@Meetup: Kathy Tafel, Meetup & Mike Walker, Lazer-Walker

Kathy Tafel, Director of Mobile Engineering at Meetup

A Timeless Way of Building

Kathy Tafel is Director of Mobile Engineering at Meetup where she leads the iOS and Android engineering teams. She’ll be talking about launching the new Meetup app, including things she contributed to specifically, such as continuous integration and deployment using Xcode server bots. Learn a few shell scripts that can make your life easier. Hear about their awesome decision to go all in on swift. Chat about what it’s like to join a team already underway on a huge project. Hear about how Meetup is iterating fast in response to member feedback.

Prior to Meetup, Kathy Tafel launched the Plenti iOS app and built out its team for American Express; is co-founder of Corpus Collusion, makers of The Recipe Box, a top iPad Food & Drink app; and spent more than eight years at Apple in Cupertino, in developer relations and on the apple.com (http://apple.com/) marketing communications team. She helped get OpenGL in the system, and worked on the Mac vs. PC campaign, amongst other things.

Mike Walker, Research Engineer at the MIT Media Lab (http://www.media.mit.edu/)

JavaScript? In MY iOS App?

Many iOS teams grapple with whether they should be writing new code in Objective-C or in Swift. But are those your only options? My recent academic research at MIT involved building an app where the majority of logic was written in JavaScript, wrapped in a thin layer of custom Swift. While part of that decision was being able to share logic cross-platform, it was much more about the other benefits of JavaScript as a language, such as its dynamism and robust third-party tooling. This talk will touch on the positives and negatives of using JS in your iOS apps, and when different approaches might be appropriate.

Mike Walker is a software engineer, game designer, and artist. Most recently, he worked with the MIT Media Lab’s Playful Systems research group. In the past, he's worked on apps such as Timehop and Words With Friends. You may know him as the creator of goshdarnblocksyntax.com (http://goshdarnblocksyntax.com/).