Hello everyone!

This fall I spoke at two conferences. Even though I didn't talk directly about AI, AI was all over both.

Me speaking at iOSDevUK

iOSDevUK: CloudKit as Your Backend

My talk landed the same day as the Nintendo Direct and the iPhone Duo announcement, so I opened with an AI-generated render of the nonexistent game Super Mario Titans running on an iPhone Duo. That's the slide behind me in the photo up top.

The rest of the talk was MistKit again: how to use CloudKit from places the CloudKit framework doesn't work, like a server, a Linux box, or a GitHub Action. I covered authentication, type safety, error handling, and the API design that sits over a generated OpenAPI client.

One question I keep coming back to since iOSDevUK in Aberystwyth: if CloudKit works from a server or a Linux box, how useful could it be for the Android and Windows users of an app? That's the part of "CloudKit from anywhere" I want to push on next.

AI at iOSDevUK: Graham Lee's talk stood out. He walked through the different patterns for working with AI in software development, which is also what we talked about when he was on the podcast.

If you want the story behind MistKit's rebuild, I wrote it up:

👉 Read the blog post: Rebuilding MistKit with Claude Code

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https://youtu.be/NyKmqtklU-U

swiftCon Berlin: Building Scalable Swift Automation

My first time speaking in Berlin. The talk covered:

👉 Watch the recording here

👉 Slides and links from the talk

AI at swiftCon: next.app devCon runs a lot of topics like IT security and mobile development, and agentic programming was a big part of the conference.

New Episodes

Speaking of AI, I just released my episode with Daniel Steinberg, You're Better Than AI where we talk about using Foundation Models, Apple's framework for using AI in your app. And Patreon members get first listen to Not Accessible by Default with Rob Whitaker, which comes out next week.

Next: CodeMash, January 2027

I'm happy to say CodeMash 2027 accepted CloudKit as Your Backend. It's January 12–15 at the Kalahari in Sandusky, Ohio. CodeMash is a polyglot conference, so this is the talk in front of a room that mostly doesn't write Swift. That makes it a good test of whether "CloudKit from anywhere" really holds up. If you're going to CodeMash, let me know. I'd love to say hi.

One more thing: consulting

I'm putting together a few fixed-scope consulting packages built on this work: CI/CD setup, Swift package architecture reviews, and adding AI to a Swift workflow. More on that soon. Until then, the free 30-minute call is still open if you want to talk through your setup.

Thanks for reading, and for the questions after both talks.

Leo

P.S. Next issue: five podcast episodes, our first video episodes, and AI, the topic four of those guests ended up on.