Ten years ago, almost to the day, I delivered what turned out to be the “best-selling” talk of all my conference speaking career, with effects that I can feel to this day.
I was invited by my friend (and community extraordinaire) Junior “Bonto” Bontognali to talk at the first edition of the App Builders conference, the first (and to my knowledge, to this day the only) 100% Swiss conference about mobile applications, with tracks for both iOS and Android developers.
I ended up speaking at the first four editions of App Builders, from 2016 to 2019. They took place all over Switzerland, from Zürich in 2016 to Lausanne in 2017 (in the French-speaking area of Switzerland, also known as the “Romandie”), to finally the gorgeous town of Lugano in the Italian-speaking section of the country for the 2018 and 2019 events.
That first edition in Zürich was more than memorable, totally epic, and featured sessions and attendees among which many luminaries (many of whom I have the immense privilege of calling friends) were there, like Anastasiia Voitova, Natasha Murashev, Vikram Kriplaney, Sebastian Vieira, Graham Lee, Daniel Steinberg, Vitaly Friedman, Nicolas Seriot, Steve “Scotty” Scott, Eliezer Talón, John Sundell, Orta Therox, Marin Todorov, and so many more. If you were active in the Swiss mobile app development community ten years ago, you know the names I just mentioned; they ring more than just a bell.
And thus I delivered the closing keynote on the first day of App Builders 2016, in a session titled “Being A Developer After 40”.
For some unknown reason, this talk hit a chord in the audience (I’m sure it was the Clippy reference, no doubt about that). It was one of my favorite moments on stage, ever. I had a blast. And I got what I suppose can be called a standing ovation at the end.
I am not used to these things, clearly.
Bonto and his team (among whom were my friends Susanna Riccardi and Patrick Balestra) recorded the talk and posted the video on YouTube a few days later. But the same evening of that talk, I published my speech on Medium and went to bed, exhausted and happy.
The following day, as the speakers were starting their sessions, Bonto approached me and, without saying a word, showed me the home page of Hacker News on his iPhone.
I was speechless.
What followed cannot be described as anything else but pure madness.
My Twitter and LinkedIn follower count jumped by 150% on a single day, and I got flooded with messages and congratulations by people from all over the world. The video on YouTube went into the thousands of views, and my Medium.com article (which I agreed to include in the FreeCodeCamp community of that website for a while) cumulated hundreds of thousands of views overnight. The article was reprinted by a (now defunct) monthly publication called “Hacker Bits.” Even crazier, I had people voluntarily translating the articles to other languages, and thus came to life versions in Russian, Hungarian, Czech, Portuguese, Farsi, Vietnamese, and Romanian. And finally, I was asked to re-deliver that same talk in India in September 2016 and then in France in April 2017.
I still have people (colleagues, conference attendees, etc.) come up to me to tell me spontaneously of how much they liked it. And I’m amazed to hear that, just like the first day.
To say that I’m still speechless as I write these words would be the understatement of the decade. In particular, I’m so thankful to all the translators for the time they took to adapt my words into so many languages. I know it was a lot of work… because, well, it’s a really long speech with almost 5000 words!
After App Builders, Bonto and his team came up with another gem of a conference: The Swift Alps, held in November 2016 in the gorgeous town of Crans-Montana (a place that, sadly, became known by a horrendous tragedy at the beginning of this year). I participated in the first two Swift Alps, but my (already visible at the time) lack of enthusiasm for Swift led me to drop out from that event, starting from the third edition onwards.
The pandemic was too strong for App Builders and Swift Alps; their last editions were (at the time of this writing) in 2022, and since then, nothing else has happened. It’s sad; it was a sensational family of events organized by the sweetest team ever. Hopefully we can get it back up on its feet one day.
So, there you go: 10 years later, I’m so thankful for this talk and its warm reception by the community. Thank you all.