Under the Bash! brand we at Instil regurarly gather the local software development community for talks, workshops and discussions on all matters of software development, ranging from functional programming to DevOps.
This summer saw the first Bash! Summer of Code, a series of 10 weekly workshops running throughout July and August covering topics such as Scala, Gradle, Clojure, React.JS and Java 8. As part of the series I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to deliver an introductory iOS development workshop. The workshop was delivered on two separate occassions, firstly to the Women Who Code Belfast group and secondly as an open event.
The focus of the workshop was getting attendees to follow along in the development of a small game named SpeedTap. The SpeedTap game tests a user’s ability to start and stop a timer after 5 seconds – a simple reaction time test. This was a surprisingly fun little app to build and offered a chance to introduce some key conepts including StoryBoards, Model-View-Controller, UIViewController, properties and Key-Value-Observation. Given that attendees had, on the most part, no prior Objective-C or Cocoa experience it was great to see everyone leaving having built their first app.
Slides for the workshop are available on Scribd and the SpeedTap source code is available on Github.
Update – 6th September 2014
Blog post from Women Who Code discussing the session.