Deep Dish is Not a Place

Wow. What a weekend it was in Chicago at Deep Dish Swift 2025. Despite returning home to a land of pollen, furious allergies, and an unattainable desire for caffeine, Josh Holtz’s annual pizza conference has me absolutely loving the life I have yet again.

I’m home and working on things for Pediapal as well as some new client work, and it couldn’t be better than that, folks. But let’s dive in to what made Deep Dish Swift so extraordinary, shall we?

The people.

Well, that was easy. Save. Post. Share.

Okay just kidding. I want to elaborate a little bit more. Thor says, “Asgard is not a place. It’s a people.” And the same is true of this conference. In the opening, Josh said, “Deep Dish is family”, which is certainly true. A few days before hopping on my flight, I said to Mary, “I feel like I’m going on a really big family reunion in a few days and I’m so happy!” Having completed the experience for my second time, I can say it felt exactly like that. But my family grew as I knew it would, and I have to say I love the new additions.

I feel a kinship with my fellow speakers who presented brilliantly on all kinds of things, be it Swift of the compiler or the heart. I think the first sentence I spoke to Michael Flarup was, “I’m so starstruck to meet you, and I literally want to be you professionally”. His talk really lit a fire within me. One of my highlights was also meeting Stewart Lynch, who gave a lovely talk on how we help each other find out really neat things. Danielle Lewis also gave a brilliant window into her journey of shipping not one but ten apps in a year to learn how to be an iOS Developer, and frankly that is amazing and straight up mythic. My friend Jordan Morgan is an all-around great guy, but he’s also so wise and willing to share his marketing learnings with us as he did in his indie developer talk. Now I find myself wanting to ship an App Clip for Pediapal because Matt Heaney (who is truly like a brother to me) made it so accessible, entertaining, and fun. I could go on and on about these amazing talks, but you can actually view them for yourselves on YouTube.

So let’s talk community then, because that’s the heart of the matter here. This was an all-inclusive environment, and no, I’m not referring to travel packages. I’m talking about how we accept one another. You can come to this as you are and be celebrated just by virtue of being you. These kind of events don’t just accidentally happen—it requires a lot of hard work that we don’t see over the course of a year. Josh jokes he takes two weeks of mental vacation from Deep Dish Thinking, but that’s a tiny amount of time in the grand scheme of things! That’s still fifty weeks of activity. If you’re reading this Josh, I appreciate you deeply for all of your hard work day in and day out. I appreciate you for the joyous moments, and I appreciate you for the frustrations that come with bringing an event together and the difficult things we don’t see. But most of all, I appreciate you for sharing your genuine, authentic self with all of us. It is through examples like yours that we can come to realise that we all have inner lights of our own that inspire each other.

As I sit here typing, I find myself missing the members of this family. These events really give me a lot of life because I love being amongst these people. I don’t necessarily have that so much at home, as I’m pretty sure Will Taylor (creator of a lovely app called Pines) is the nearest iOS Developer to me at a distance of 263 miles away, which is 3 hours and 45 minutes of driving. Not exactly a hop and a skip away. I’m not the only one who gets the post conference blues, and I think the fact that we experience this is an amazing testament to just how powerful these events are and what they mean to us. It’s why I fill my calendar with recurring time slots for these friends of mine, and if you’re not doing this, I recommend you start. Community doesn’t just live in Chicago, or Cupertino, or any place on a map. It lives in you because you’re a part of it. You’re the reason that one of us is smiling over a cheeky text, daydreaming about our next trip, or reminiscing a tender moment. The community is fantastic, no doubt, but you’re a part of it, too. Your presence just makes it that much better.

2025: Enter the Ewoks

Before I get into anything serious, I just want to humble brag and let anyone reading this know that my year officially began with the destruction of the second Death Star. At 9:56:55pm Central Standard Time, I meticulously hit play on the Disney+ version of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. I have to tell you, it was the best way to end 2024. Luke Skywalker firmly refused the dark side of the Force, Darth Vader was redeemed, Palpatine kicked rocks (we’re not going to talk about how he somehow returned right now). As the clock switched from 11:59pm to 12:00am (actually 23:59 to 00:00, if we’re talking about my specific device), the Death Star went boom! All of Palpatine’s plans were foiled because he didn’t foresee the influence of the Ewoks—no really. Stop and think on it for a second. I think the moral of the story is that we need some Ewoks in 2025, and I’ve got mine, thankfully.

The iOS Community is largely my crowd of Ewoks. For years, they’ve been so kind to me, and it’s given me some of my very best friends. If you’re reading this and you’re involved in the iOS/Swift Community, I hope you’ll consider them your Ewoks too. I’ve never known such a large body of folks who hold themselves to the same standards of quality and kindness. The beautiful thing is that this isn’t the only community out there. Regardless of your industry, you can find your Ewoks! And I really hope that you’ll take a mindful minute in 2025 to assess the Ewoks you want to form lasting relationships with.

And now for a bit of news—this year I’m shipping an app of my own, and no, I did not just come up with it. I’ve spent the last two months really digging into it, and all the things I want it to do for its 1.0 release are in place—which means it would be an incredible waste of time to can it now. I’m aiming for a Spring release, which judging by any calendar, is actually quite soon. I’d say I’m equal parts nervous and excited, so maybe I should stick with Simon Sinek’s trick to see me through. It’s easy to be passionate about this app, though, because I feel I’ve finally had my “aha! I’m solving a real problem” moment. Long have I waited for an inspiration like that. If you’re a parent, I think you’re going to love it.

Apart from my solo app, I’m going strong with the contracts, and I feel that I’ve done some of my best work with some of these folks, and I simply cannot wait to have you experience for yourself what we’ve done. I abide strongly by the idea that if I’m not in charge of a project, it’s not my story to tell, but wow I’m struggling to keep my mouth shut.

That’s all for now. May the Force be with you.

Is this thing on?

I’ve tried to start a blog three times in my life.

No, really. Once in high school—the one I’m proudest of, actually—and twice later on. I think with each successive attempt, the general idea of blogging got less and less inspired. Now I know what you’re thinking: Adrian, is a fourth effort going to fix that? I read that question in the voice of one of my close friends, and if he’s reading this, I hope he gets a chuckle out of it because it’s exactly what he’d ask me if he were sitting across the table from me. But to answer the question honestly, I’m not sure what it’ll fix, but I think this time I’m not really setting out to fix something or to be someone. I constantly fear saying not just the right thing, but the best thing—the thing that elicits laughs, earns me a react or two in my group messages, or otherwise gets recognised for the cheeky verbal gold that it is. And that’s exhausting. Every year, another close friend and I set our New Years’ themes—not a resolution, but a singular word or phrase that we want to carry in our minds to grow as people. This year, mine was “tenacity”, and I learned many other meanings of that word other than the one I fixated upon. My intended tenacity was kind of on par with Conan the Barbarian’s phrase from the 1982 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger: Let us take the world by the throat and make it give us what we desire.

At the year’s end, I don’t think that’s at all what happened. In fact, the opposite happened quite frequently, and I felt the world had me by my throat more than I’d like. There’s a reflex I’ve possessed for most of my life to sit amidst my losses a little pitifully, and I don’t mean that to judge anyone’s processing of difficult moments. But I’ve sort of made my identity about the difficulties I’ve had, and it’s taken a few severely painful moments this year to come to this conclusion.

I was in the Atlanta airport trying to race home when our five-year-old golden retriever lost the fight against cancer, and my wife, and a competent veterinarian, did everything she could to beat it. Over the summer, I lost one of my best friends suddenly in a freak accident, and nothing’s been the same since. I’ve admittedly overplayed Ed Sheeran’s album, Subtract, through a lot of this. Autumn rolled in as it does with its scarlet glory, and we stared glassy eyed at the ultrasound that showed us that one of the twins we were expecting had passed away—his name is Michael Francis Eves, and he deserves to be remembered despite a cruelly short lifetime. Shortly after, amidst all of this, I got asked to leave my small business, a children’s theatre company, because I distractedly made a costly mistake in my emotional haze, and I obliged. I’ve spent the better part of these twelve months feeling sorry for myself, and most of it rightly so. I say all this not to invite you to pity me, but just to share with me for just a moment. All of these things have put me in a mental headspace unseen and untrod, so of course how could I express tenacity with a bunch of new and ugly feelings? As it turns out, I think the tenacity I needed to learn is really just as simple as gently holding on to those you love, and that includes yourself.

So I’m going to end the year with that tenacity, and I want to focus on the beautiful relationships and things that I’m fortunate enough to have. I’ll start with the losses to finally anoint them with the ethereal power of acceptance, that last pinnacle in the stages of grief. Thor was honestly the best dog we’ve ever had, and the fact that we got five years with that dog, let alone five minutes, was truly special. We still talk about him as though he was some legendary figure in our family. Moreso than any other pet we’ve had, he really participated fully as a member of the family, and it’s mind blowing to me that that is a lesson I learned from a dog because I struggle with that a bunch. My friend Wade was amongst the best caliber of human beings you could ever contrive—he had such a true goodness to him, a light humor, and a sense of loyalty fiercer than anything I’ve witnessed. This was a relationship I was so fortunate to have, and I really hope that at least one of my friends in the world feels that I’m half as good a friend as Wade was. I could rest easy on that. Michael Francis, there’s a lot we don’t get to have, and I’m sorry, my son. I so desperately wish for a different ending to this story. There’s no way around that, no way to really embellish that with a synthetic sense of beauty. But you are my son, and I am glad we share that, for no passage of time can erase that, nor the love that I carry for you. The same from my error in the theatre company has largely faded, and I’m fortunate enough that the mistake was a blissful accident as opposed to an unscrupulous intent. I lost friends to this, but I also realised what a real friend does and does not do for one another.

As unfortunate things happen to everyone in existence, for I do not claim a monopoly on bad things, great things occur too. I got an opportunity for work that was so fantastic that I’m going to give it its own paragraph. The software engineering industry has been largely marred by egregious layoffs in the past few years. I experienced a couple of those, but my attitude on them has largely shifted thanks to a brief conversation with Ellen Shapiro, someone with an incredibly massive heart. If I recall correctly, it went something like this:

I was sitting in the speaker room at iOS Conf SG, and Ellen was there with me. I had expressed a certain level of anxiety after experience a layoff at the Walt Disney Company as a part of the notorious 7,000, and I’m sure I was heavy on the pessimism. When I’d finished speaking, Ellen looked at me plainly and asked, “First time?”

It was not a remark of sarcasm or a callous walk-it-off attitude—it was communicated with wit and empathy with a remarkable brevity. Ellen had experienced layoffs, too. A lot of us have. And as she told me one of her stories, I realised this kind of thing happens. It happened again after that, but it really wasn’t as much of a ground-shaking moment. I found something immediately after, and it brought me a lot of happiness—and friendship.

There’s an app called Foodnoms—if you haven’t downloaded it, I strongly recommend it, especially as we head into the New Year. And no one paid or prompted me to say this. It’s a wonderful thing when you get to work on something you 100% believe in, and in my case, it 100% was meant to help people. Foodnoms is an app used to track your nutrition and set goals for yourself based on those things, and Ryan Ashcraft is its creator. And it’s time for that paragraph I promised. Ryan let me contract on Foodnoms for some really cool work—I’m not really going to get into exactly what I did until he feels comfortable sharing because that’s his story to tell. But the two of us got started on this work like two outlaws living in the Wild West. Documentation was sparse, examples were few, and Ryan wanted to be one of the best, if not the best. If you take a look at Foodnoms, you’ll get a taste of what the best feels like, and yet Ryan isn’t so saturated with the idea of “the best” that it comes off as cocky or narcissistic, but far from it. To say he is an excellent communicator is an understatement. Ryan has this enviable ability where he can clearly describe what he wants, and his no’s don’t feel at all crushing. He understands how to balance what needs to be done with the sensibilities of basic human needs. I’ve mentioned this to him, and he says he’s learned things from what he’s read, et al. But I think it takes a special kind of person to be receptive to that at all. I think I started out loving working on Foodnoms, but by the end of the contract, the thing I enjoyed most was the relationship I formed with this person. Ryan’s a good friend. A great one, actually. If you know him, you know. If you don’t, he’ll likely be at Deep Dish Swift 2025, so start the queue early. But the conversations I’ve had with this person have been great, and I’ve learned so much. Somewhere down the line, I think Ryan somehow inspired me to start shedding this way of life where I equate my hardships with my identity, and I cannot even begin to describe how grateful I am for that. Of course, I can’t say for sure how grateful he’d be for all the attempts to nudge him into (Taylor) Swiftie culture, but it’s part of the package, right?

So here we are at the end of 2024, a mixed bag of a year. It had its joys, and it had its pains, but though all of it, we have community. Let’s quell the suspicion that I’ve dodged the initial question “what’s different about this time”? To be honest and frank, I simply believe it’s the first time I’m just going to write things I’m proud of, accept constructive criticism where it counts, and to treasure the community that I am so grateful to have. You can expect musings such as these, though this is really more of a prologue, but I’ll sprinkle in my experiences with software development, most notably with the Apple platforms. I’ll most definitely be using this to promote my upcoming app, but more on that in a few days. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for joining me on this journey of vulnerability and experience.

Let’s make something special with 2025.