Introduction

Earlier in my career — all the way back before Swift was announced — my focus was on Java. I was one of the early adopters of JavaFX and kept in touch with the developer relations team over at Oracle.

Every year, my students and I attended the Devoxx conference. On several occasions, some of my students were invited by Oracle to showcase their work with JavaFX on the big stage. Those were amazing opportunities for my students and it really boosted their skills, confidence, and even their careers.

Now that my focus is on the Swift ecosystem, I want to recreate those opportunities. I started by attending as many Swift and iOS conferences as I could afford, and eventually became a speaker myself. With these experiences under my belt, I felt confident that I could get one of my students on stage at a Swift conference as well.

By that time, I had already been offering Swift-related internships and thesis topics for several years. The logical next step was to take some of that work and turn it into a talk proposal. I just had to find the right topic and the right student. Fast-forward a few months, and I felt really proud (and a bit nervous) to see Babeth Velghe on stage at the ServerSide.swift conference.

What follows is her report.

My first conference

I'd like to reflect on one of the most enjoyable — but also one of the scariest — experiences in my life so far: speaking at the ServerSide.swift conference. But before I can do that, I need to take you back to how this all started.

Learning Swift

I've always been interested in developing for Apple platforms, and the Swift language in particular. When I learned that my school offered an elective course on app development for iOS, I didn't have to think twice and quickly signed up.

This course introduced me to Swift and SwiftUI, and I really enjoyed it. I reached out to my teacher to see if I he could come up with a Swift-related topic for my Bachelor's thesis. He suggested I explore the newly released Swift OpenAPI Generator.

A thesis and a conference

My thesis focused on answering the following questions:

• Is the generator mature enough to produce a working prototype?
• Can this prototype be developed into a production-ready back-end, or is a rewrite needed at some point?
• If it can become production-ready, which steps are needed to make it so?
• Which pitfalls should be expected when attempting this?

During the course of my research, my teacher asked me if I'd be interested in presenting my results at an international conference. At first, this seemed quite scary. I had never even attended a conference before! However, I soon realized this was an opportunity I had to take. Fortunately, my teacher guided me through the entire process, from writing up a proposal to preparing the actual talk.

A recording of my talk is available below:

Speaking at this conference really changed my life. It forced me out of my comfort zone and welcomed me into the server-side Swift community. I was able to connect with so many people I would have otherwise never met. This was definitely an experience I will never forget!

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