Hacking with Swift Live 2019 raises $30,000 for charity

Thank you to all our speakers, attendees, and volunteers!

Paul Hudson July 18th 2019 @twostraws

The first Hacking with Swift Live took place last week in Bath, England, with all profits being donated to Special Effect – a charity that aims to put fun and inclusion back into the lives of people with physical disabilities by helping them to play video games.

We had eight fantastic speakers on day one: John Sundell kicked us off with an introductory keynote on generics, followed by Kilo Loco, Kelly Hutchison, and Daniel Steinberg rounding up before lunch with a talk about the Swift behind SwiftUI. In the afternoon Ellen Shapiro talked about Swift Package Manager, followed by Sally Shepard and Cory Benfield, before James Thomson closed the day with his incredible talk An Illustrated History of Easter Eggs.

All these talks are now available to watch on YouTube:

Gentle Generics by John Sundell
Auditing your App with the Accessibility Inspector by Kilo Loco
Extending UIColor to Support Custom Styling by Kelly Hutchison
The Swift Behind SwiftUI by Daniel Steinberg
Thinking Outside the Box with Swift Package Manager by Ellen Shapiro
Swift Hardware Hacking by Sally Shepard
High Performance Systems in Swift by Cory Benfield
An Illustrated History of Easter Eggs by James Thomson

Day two was dedicated to hands-on tutorials of the major new features introduced from WWDC19, including SwiftUI, compositional layouts for collection views, diffable data sources, storyboard dependency injection, and more – we worked through three example projects demonstrating so many new things.

Even though this was our first event, we sold all our tickets, and also had support from incredible sponsors: Bitrise and Cookpad were generous enough to come on as platinum sponsors, and Compare the Market, Dyson, Ecotricity, JetBrains, and Stickermule were silver sponsors.

Thanks to the support from attendees and sponsors, all the hard work from our volunteers Chris, Dan, Ian, and Illy, and of course all our attendees, we managed to donate $30,000 to a fantastic charity called Special Effect – that’s the full amount of profit from the event.

Now the event is complete, the number one question we’ve had from attendees is “when can I buy a ticket for next year?” Well, we can’t promise anything just yet, but I can say that having raised so much money for charity we’ve started talking about what next year might look like… watch this space!