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NSNorth Main Conference Schedule
Thursday, April 28th
Friday, April 29th
Saturday, April 30th
Community Kickoff
Kickoff Schedule, Thursday, April 28th
Please head over to our Community Kickoff page to learn more.
Children's Program, Saturday, April 30th
Game Making with Scratch (9:00 - 11:30am)
You and your child will take part in this 2.5 hour session that will go through all the steps involved in how to make a game. Suitable for children aged 6+. Expert instructors and mentors from Toronto's Ladies Learning Code will be on hand.
From Checkers, to Tag, to Angry Birds, games are everywhere! This experience allows kids to discuss their favourite games and analyze the characteristics that make them engaging, addictive, and fun! As a group, we’ll explore a basic game design process -- from idea, to execution, to testing! Kids will be able to work individually or in pairs to brainstorm their very own game.
Required equipment: none
The Turtle in the Playground (1:00 - 3:30pm)
Our Technical Workshop instructor, Daniel Steinberg, will lead this fun, half-day workshop designed to introduce programming to children aged 8+. Participants direct a turtle towards its goal while learning the fundamentals of the Swift programming language and how to work with an Xcode 7 playground.
Required equipment: Apple laptop with the latest version of Xcode installed.
Mentors and volunteers will be available to help during both the morning and afternoon sessions.
About Your Instructors
Ladies Learning Code is a not-for-profit organization with the mission to be the leading resource for women and youth to become passionate builders - not just consumers - of technology by learning technical skills in a hands-on, social, and collaborative way. 
The code:mobile is Ladies Learning Code’s newest and biggest initiative to inspire and educate Canadian girls and boys to become passionate builders -- not just consumers of technology. Think: a computer lab on wheels. But, it’s more than just a truck or a computer lab. It’s a cross-Canada journey that will bring technology education to Canadian youth at community events, Summer Camps, schools, community centers, parks and more in major cities and underprivileged and remote communities, alike.
From May to September 2016, we’ll be visiting our 22+ Chapter cities across Canada plus their surrounding cities and towns based on community requests. We’ll be visiting large and small, privileged and underprivileged communities stopping by at local parks, community centres, Summer Camps, street festivals and more - travelling an estimated 35,000km coast to coast and teaching over 10,000 kids to code!
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Daniel Steinberg is the author of the best selling books A Swift Kickstart and Developing iOS 7 Apps for iPad and iPhone (the official companion book to the popular iTunes U series from Stanford University).
He has written apps for the iPhone and the iPad since the SDKs first appeared and has written programs for the Mac all the way back to System 7. Daniel presents iPhone, Cocoa, and Swift training and consults through his company Dim Sum Thinking. When he's not coding or talking about coding for the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad he's probably cooking or hanging out with his wife and daughter.
Technical Workshop, Thursday, April 28th
The Technical Workshop is organized as a stand-alone single day pre-conference event that will take place on Thursday, April 28th, at the main venue.
Join Daniel Steinberg for a day of Thinking in Swift
This fast-paced workshop shows you how to take advantage of Swift features to write more robust code that is easier to reason about. One of the strengths of Swift is that it can borrow the best from a multitude of paradigms. We’ll look at how to successfully weave together OO and functional code into a readable and flexible architecture and focus on protocol oriented programming.
This course is for programmers who know the fundamentals of the Swift Programming Language but still haven't mastered the paradigms.
Topics will include
- Thinking functionally - Swift is not a functional language but we can benefit from using some aspects of functional programming in our code.
- Structs and Enums - Revisit the code you write with an eye to using more value types.
- guard, if-let, where, errors, and optionals - Are you taking full advantage of Swift constructs for control flow and checking for correctness
- Rethinking Names - One of the largest recommended changes to Swift are standards for naming functions, methods and protocols.
- Protocols and Protocol Extensions - Protocols are central to how we think about our Swift code.
- Sequences and Generators - The Swift collection types conform to a protocol that contains much of the power that we use without knowing it.
- Map, filter, reduce - Make these core methods do the heavy lifting for you…then hide them away
- Flat map - This is our “bind”. We won’t go all category theory on you but we may use words like functor and monad.
- Lost in Translation - You can’t just translate an Objective-C app into Swift. You have to re-architect it to take advantage of what Swift does best.
About Your Instructor
Daniel is the author of the best selling books A Swift Kickstart and Developing iOS 7 Apps for iPad and iPhone (the official companion book to the popular iTunes U series from Stanford University).
He has written apps for the iPhone and the iPad since the SDKs first appeared and has written programs for the Mac all the way back to System 7. Daniel presents iPhone, Cocoa, and Swift training and consults through his company Dim Sum Thinking. When he's not coding or talking about coding for the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad he's probably cooking or hanging out with his wife and daughter.
Lightning Talks
Lightning Talks are Back! They are very short, five minute, presentations where our attendees can present on a topic of their choice. These talks will be mixed in among the regular sessions on Friday and Saturday.