I spent three days last week at the Deep Dish Swift conference here in Chicago. My fourth year in a row of learning so much at this wonderful conference, surrounded by a really amazing community.

This week, I got the opportunity to present what I’d learned to the rest of the creative team at work. One of the strengths of Deep Dish Swift is how approachable so many of the talks and topics are. Even the more in-depth, technical talks are still rooted in the community’s values—craft, design, an excellent experience.

But how do you encapsulate that in a ten-minute recap, from zero? You make a very Deep Dish app. …which is to say I made a very quick, demo app to introduce the concept of Deep Dish Swift and deliver some agency-facing things that stuck out to me from sessions.

Does it have rough edges? Absolutely! Is it code I’d share with the community? No. But it was so much fun to make.

The Basic Pie:

• The Featured tab highlighted the sessions and presenters. A carousel at the top subtly nodded at the sessions I’d be referring to for takeaways. Hitting “See All” in the sessions section opened a schedule by day. At the bottom, I recreated the speaker bios. “So it’s a pretty presentation around JSON?” Yep.
• The Podcast tab was all about highlight the excellent Slices podcast that Malin Sundberg and Kai Dombrowski run each year to interview the speakers and organizers of Deep Dish Swift. Any time podcasts come up for Golin’s corporate clients I nudge them toward Slices for inspiration, particularly for any conference or speaker-based events. I hope some of our creatives tune in.
• Takeaway tab. In hindsight, probably should have called this one “Leftovers” because I’m sort of bringing back slices of the conference for the team. This is where I spent most of my presentation. I ran through about five sessions themed to the various stages of a pizza (ordering, crust, sauce, etc.) and then tapped into a gallery of three to five things I learned, filtered toward a non-technical audience.

Cool. But could it be cooler?

I wouldn’t be doing the spirit of Deep Dish Swift justice without a little whimsy. So, yes, the app was a little basic. The way I get into the presentation? Anything but.

An app intent started a Live Activity recreating a pizza delivery status board when I said “Hey Siri, order pizza from Deep Dish.” That got us going. Ten minutes to run through Deep Dish Swift before our pizza arrived, with the timer also visible in a tab view bottom accessory as it ran.

Taking some inspiration from Morten Gregerson’s unofficial Deep Dish Swift app, pizza emoji confetti drops when the clock strikes zero.

But because I’m…me…I didn’t stop there. I also made an “Emergency Pizza Button” on a widget. If I whizzed through my presentation or the meeting needed to be foreshortened, tapping the button in the widget would end the Live Activity and nudge the app to start confetti.

I am nothing if not extra cheesy.