So this week I was at NSConference 6, one of the largest iOS & Mac developer conferences in Europe, hosted by Scotty of iDeveloper TV. Last year, I was there for Apegroup, this time, for myself. I really had a blast, meeting lots of new people and listening to talks that never ceased to surprise me or tease my mind.

The conference was hosted for the second year in a row in the art deco-styled venue Athena, which catered all needs except for good wifi. Lunch & dinner was included for all conference days (with the optional Curry Night) and the food was actually pretty good. What I also like about the conference is that all talks run in serial, meaning everybody have a chance to see all of them.

While all of the talks were great, some of them really made an impression on me. One I found particularly interesting was Karsten Kusche's talk about moving away from plain text source code languages, coming from a Smalltalk background. Coincidentally, Jason Brennan wrote a blog post about his own views on non-textual developer environments just the day before and got featured in iOS Dev Weekly. All in all, I think it's great that people are questioning the heritage software development stands on. Is writing ASCII-characters and storing them in plain text the most easy to understand and expressive way to describe what a piece of computer software should do? It's worth thinking about.

It was also interesting to see some controversy among the speakers. For example, while James Thomson spoke about the importance of code reuse and how it enabled him to reach new platforms, Marcus S. Zarra stressed that using third party software is risky and that it's better to write your own single purpose code. There has been a lot of debate around third party libraries and CocoaPods lately and it seems it won't end for a while.

Even though the conference schedule was tight, I managed to get to the gym at least once. I even got accompanied by the swole UI-Kit wizard, Peter Steinberger. It was kind of hard to find a gym in small Leicester for just one day, but after browsing the web for a while I found the site PayAsUGym. Basically, you can sign up there and find gyms all across the UK with day/week/month passes without having to sign up for a direct debit. The service itself was pretty good, and since we got a 5£ credit for joining, we ended up just paying less than 2£ for the stay at Spirit Health Club Leicester. The actual gym though, was a classic tiny hotel gym with no barbells to be found. With some improvisation (see below) we could at least get a decent upper-body workout done. In future blog posts, I'm going to keep you updated on how you can get cheap access to gyms & supplements while traveling.

To summarize, I really enjoyed NSConference 6 and will certainly show up next year again. Hopefully, I will meet some of the amazing people again in my travels :)

As I'm writing this, I sit in the Posh Lounge at the Castle Rock Hostel in Edinburgh, enjoying the calmness of Scotland. Since I will be staying here for a while (10 days). I aim to get some coding and writing done. I have quite a list of topics to write about so if everything goes well, there will be posts up both from a technical and a UX perspective. Until then, keep following my journey here and on Twitter & Instagram!