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Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending KWDC 24,\nan Apple developer conference modeled after WWDC,\nbut for the Korean market.\nRegrettably, I only heard about it a few days prior\nthrough a friend at the Seoul iOS Meetup,\nso I wasn’t able to give a talk.
\nThe iOS meetup typically has 20-30 attendees.\nBut wow... the turnout at KWDC far exceeded my expectations.\nNearly 600 attendees showed up,\nand this is only its second year (I also didn’t hear about it last year;\nclearly I live under a rock)!\nThe staff were well organized and friendly,\nand the international participation was significantly better than I had expected.
\nSurprisingly, most of the (30+) event staff also spoke English very well (that’s a first for a Korean conference that I’ve been to).\nI think the organizers did an excellent job in not only attracting an international audience\n(one speaker flew in from Czechia!),\nbut also making them feel welcome.\nHats off to the organizing team for that!\nThis makes me really happy, and I hope this is a big step in raising the level of conferences here.
\nNot only did they have a mix of English and Korean talks,\nthey handled live translation much better than any other event I’ve seen.\nThey used a service called Flitto.\nApparently it’s a Korean company,\nand they were using some AI models to do the heavy lifting.\nIt had some hiccups to be sure,\nbut it did a surprisingly good job!\nThe main complaint I heard was that it would wait for half or 2/3 of a screenful of content, causing jumps that were hard to read.
\nThe speakers I talked with said they had to provide a script in advance,\nwhich we speculate were used to improve the quality of the translations\n(which were still live, even when the presenter went “off script”).\nThe model still failed to recognize technical terms on occasion,\nbut the hiccups were to be expected.\nOverall, the quality of the translation was excellent,\nand I think this will be the future of such events!\nI’ve been at half a dozen events where they give you a radio receiver\nand an earpiece, and it is never a great experience.\nEveryone I talked with said they liked the\ntext on screen approach was better too\n(especially since it was alongside the slides,\nwhich were honestly Apple quality at every single talk I saw!).
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My favorite talk was Pavel’s on “The Magic of SwiftUI Animations.”\nHe even walked up to the podium in a wizard robe 🧙\nI was blown away by the amount of effort that he put into the slides,\nand got a bunch of things to follow up on (like this video on shaders).\nTalking with him after, he said it was the culmination of around 4 years of effort.
\n![\"Pavel](\"media/IMG_8820.jpeg\")
Riana’s talk on Swift Testing\ngot me fired up to switch.\nI wanted to shout with excitement when I heard that Swift finally\nsupports parameterized tests in a native testing framework!\nAnd it’s open source,\nso I hope it will be improve faster than XCTest.\nWho knows; maybe it’ll even get property testing (like QuickCheck, Hypothesis, etc.)!
\nThe third talk that stuck out to me was Rudrank’s\ntalk on widgets.\nHe was a GREAT presenter, with a number of Korean expressions woven throughout,\nwhich the audience loved.\nI also liked how he cleverly wove the Rime of the Ancient Mariner throughout\nthe talk (the title was “Widgets, Widgets Everywhere, and not a Pixel to Spare”).\nMy biggest learning was in the weird differences in the mental model for updates:\nit’s all about the timeline!
\nNetworking at Korean conferences is typically a bit slow to be honest,\nas it is not normal in Korean culture to walk up to someone\nand start a conversation without much context.\nThis event also happened to be exceptional in a good way!
\nThe first big networking opportunity was lunch.\nBut there wasn't a very clear announcement of how lunch would work.\nEveryone was on their own, and the info was rather buried in some PDFs (which I didn’t get somehow)\nand Discord (which I had a hard time navigating).\nTogether with a Danish friend I met at the iOS meetup a few days prior,\nI suggested we wing it and just follow the crowd outside to see where we ended up,\nsince they were clearly better informed than us 🤣
\nWe ended up taking a few turns following a group in front of us,\nand eventually I asked if they would be cool with us crashing their party.\nWe ended up at a crowded Donkatsu buffet a few minutes later.\nThe two at our table were iOS engineers, one working at Hyundai AutoEver,\nand another at 오늘의집,\nand we had a great conversation over lunch!\n(They even bought us coffee after; so friendly!)
\nOne of them mentioned that we should check out the networking area in-between sessions, which I did later.\nIt was a bit hard to find, since it was in a narrow hall,\nafter you passed through a cafe on another floor.\nI think this could have been announced a bit better,\nsince not many people used it, but the conversations I had there were great!
\nAside: another cool thing that I haven’t seen done elsewhere is round-table Q&A.\nAlong with the session times, each speaker was available for Q&A around (literally)\nround tables near the networking zone.\nVery cool idea!
\nThe networking area had one room dedicated to local communities as well,\nincluding the Seoul iOS Meetup,\nthe Korean Swift Coding Club,\nand the AWS Korea User group.\nThe Swift Coding Club in particular was a super cool group.\nSeveral were students,\nand one was working on some apps related to EV charging.\nThis naturally lead to a conversation about the geocoding,\nmaps, and navigation SDKs I’ve been working on at Stadia Maps.\nIt was a good time!
\nFinally, there wasn’t a big after-party or anything,\nbut there was a small event at a bar organized for the speakers and sponsors.\nI didn’t speak, but they were fine letting me tag along.\nI ended up talking for well over an hour with Riana about everything from Swift\nto world cultures to under-representation of women in tech.\nAnd she 100% sold me on attending try! Swift\nin Tokyo next year.\nAnd Mark from RevenueCat,\nwho I also met at the iOS meetup prior,\ntaught me a bunch of things I didn’t know about the history of MacRuby\n(turns out he built the first BaseCamp app using RubyMotion back in the day!).
I ended up getting home at 1:30am for the second time this week.\nBut it was worth it!
\n", "summary": "", "date_published": "2024-10-26T00:00:00-00:00", "image": "media/IMG_8818.jpeg", "authors": [ { "name": "Ian Wagner", "url": "https://fosstodon.org/@ianthetechie", "avatar": "media/avi.jpeg" } ], "tags": [ "conferences", "AI", "translation", "apple", "swift" ], "language": "en" } ] }