NSScotland 2014

This past weekend, I attended NSScotland in Edinburgh. The conference, in its 3^rd year, is organised by Alan Francis and Paul Wilson, who also organised the Scottish Ruby conference. The venue for the conference was on the south side of Edinburgh in the Pollock Halls.

Spread over two days, the conference covered a good mix of technical and non-technical subjects, including iOS app testing at Facebook (Graham Lee), Computing’s Hidden Heroes (Emily Toop), and, the personal highlight for me, Eric Knapp’s talk on Helping Blind Musicians with an iOS App. Between talks, there was plenty of time for socialising and catching up with other developers.

On Saturday night, we were treated to chilli for dinner, cooked by Illegal Jacks, in a near-by Church Hall. As there was no connectivity in the hall, people were forced to talk to each other, rather than huddling over laptops!

On the Monday following the conference, Alan had organised a Swift tutorial, taught by Daniel Steinberg. The tutorial covered the basics of swift from the very beginning and progressed at a nice pace up to the more complicating features. Personally, some of the subjects covered in the final part of the tutorial made my head spin a bit, but this was due to my lack of computer science knowledge, rather than the instructor. At the end of the tutorial I was left with a good understanding of Swift, having never touched it before.

A big thank you to Alan and Paul for organising the conference, Daniel Steinberg for teaching the tutorial and Zonal and Karelia Software for their sponsorship. I’m already looking forward to next year!