/dev/world 2025
4-5 SEPTEMBER • NAARM | MELBOURNE
THURSDAY 4 SEP 2025
9:00am
/DEV/WORLD REGISTRATION OPENS
10:00am
WELCOME
10:15am G.01/02
FALSEHOODS PROGRAMMERS BELIEVE ABOUT REALITY
Lilly Ryan
"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams
Computers, despite a frankly alarming amount of hype, are not good at nuance. They are usually fast, occasionally obedient, and capable of storing quite a lot of cat pictures, but when asked to represent something as slippery as "a person" or "Tuesday", things begin to get weird.
Human beings remain the most reliable mediums for interpreting reality in a format that machines can parse. Regrettably, reality is complex. We make heavy use of abstractions to handle this complexity, but if you ask any seasoned developer about designing systems to handle names, time, geography, or a thousand other "standards", you will be met with either a thousand-yard stare or a wild, keening noise. If no group chat can agree on whether cereal is a soup, how can we tell a computer what to do?
Apart from the difficulty of agreeing on categories, reality's refusal to be abstracted neatly can lead to system inaccuracies, poor user experiences, security vulnerabilities, and the amplification of social harms. But given our industry, our systems of government, and (quite often) our sense of self are built on top of the very same kind of abstractions, how can we do better in the systems we are responsible for?
In this talk, we will look at some of the most common ways that our systems and data models frequently do not match reality, explore approaches to handling reality gracefully, and consider how to anticipate flaws in those models and minimise harmful outcomes. This will be an introduction to the topic for some, a refresher for others, and possibly a useful thing to show that one boss with unrealistic expectations.
Attendees will leave with a better understanding of how and when to make effective use of abstractions in systems, and probably an existential headache.
About the presenter
Lilly Ryan is a recovering historian and current information security specialist based in Melbourne. Over the last decade she has worked as a Python developer, Linux wrangler, and penetration tester specialising in web application and cloud security. Lilly is a fierce advocate for consumer privacy rights, a human-centred web, and making tech knowledge accessible to all.
11:00am G.01/02
A CONVERSATION WITH YOUR ~DOCTOR~ HEALTH DATA
Amy Delves
Since HealthKit was introduced to iOS in 2014 with iOS 8.0 phones have been steadily recording health data for users that allow it. Accessing this data has not been straight forward. This talk will walk through accessing data in health kit starting from requesting permissions of the user, creating queries to access the data and then branch out into looking at how to create a FoundationModel Tool to query your health data and return responses.
About the presenter
Amy is an iOS and macOS developer with a love for health tech and creating products that improve peoples lives. She is often out traveling the world and loves meeting new people.
11:40am G.01/02
THE CURIOUS CASE OF SWIFT TESTING
Adrian Eves, aberfeldy studios
We know testing is something we're supposed to do, right? But what about the secrets our tests can tell us? Swift Testing is a young framework, but its a fantastic entry for building the habits that will help you ensure correctness and even expose better ways to implement what you want. We'll discuss the fundamentals of Swift Testing, and I'll wall through a story of how Swift Testing completely saved one of my feature launches from catastrophe.
About the presenter
iOS developer who's worked for companies such as Apple, Inc and the Walt Disney Company. He is the developer of the app, Pediapal, a tool for parents to manage the health, vitals, and care of their children.
11:40am G.03
THINGS EVERY DEV SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CRYPTOGRAPHY
Louis Cremen, Lumify Work
STOP! I know the talk title says Cryptography! I know that means you think this will be a confusing, inflated talk about maths and cryptography - but I promise - as a dev myself - I will use pictures and simplify the complexity of cryptography.
You should trust me. I'll keep it simple :)
Have you ever been curious about:
* Why we have symmetric and asymmetric encryption?
* What a certificate is?
* What is an IV, Diffie-hellman, GCM, ECB, RSA, ECC?
* How to be ready for a quantum world?
Or maybe you're just interested in a talk that tries to make cryptography more accessible. We'll have some fun and learn something along the way.
About the presenter
Louis is one of two /dev/eryworlders that has been to every /dev/world. He's known by people as the BrainDevSec guy as his interests are Neuroscience, Coding and Information Security. He's currently the lead cyber instructor at Lumify Work, Cyber Training Business of the Year (CyberDaily) and he teaches most of the well-known security certifications to companies all over Australia and New Zealand.
12:15pm
LUNCH
1:20pm G.01/02
LIVE ACTIVITIES ON IOS
Zach Simone
This presentation explores Live Activities on iOS, diving into what they're good for and when to use them, followed by an overview of everything you need to build your first one.
You'll learn about the different UI states and design considerations across the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island. We'll walk through practical code examples covering the full lifecycle - starting, updating, and ending Live Activities both locally and via remote push notifications.
Along the way, we'll cover implementation tips, and note limitations to watch out for. We'll also explore broadcast push notifications, showing how channels enable you to efficiently update Live Activities simultaneously for all devices with a single server request - perfect for live sport and events.
By the end of this talk you'll have an appreciation for Live Activities and be ready to explore uses for them in your own apps.
About the presenter
Zach is an iOS developer and organiser of the Sydney CocoaHeads meetup. He has experience working on all kinds of apps for companies large and small, and has multiple indie apps of his own that happen to be perfect for trying out the latest in iOS development including, you guessed it, Live Activities.
2:00pm G.01/02
MAINTAINING THE BUILDKITE AGENT
Josh Deprez, Buildkite
Three years ago I decided to take a break from being unemployed, and joined Buildkite. My job involves the care and feeding of the Buildkite Agent, a cross-platform CI/CD runner written in Go from 2014 until today, that communicates with a Ruby on Rails monolith.
The pairing of Go client with a Rails backend works well in some ways, and in others, seems totally unnatural - Ruby has historically been a scripting language on Mac OS X, whereas Go has historically had greater server-side use. However, Go's strong cross-compilation support solves many basic problems across the main targets of Mac, Linux, and Windows, and provides many OS and arch combinations almost for free. Which is good, because I'd rather not have to manage a zoo of platforms for testing.
I will talk about:
- the trials of cross-platform support when everybody codes with a Mac
- fun times maintaining a codebase that is over 11 years old
- teaching Ruby on Rails engineers Go, and other techniques to getting stuff done
And finally, the question I'm sure is top of everybody's minds: what's the oldest Mac I can run a Buildkite job on?
About the presenter
Josh is a software developer from Tasmania working for Buildkite, previously for Google. Their current hobbies are learning German, fixing the shed, and formally verifying their thesis with Lean 4. Josh stubbornly refuses not to come to /dev/world.
2:50pm
AFTERNOON TEA
3:35pm G.01/02
PROTECT YOUR KEYS WITH THE SECURE ENCLAVE
Thomas Karpiniec, Ditto
Apple's Secure Enclave is a sophisticated piece of technology for securing private keys that live on end-user devices, especially for local-first software where your device needs to own and prove its identity. Through the Security framework, Apple grants developers low-level access for creating keys and performing cryptographic operations with the Enclave's assistance. In this session we will discuss what operations are possible, demonstrate how this solves real-world problems for apps, and compare Apple's APIs and support with other platforms that provide some form of hardware security module. This is a deep dive for developers who want to make their users' devices the root of trust, not the cloud.
About the presenter
Thomas Karpiniec is an experienced cross-platform developer from Tasmania. He works for Ditto, a US-based startup building a universal edge platform that syncs data directly between mobile devices and also to the cloud. For five years he led development of the mesh networking and authentication systems across iOS, Android and desktop platforms. Today he is a Staff Software Engineer working mostly on Ditto's Kubernetes Operator.
4:15pm G.01/02
POLISHING YOUR SCREEN ROTATIONS IN IOS
Tim Oliver
Screen rotations have been a staple of iOS apps since the very beginning. The mark of a great app is one that supports rotations both elegantly and appropriately. You might not believe it, but Apple has continued to add new APIs to allow more control of screen rotations, enabling some cooler effects that weren't possible before.
This talk covers a journey I undertook last year to produce fluid rotation animations in an app that only enables landscape support on certain screens: a very common pattern in many iPhone apps. It covers the design mindset, how to plan for it, and some pitfalls that were discovered along the way.
About the presenter
Tim is an Aussie iOS developer from Perth, WA. He's been a huge fan of making iPhone apps since the 3G era and has been presenting at /dev/world since shortly after. He currently works for Instagram at the Meta office in Tokyo, Japan.
5:00pm
DRINKS
6:00pm
DINNER AND QUIZ
/dev/world's Quiz is (in)famous. Get your nerd on, and see if can clutch it against the other teams. You might even want to cook the judges while you're at it. (If you're ancient, all of this just means have a good time).
About the presenter
FRIDAY 5 SEP 2025
9:00am
REGISTRATION OPENS
10:00am
WELCOME AND HOUSEKEEPING
10:15am G.01/02
WE BUILT DAFT PUNK’S VOCODER AS AN AUDIO PLUGIN!
Marc Edwards & Russell Ivanovic, Bjango
I love vocoders. I love them so much I spent around two years researching the vocal effects of Daft Punk, and ended up discovering a bunch of previously unknown or at least not-well-known facts about the hardware they used, and the history of the companies involved. I emailed Imogen Heap’s team, and they replied! Why is Imogen Heap involved? You’ll have to watch the talk to learn that one, sorry.
Daft Punk used a DigiTech Talker vocoder for a lot of their famous songs. As a result, it has now become one of the most sought after vocoders on the planet. During my research, I learned so much about the Talker that I wondered if it would be possible to replicate its sound as a plugin, using the same techniques (linear predictive coding). I tried, and I failed.
I then turned to my friend Russell to help. Neither of us had built a plugin prior to this project. The goal is to create an Audio Unit v3 plugin that can be used in Logic Pro and other audio apps. Will we succeed?
About the presenter
Marc Edwards is the founder and designer at Bjango. Russell Ivanovic is a legendary Australian developer who previously owned Shifty Jelly, the creators of Pocket Casts, Pocket Weather, and other apps. Marc and Russell currently both work on Skala, Pinwheel and other apps at Bjango.
10:50am G.01/02
INTRODUCING FOUNDATION MODELS IN IOS 26
Tim Oliver
This year, Apple announced it was opening up its on-device LLMs to third party developers on supported Apple Intelligence devices. This has the potential to unlock new categories of use cases and experiences for apps in the Apple ecosystem. This talk covers how to use this new framework in your own apps, discusses potential use cases, as well as an opportunity to discuss the use of AI in iOS apps as a whole.
About the presenter
Tim is an Aussie iOS developer from Perth, WA. He's been a huge fan of making iPhone apps since the 3G era and has been presenting at /dev/world since shortly after. He currently works for Instagram at the Meta office in Tokyo, Japan.
11:30am G.01/02
BEYOND STORAGE: UNLEASHING SQLITE'S POWER IN SWIFT APPS
Steve Prior, ANZ Plus
A fun, fast-paced journey through SQL's fascinating history—from Ted Codd's revolutionary 1970 paper to Richard Hipp's warship crisis that birthed SQLite. This talk challenges Swift engineers to rethink their data layer beyond simple storage, exploring advanced SQLite features like FTS, recursive queries, window functions, and reactive patterns with GRDB that can transform how you architect Swift applications.
About the presenter
Steve Prior has worked in the industry for over 25 years, writing mobile applications since the PalmOS era and delivering products throughout the entire evolution of Apple's iPhone platform. He currently manages the ANZ Plus Mobile Transaction team, where he tackles high-volume database operations and fully reactive updates in a cache-first offline banking application.
11:30am G.03
DON'T DDOS YOURSELF!
Rob Amos, ANZ
Usually when we hear the term DDoS – Distributed Denial of Service – we imagine a deliberate and coordinated attack. But something typically overlooked when developing mobile apps intended for millions of users is that it is surprisingly easy to accidentally orchestrate a DDoS on your own infrastructure. In one sense, this is a pretty amazing problem to have – your app now has millions of users! Unfortunately these users will begin to experience increasingly severe outages triggered by otherwise innocuous server errors. As with other classic scaling issues, a business can end up being the victim of its own success.
The culprit is usually automated polling or retry behaviour: in other words, the front end application is being overly naive or greedy in its effort to stay up-to-date and seamlessly recover from error states. Of course, these are both noble goals that contribute to a high-quality user experience. In this presentation we describe a solution that allows us to have our cake and eat it – a distributed front end “circuit breaker” inspired by the traffic smoothing and limiting algorithms used for decades in packet-switching networks. Instead of overwhelming servers during spikes in usage, a fleet of mobile apps can be programmed to respond to anomalous patterns of server failure and gracefully ramp down and back up again as the backend’s health is restored. This is also known as the thundering herd problem.
About the presenter
Rob (also known as Bok) started with Objective-C by trying to write an XMLParserDelegate with manual memory management in 2009. He is currently a Principal Engineer at Australia and New Zealand Bank (ANZ) working with a large team building a new bank from the foundations up and scaling it to 8 million customers. He loves Swift and is always looking for new ways to use it away from building UIs.
12:10pm
LUNCH
1:10pm G.01/02
ONE APP, 3 PLATFORMS: A BEGINNER-TO-DEVELOPER JOURNEY IN KOTLIN, SWIFT, & DART
Onnida Hempattawee, Yu Wang, School of ICT, University of Tasmania
This presentation provides a unique insight into how the same mobile app was developed in three different languages, Swift, Kotlin, and Dart (Flutter), within just 13 weeks as part of the Mobile Application Development unit in the Master of Information Technology and Systems program at the University of Tasmania. The app, designed to record and display live statistics for team sports in real time, was developed from the ground up by two students starting with no coding experience.
Yu Wang will share her journey from complete beginner to confident developer, outlining how she overcame challenges such as learning syntax, debugging, and mastering multiple languages in a short period. Her experience highlights the value of hands-on practice, peer learning, and rapid immersion in real-world development tools.
Nida will then guide the audience through the end-to-end development process, including prototype design, usability testing, and implementation across all three programming languages. She will offer an engaging comparison of these languages through relatable analogies, revealing how language design choices shape the developer experience.
This session is not only an inspiring story of learning but also a valuable technical comparison for experienced developers curious about cross-platform development from a fresh perspective.
About the presenter
Onnida Hempattawee and Yu Wang are postgraduate students in the Master of Information Technology and Systems at the University of Tasmania. Despite having no prior coding experience, they successfully developed a fully functioning mobile application in Swift, Kotlin, and Dart (Flutter) within just 13 weeks as part of the Mobile Application Development unit. Their dedication, adaptability, and technical achievement were recognised when their apps were selected for presentation at the ICT Capstone Project Expo at UTAS. Their unique journey offers valuable insights into cross-platform development, hands-on learning, and rapid skill acquisition.
1:55pm G.03
WHAT'S AI GOOD FOR? (PROBABLY NOT THAT, BUT NOT NOTHING.)
Rob Napier
As developers, we're pretty overwhelmed with AI-everything right now. You've probably heard all the arguments ranging from "all programmers will be out of a job by December" to "lying autocompletion engines have no practical uses." You've probably seen posts from people claiming incredible "one-shot" prompting that rewrites Safari from scratch in an afternoon. Maybe you've tried it out, and it wasn't quite...that. Are you doing it wrong? Is everyone lying? What's going on?
I spend much of my work time developing software and processes based on LLMs. I've talked extensively to people in other teams and other companies about what does and doesn't work. And I've learned a few things that aren't obvious.
AI is not particularly good at most of the things your boss probably wants it for. But there are problems it can help you solve that would be impractical without it. In this talk, I'll help you think a little more clearly about where AI will probably be unhelpful, where it may be harmful, and where it's worth considering.
About the presenter
Rob has been a Cocoa developer since 2003, and began developing for iPhone when the first public SDK came out. Before coming to Cocoa, he made his living sneaking into Chinese facilities in broad daylight, among other InfoSec risk assessment duties. He's given dozens of talks internationally on software development, infosec, and cryptography. Today he's a senior developer for Audible's iOS team.
1:55pm G.01/02
THE HABITS OF FAST DEVELOPERS
Sam Jarman
Some developers just seem to fly when things get hectic — when bugs pop up, deadlines tighten, or priorities shift overnight. What’s their secret sauce? In this talk, I’ll share the habits, mindsets, and workflows that help you move fast without cutting corners or sacrificing quality. You’ll learn how to shorten your debug loop, master your IDE, terminal tricks, and build a mental map of your team’s work to avoid reinventing the wheel. We’ll explore why sometimes slowing down to really understand a problem can actually speed you up, and how small automations and smart documentation can multiply your impact. Whether you’re at a scrappy startup or a big company, junior or senior, this session is for anyone who wants to get sharper, stay calm under pressure, and deliver better, faster.
About the presenter
Sam Jarman is a Kiwi engineering manager based in Sydney, Australia, with over 15 years of experience in software development. His background includes development and leadership roles in iOS, frontend, backend across startups, agencies, small businesses, and medtech. Sam currently leads a team of engineers at Cochlear, where he focuses on helping the team work efficiently and grow their skills.
2:35pm
AFTERNOON TEA
3:20pm G.03
BUILDING APPS THAT SCALE WITHOUT LOSING YOUR MOTIVATION
Sushant Verma
Whether you’re building at scale or sprinting through a weekend hackathon, every developer faces the same challenge: how do you build something quickly that doesn’t fall apart later?
Apple gives us some powerful tools to help us ship great apps—but deciding how to structure and scale them is up to us. In this talk, we’ll explore practical techniques and design patterns that support maintainability, testability, and platform adaptability. From architecture and dependency management to leveraging compiler-assisted tooling, you’ll gain insights into what makes apps robust in the long run.
Expect inspiration drawn from real-world experience and lessons learned from both successes and growing pains.
About the presenter
Sushant is a Senior Software Engineer with over 15 years of experience turning ideas into high-quality software. He has worked across various parts of the software development lifecycle and is passionate about building mobile apps that not only work well for users but are a joy for his fellow developers to work on and maintain. Sushant loves helping teams and products grow, mentoring developers, and sharing practical insights that make a real difference in the day-to-day life of a developer. When he’s not coding, Sushant can be found doomscrolling on social media, binge-watching a TV series, or trying to switch off to spend time with family and friends.
3:20pm G.01/02
REAL-TIME VFX WITH GODOT
Kyle Connolly
Uncover VFX production workflows in Godot and on the iPad! Gain exclusive insight into Godot’s lesser known features and just how much it offers by crafting stunning visual effects. Want to learn mind bending shader techniques or wondering if Godot is right for you? Don’t miss the chance to hear what it’s all about from the perspective of a technical wizard. Topics include: How to support stereoscopic VR rendering in Godot shaders, utilising sensor input for unique interactive artwork, and working with Godot’s shader language to maximize platform compatibility.
About the presenter
Kyle is a Technical Artist and Teacher based in NSW. For years he has assisted the Godot community by providing guidance, tools, and bug fixes. With a deep passion for graphics programming and generative art, he creates novel experiences using the latest technology.
4:00pm G.01/02
RAISE A GLASS TO APPLE'S "NEW DESIGN"
James White, Reach HPI
Mere days before the time of writing, Apple introduced its new design language for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS and visionOS. It called this design…The New Design. A centrepiece of The New Design is Liquid Glass, a magical digital meta material that [only Apple could achieve || seems a bit Vista]. This material [uses the optical qualities of glass such as translucency and specular highlights to transform your content or context || looks nice]. In this session we will [celebrate the triumph || lament the problems] of The New Design. You’ll hear tips and tricks from an experienced iOS designer who’s seen it all, about how to [embrace The New Design || turn it all off]. Come along and be part of the [future || past].
About the presenter
James is a long time AUC member who has attended /dev/world, and spoken at it, numerous times. He's an iOS [designer || developer] who spends a lot of time thinking about how to make nice apps.
4:00pm G.03
SWIFT REGISTRY: DEPENDENCIES OUTSIDE OF GITHUB
Marcelo Esperidiao, ANZ
The Swift Package Manager (SwiftPM) enables Swift projects to directly depend on libraries available on GitHub. This feature previously required third-party tools like Carthage or CocoaPods for dependency management. However, SwiftPM has limitations. Dependencies must be either globally available on GitHub or stored on a local file system path. It doesn’t support distributing versioned packages outside of GitHub.
To address this gap, Swift introduced the Swift Package Registry Specification (SE-0292) through an Evolution proposal. This specification outlines the means of publishing and distributing versioned Swift Packages through a Registry. Initially released in Swift 5.7 and Xcode 14, it provides a solution for this limitation.
This talk will delve into the capabilities and workflows of Swift registries and explore scenarios where its adoption would be beneficial. It will demonstrate the specification through an open-source reference implementation developerd by the author.
About the presenter
Marcelo Esperidiao is a Senior Software Engineer at ANZx, where he leads the integration of APIs with the ANZ Plus iOS app. With 18 years of experience in mobile development, Marcelo has contributed to companies including LG Mobile, GE Healthcare, Virgin Airlines, and currently ANZ. Originally from Brazil, Marcelo holds an engineering degree from the University of São Paulo and a master’s in electrical engineering from Korea University. He proudly calls Melbourne home, where he enjoys life with his son.
4:40pm
LIGHTNING TALKS & CONFERENCE CLOSE
Wrap up an amazing event with a round of quick lightning talks on almost any topic!
About the presenter