10-27, 09:05–09:30 (Europe/Berlin), Main stage
Package ecosystems burst onto the scene, sometimes slowly and sometimes… a little bit loudly. That part of the story is familiar. But what happens when that ecosystem is no longer the new shiny thing, and the larger ecosystem it lives in has moved onto? This talk will chronicle the tale of CocoaPods, the unofficial 3rd party package manager for Apple ecosystem development, and how its maintainers have helped it gently fade away over the past decade.
This talk will explore the life cycle of package ecosystems and what happens when they are no longer the new, shiny thing. Using the example of CocoaPods, the unofficial 3rd party package manager for Apple ecosystem development, we’ll explore: what it means for a package manager to be “done”; how users generally lag behind in adopting new build-related technologies when given any choice on the matter; what becomes most important in keeping the ecosystem afloat without spending too much time on development; and most importantly, how to help users migrate to the next thing as seamlessly as possible. At the end, you’ll be ready for your package manager to reach retirement age and hit the beach after a lengthy career helping users build entirely too much software.
Samuel is a developer well-versed in the rituals of writing software that occasionally work. By day, Samuel is doing random interesting things for Nerdsniped LLC; by night he can be found breaking open source projects such as RubyGems.org, Bundler, and Bazel (let’s be honest, the day and night activities are starting to converge). Before this whole "developer" thing, Samuel studied in the highly impractical Mathematics & Economics departments at UChicago, learning subjects such as "numbers", "social theory", and "memes". When not coding, Samuel is often in the kitchen, marveling at the fact that dinner smells better than it looks.