Distilled, May 1 2014

Welcome to the very first edition of Distilled, a collection of what we at Distiller found interesting on the web, and in the world, this week. We'll be publishing Distilled every Thursday - let us know if you find a project or link you think would be of interest to our readers!

CocoaConf San Jose

Over the weekend, we attended CocoaConf San Jose. The conference was great and we'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking to connect with other iOS developers and hone their craft in a friendly and collaborative environment. It also happens to take place throughout the year in different locations.

Our goal was to get out and learn more about how iOS developers are dealing with building and for that it was great. A solid community of developers who are all interested in improving their processes and delivering better products to their customers. We learned a ton.

As it happens, though, there was also great content. It was particularly exciting to see the level of interest in bringing immutability and functional programming to iOS, given our own tendency towards fp and our use of Clojure wherever we can fit it in.

And if you've never seen James Dempsey and the Breakpoints, you need to.

f8

f8 is obviously a pretty different conference. Larger in scale in every possible way. As former users of the fb platform API and current users of Parse, it was interesting to hear the directions they are heading. On the platform side, we were also consoling those who have bet their business on that ever-changing beast.

In terms of content, though, the interesting stuff was mostly in the "Hacker Way" sessions, where Facebook engineers talked about how they build and deploy their own code. One known entity there is React, which we are already using through om. The mobile release engineering talk was also great. FB is doing things at an amazing scale, but they definitely share our views about the value of Continuous Integration (and how nuts it can be for iOS).

As always, the community of people was great and we learned still more about how we can help. But we met some developers who had traveled from Croatia just to be there. We probably wouldn't do that.

Enlive Hacks

Travis published two posts on some of ways we're using Enlive to build Distiller. Enlive is a templating library with a very different philosophy from most templating libraries in use today. As with most software, it makes some tasks easier and some harder - Travis posts on two tasks that may seem non-trivial but are actually quite straightforward - incorporating Markdown and using Google Analytics.