Issue 729

3^rd October 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I was a regular conference speaker and attendee before the pandemic, but I haven’t got back into the habit since events restarted. This week’s ServerSide.swift conference in London reminded me how much I miss in-person events.

The conference is ongoing, but there have already been standout talks from Matt Massicotte and Emma Gaubert. What I valued most, though, was reconnecting with old friends, meeting new people, and feeling like I was part of the community again.

For me, the fragmentation of social media over the last few years has really hurt the sense of community online. Some people stayed on Twitter, some moved to Mastodon, some joined Bluesky. Some conversations moved to Discord and Slack, and even LinkedIn seems to be thriving as a social network these days, which surprised me. I’ve largely given up on it all, being only very occasionally active on Bluesky.

But even if we were able to create one big melting pot of social media again, it’s still not the same as an in-person event. So I thought I’d share how this conference made me feel, in case you have also struggled either to get back into in-person events or to get started with them!

If, like me, you’d like to jump back into an in-person conference, CocoaConferences has an up-to-date list of events. Swift Connection in Paris and SwiftLeeds both start on Monday. Then comes Pragma in Bologna in late October, followed by DO iOS in Amsterdam a month later. Finally, iOS Conf SG, try! Swift Tokyo, and iOSDevUK all have scheduled dates in 2026. I also expect to see Swift Heroes, Swift Craft, NSSpain, and Swift Island announce follow-up events, as they all ran successful events this year.

One thing that struck me is how few North American conferences there are these days. Many beloved US-based conferences have shut down over the past few years, mainly due to either the pandemic or the increasing risk of huge financial losses from running a conference. If you’re looking for something in North America, you’ll be taking a trip to Chicago in April next year for Deep Dish Swift, unless you want to attend WWDC or something alongside it.

If none of those is convenient, it’s quite possible you have a local Swift or iOS developer meetup. Whatever you choose to attend, I’m sure it’ll bring you closer to this community, and maybe I’ll see you at one of them!

– Dave Verwer

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News

I asked you all at the end of July what you were doing with the Foundation Model in your apps, and while the responses were interesting, it was a little early to see them fully integrated. I don’t need to ask again now, as Apple itself has published details of the apps that it thinks are using the “little LLM that could” in interesting ways. There are lots of examples, too, with more than 20 apps mentioned.

Tools

Łukasz Domaradzki’s new xcsift tool is interesting and might offer a glimpse of how more developer-focused tools will format their output in the future. Designed to work with LLM agents, where context windows quickly fill with log output, it formats build and test logs into lean JSON data that an LLM can parse more easily.

Code

Tibor Bödecs on Package Traits:

Swift Package Traits work like feature flags for Swift packages. They let developers conditionally compile code and toggle optional dependencies on or off. Consumers can enable specific traits, disable defaults, and check availability in code using the #if TraitName syntax.

I didn’t see many people talk about this feature when Apple shipped Swift 6.1, so it’s good to see Tibor blog about it.

I enjoyed Leo Dion’s latest article on creating SyntaxKit with Cursor and Claude Code. I don’t have quite the same fondness for DSLs as Leo does, but there’s no argument that producing a macro with his library is far simpler than working directly with SwiftSyntax. I also agree with all of his lessons learned from working with AI agents. Give this a read if you’re interested either in Swift macros or in Swift package development with an AI agent.

Design

I love the subtitle of Alice Milo’s latest post: “Visual micro storytelling”. It’s such a great way to describe a Live Activity. Read the full post to see whether a feature like this might be a good fit for your app.

Andras Kindler’s new site focuses more on resources that replicate Liquid Glass effects in technologies other than Swift and SwiftUI. However, if you’re looking for a way to transport that look-and-feel across platforms or on the web, there are plenty of resources here.

Jobs

Product Engineer @ Tolan – At Tolan, we’ve built the world’s first voice-native embodied AI companion in a Swift 6 app, working alongside an Apple Design Award winning creative team to bring the Tolan characters to life. We work hard, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. We work together in-person in downtown SF. – On-site (United States in CA) with some remote work (within US timezones)

And finally...

The QR code materializes eventually like it’s the year 2000 and I’m downloading a JPEG on dial-up. Someone behind me clears their throat. I scan it and the barrier grunts open.

47 seconds: A villain origin story. 🦹