Over the past weekend I had a blast at the NSNorth conference in Toronto. There was over 170 attendees from all sorts of places. This was my second year attending and it was great to catch up with old friends and make new ones. The community is very friendly and welcoming to everyone. I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk to fellow developers in the industry and I came back inspired to work on creating amazing products.

The talks that stood out to me, in chronological order, were:

• Tom Creighton - “Frenemies: Dev + Design”
  This talk provides another helpful reminder that developing products is a collaborative and iterative process.

• Ayaka Nonaka - “Clean View Layout with iOS 9 Features”
  I enjoyed following the guided examples of solving specific layout problems using NSLayoutAnchor and UIStackView.

• Jon Edwards - “Carving out a Space in the Continuum of App Store Success”
  The animations in this presentation were stunning and the segues between topics flowed like story.

• Michael Gorbach - “The Value of Platform Tourism”
  Sometimes, developers should just drop their bias against other platforms and give them a shot.

• Robleh Jama - “Charting”
  I was always curious about how other people market their apps. There were several good points such as creating a promo video and providing press kits.

Keynote Karaoke

Now the most interesting part of the conference was the Keynote Karaoke where one would give a lightning talk. The catch, however, was that each presenter did not know the topic ahead of time and needed to improvise on the spot. Sitting as a member of the audience, I could only imagine how difficult and nerve-racking it is to talk about an unknown topic. As one of the karaoke topic goes, “Embrace the Ackward”.

I want to give a huge shoutout to the organizers, Adrienne, Dan, and Phil, as well as the volunteers for making the event possible. It’s hard to imagine how this conference could be even better, but maybe we will find out how next year.