I love teaching, sharing knowledge and speaking at conferences. Ping me on Twitter or via Email.
| Location | Date | Conference |
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Ping @steipete on Twitter or reach out via email (steipete at gmail) if you organize a conference where you'd like me to speak. I direct the day-to-day work as CEO of PSPDFKit and also share knowledge on our company blog.
This talk was originally written for Deep Dish Swift 2023. I also gave a (majorly) modified version of this talk at iOS Conf SG 2024 in Singapore.
Description from Daniel Saidi, one of the attendees:
Peter from PSPDFKit talked about how he sold his company, and how the last two years have been the hardest of his life. Starting his first app out of rage, and later his first company, Peter founded PSPDFKit, which over time has turned into a pretty big thing.
This talk was not a success story of formula 1A talk, rather the opposite. It was a many-faceted, rich and deeply touching description about what it’s like to start a company, reach success and start to grow, then feeling the loss of control as more people are brought in, having to battle with separating your identity from your company and product, conflicts, burning out etc. Eventually, selling the thing you’ve identified with for so long can have some nasty surprises up its sleeve. Who are you when you sell a large part of who you consider yourself to be? Who are you in that deep void, when you have no sense of purpose?
This talk went deep and dark, but ended with rich insights on how to find yourself after such a journey.
I loved it.
"PJ: Thanks so much Peter Steinberger for sharing your journey and being so candid! Wasn’t expecting to tear up at a tech conference, but here we are 🙏" (via Slack), Nick Hayward: "Excellent talk!", Patrick McCarron: "Thanks so much as someone who has struggled with burn out and depression over the years I loved the additional tips and tools to look into to learn even more about the why it happened.", "Super thoughtful and thought-provoking keynote", "Company success, beating health issues, experience burnout, selling his company, feeling lost - the hedonic treadmill", "Wow @steipete just mentioned Three20 and ASIHTTPRequest. I don’t think anyone has said anything that has given me so much nostalgia as an iOS developer", "Peter’s deeply personal talk I can relate with in many ways having done a few cycles of burnout and depression over the years.", "Really enjoyed @steipete’s personal talk at @DeepDishSwift! 🫶", "In @DeepDishSwift opening keynote @steipete shares emotional journey of founding @PSPDFKit and eventual exit #inspiring #powerful", "We have @steipete giving an amazing keynote 🥰", "We have @steipete giving our opening keynote. He’s been an idol of mine for so long and it’s super surreal and amazing being able to introduce him as our keynote speaker 🥰", "I loved your keynote. So many relatable feelings. Thank you for sharing your story. May you continue to find healing and happiness, Peter. 💚", "This morning’s keynote by @steipete at #DeepDishSwift was easily it’s equal for me: every indie app developer should stop periodically to think about who they are without their work, otherwise they’ll eventually find themselves starting from scratch and regretting time lost. Thank you @steipete for being so honest and open about your journey.", "Amazing talk!! 😍", “We’re carrying these time wasting boxes in our pockets”, "Some very powerful storytelling from @steipete during the #DeepDishSwift keynote; excellent behind-the-scenes of the story of him + PSPDFKit on a very personal level.", "This was such an inspiring talk. @steipete displayed such vulnerability and discussed some really hard topics. Self-care is so important, and money can only make you so happy.", "Peter your talk was awesome, vulnerable, and so inspiring to listen to! Thank you for it!", "This was really, really excellent. Thanks for putting yourself out there and talking about some tough stuff.", "This is a talk I’m going to remember for forever 🫶", "It was a great talk - thanks for sharing. Really landed with me. Everybody I’ve spoken to today have commented on how your talk resonated with them. ❤️"
I also gave a modified version of this talk at iOS Conf SG 2024 in Singapore:
"touching talk by @steipete, it takes a lot to be so honest and open about you publicly, hats off 👏🏻", "What an amazing talk! Thank you for sharing @steipete 🙇♂️", "One of the best talk for sure, and considering the fact that we less likely ever talk about the our mental awareness and creating time for self-care to slow down from the daily hassle.", "Very touching indeed. Very inspiring as well. Thank you for being so transparent @steipete, it will definitely help many people who are listening to it!", "We need more talks like this one at tech conferences about personal stories, experiences and hurdles. Thanks for sharing your story @steipete", "I had a chance to talk with @steipete and it was my pleasure to have a lot of good tips from him, and I would strongly suggest to watch his talk."
There’s a shift happening in how mobile apps are built—again. While a few years ago we moved from languages created in the 1980s and ʼ90s (think Objective-C and Java) toward more modern and expressive programming languages (Swift and Kotlin), we’re now seeing the transition from imperative to declarative UI frameworks in the form of SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose. This once again promises to dramatically increase developer productivity. To understand declarative UI’s present potential, it helps to start by exploring its not-too-distant past. Along the way, we’ll look at how it’s empowering developers to build apps faster with less code, and why now is the right time to consider adopting SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose.
This talk was first presented at WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2021 slides
With the 10.3 release of our iOS PDF SDK, we’re shipping SwiftUI in production. This is a big milestone for us, and an even more interesting one, as our product still supports iOS 12. In this talk I'll explain how we built this feature while also keep things working for iOS 12, and why we picked SwiftUI for it.
Feedback: "Wow, nice talk Peter! Thanks a lot for setting it up! The keyboard avoidance trick was really cool to see 🚀" @kkostov, @steipete Absolutely fantastic presentation on SwiftUI Peter! We also saw a lot of those SwiftUI 1.0 issues in the app we’re building at work, so it was really great to see it wasn’t just us! 🤣 Thanks so much for that!, After seeing @steipete talk this morning I feel less sad about the bugs in Mocka. Pure SwiftUI is hell 🤷, Amazing @steipete SwiftUI talk at @swiftheroes_it, what a chain of hacks are being shown. Mind = .blown, Congrats on your talk @steipete @swiftheroes_it. Thanks for sharing your experiences. Makes me we wanna pull the breaks on adopting SwiftUI a bit until we can drop iOS13 on our projects., that was a great talk, as usual from @steipete :), "Really enjoyed your talk @steipete some great tips on mixing UIKit and SwiftUI"
This talk has been made for Swift Heroes 2021. slides video
A revised version of this talk has been presented at WeAreDevelopers Live 2021
Every project benefits from a good Continuous Integration & Delivery system. While there's countless articles on the latest Swift or SwiftUI tricks, there's surprisingly little talk about strategies around CI & CD. You will find case studies by industry giants like Shopify or Uber that talk about their solutions, however their CI/CD team in many cases is larger than some middle-sized companies.
At PSPDFKit, we don't have a separate team for CI/CD, our engineering team also owns testing and delivery. In this talk I'll give you an overview of the options today, and will explore what path we took for fast, automated testing in a multi-platform environment. We'll also talk about money, because running cost is an important topic for bootstrapped companies. Lastly, we'll look at options around configuration management tools to automate machine setups.
This talk was made for iOS Conf SG 2021. slides video
Feedback from Attendees via Zoom: "thank you. great talk." "Peter! I'm impressed by your optimism :)" "Super cool the script about removing default apps, adding that to my dot files!" "Honestly installing Xcode on just one machine does it for me!" "Thank you Peter, amazing talk 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻"
Follow me along as I take the main view controller of PSPDFKit and wrap it into a SwiftUI view, add custom configuration properties, make methods on the view controller accessible via Combine publishers, use a Coordinator to wrap the delegate into modern closures and call pre-built popovers from a SwiftUI Navigation Bar. This will be a Xcode coding session where I explain the concepts as I'm building the component. We look at tradeoffs with iOS 13 vs iOS 14 compatibility, some tricks to work around bugs, SwiftUI lifetime, considerations for Combine cancellables and much more.
Feedback via Brella: Tim Oliver: Oh man. Damn that's impressive Peter!, Cristina De: Thank you very much Peter! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻, Moein Barzegaran: Thanks Peter!, Sammy Smallman: Thanks Peter, that was awesome!, Nissi Miranda: Very good! 😄, Fernando Bunn: Really awesome talk Peter.
This talk was hand-crafted and recorded for Swift Heroes Digital 2020. video
UI testing has been around since iOS 4, but it never really caught on. I've asked various members of the iOS community about their experience and tips. Join me on a trip of different frameworks, strategies and tools to find a solution that fits your app. You will hear about KIF, EarlGrey, XCU and various open source projects to help you write better tests, to parallelize them or even to remind you to write tests. " Feedback via hopin.to: Daniel Steinberg: nice job @Peter Steinberger thanks, Alexander Lonsky thanks Peter!, Thomas Besnehard: 👏👏👏👏, Hugo Saynac: Congrats, great talk 👏, Heiko Goes: Thanks a lot Peter for this extensive overview, Seán Labastille (Organizer): 👏 👏 👏 👏, Shai Mishal: Great overview, thanks !, Vincent Pradeilles: Thank you!, Paris Buttfield-Addison: Fabulous talk, thanks!, Andrea Antonioni: Great talk!!, Andreas Hegenberg: 👍👍 very nice!, Eben Kok: That was awesome!, Alexander Weiß: Very interesting talk !, Martin Fitzka-Reichart: Great talk Peter!!, Matej Malesevic: thanks a lot 👏👏👏, "very informative talk about UI testing.", "When can I watch this over and over again please?"
This talk was hand-crafted and recorded for App Builders 2020. slides, video
With the just released iPadOS 13.4, Apple added support for trackpad and mouse devices! Watch me life-coding support for pointer interactions into a large project (PSPDFKit, a PDF SDK) using Xcode 11.4 and Swift. You'll learn how the API works, how you can create bezier paths in-code (and what tools are there to help), and how to structure the handler in a way that is easy to read and extensive. We'll also discuss a few tricks and hacks how to make progress faster, how to make buttons react to events, and official and unofficual ways how to differentiate between finger touches and pointer taps.
This talk is based on my blog post https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2020/supporting-pointer-interactions/ but is much more hands-on and shows a few tricks we learned since then.
Feedback from Attendees: (Via ClickMeeting Platform) Tiago Mergulhão: OMG! SO COOL!, Christian Beer: One more thing! Thank you very much, Peter! That was really awesome!!, Akshat Patel: hahaha now THIS looks like real code, Stefan Steinbauer: Thanks for the ride, Nico du Plessis: Awesome session!, Liviu C: haha. nice tweak!, Mostafa: Thank you 👏, J.B.: *Good stuff, Peter, Mosbah: That was really cool thx !, Joao Pereira: great stuff! Thanks Peter & the organizers, Alexander: Peter, thank you very much! I'm always amazed at how you instantly manage to support new things, very grateful for doing pioneer work. By the way, besides this webinar and the aforementioned blog post by Peter I can highly recommend Apple's HIG article covering pointers in user interaction chapter and pretty decent sample code "Integrating Pointer Interactions into Your iPad App"., Gerry (WeAreDevelopers): Great session, thank you Peter!, Tamas Jaroli: Thank you Peter, this was amazing!, Eben: Pete that was epic!, Sead: Thanks Peter, it was awesome!
Learn how PSPDFKit builds on and improves world’s most popular PDF library.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, Opera, LG and Dropbox are working together to commoditize PDF render technology. The future is open source, fast and fuzzed/well-tested.
We walk you through the many powerful features of PDFium, where it can be used, and how you can contribute to the most used PDF library in the world.
PSPDFKit ported PDF Viewer, a project with over 2 MLOC and lots of UIKit code to the Mac via Catalyst. Having played with "Marzipan" in 2018, the team was able to port their huge app in a relative short timeframe. Learn what you have to do after checking the [X] Mac checkbox, how far Catalyst can be pushed, how it interacts with AppKit, and how to work around the worst bugs. We'll show real code, a selection of r̵a̵d̵a̵r̵ Feedback Assistant items, strategies to keep code branching low, and some design alterations that were necessary to make it feel more at home on the Mac." (video, slides)
Feedback from Attendees: "Just learned a whole lot about the real life process for PSPDFKit to ship with Catalyst! Awesome talk by the one and only @steipete !", "Peter @steipete is talking about not great and yet not terrible experience of shipping a Catalyst app 🚀", "“SwiftUI is the Austin Powers of frameworks: cool, if you like to live dangerously.” – @steipete at @mobiconf", "Can’t wait to see what great things @steipete has to say about this year’s Xcode GM releases 😜", "The excellent @steipete is sharing his experience porting the PsPdfKit app to Catalyst. So many holes he had to polyfill... Exceptional work! ", "@steipete sharing the @PSPDFKit adventures on shipping a Catalyst app. Good stuff! #frenchkit", "@steipete giving us a great talk on Catalyst @frenchkitconf #FrenchKit ", "Amazing talk from @steipete showing us we just have to check a box to run our iPadOS app on macOS!", "Catalyst without cataclysm", "What was great about @steipete talk at @frenchkitconf ? You learn about technical stuff and you got a new movie to watch. Amazing talk btw !", "Thanks for sharing! Awesome talk, very interesting and funny :)", "@steipete talk about macOS catalyst at #BASwiftable was mindblowing. Thanks!", "💪🏻 @steipete @baswiftable #swiftable"
I explain our approach to SDK design, long-term product evolvement, feature/proposal development and support. This talk is interesting to developers and product planners alike. (slides, blog post)
We discussed the up- and downsides of taking VC money vs boostrapping a business. Many thanks to Natalie, Marcus, Anna for being great panel partners, the whole Pioneers team for being incredibly well organized and Florian for the tough audience question that later lead to an episode in his “Gründer&Zünder” podcast. Pioneers 2019 Photos (c) Emil Chalhoub for Pioneers
I will show the hacks currently needed to try Apple's new iOSMac platform, codenamed "Marzipan", and walk through what I needed to do to get PDF Viewer to run on macOS Mojave. Learn about the history, the current status, the timeline, and how to port your app today. See preview research tweet
Early version of this talk given at mDevCamp 2018, one week after the release of Marzipan.
Talk completely re-imagined at try! Swift New York, Sept 5, 2018. Slides Video
Feedback from Attendees: "Marizpandemic is coming.", "Awesome talk – really educational and entertaining 👏", "excellent black magic", "Having my mind blown (again)", "I can’t wait for Marzipan so I can get away with never having to learn AppKit!", "words to live by", "Having fun with Marzipan", "Crash once return 0, crash twice return it with 1 ... 😂😂😂", "educational and entertaining, well done 👍", "I would have liked to be there for this one!"
Having a successful online identity will open many doors and help you to become a better developer, and person as a whole. I've been working on my professional persona since 2009, and it helped me so tremendously and pushed me forward into places I didn't think I could ever go.
This is the keynote talk for UIKonf for Day 2. slides | video
Feedback from Attendees: "highly recommended", "really awesome", "FANTASTIC talk, funny slides, nice pace", "Absolutely inspiring. One of the most important skills in our field.", "Brilliant, powerful, warm, full of empathy", "very inspiring, motivational... feeling energized"
As part of the Founder & Investor Talks at Vienna University of Technology of 2018 I'll talk about my road from a freelancer to CEO of a succssful, growing international company with a deliberate choice of not taking VC money. This talk is about upsides/downsides and many lessions learned, the hard transition from "builder" to "manager", about teaming up with other people, building a team, core values, and strategies how to make a product work that sells B2B.
Feedback from Attendees: "Beautiful, eyes opening argument, funny stories", "Loved it! Detailed personal developer stories like this one are what make these conferences so interesting", "Inspiring tech entrepreneurship story", "Super interesting", "FANTASTIC talk, lots of wisdom and funny anecdotes"
Debugging can be exciting, but often also very, very frustrating. We explore some lesser-known tools and techniques to find problems faster and make the Compiler mark issues, before they become a crash for the user. The second part is a case study of a particularily interesting bug hunts where I use some unconventional ways to find and resolve the issue.
Feedback from Attendees: "really great structured overview", "great talk",
Binary frameworks? Without ABI? In Swift? What’s the deal with Swift Modules? In his talk, Peter discusses binary frameworks and stability, when and why ABI matters, and why his team writes in Objective-C. Learn more about what you can do right now, what other companies are doing, common pitfalls, and the future.
slides | blog post | video and transcript
Swift Weekly Shoutout, Most Interesting Videos of dotSwift
Peter will discuss strategies how code can be written in a way where you can both 'ship it' and have a sustainable product that allows you to move fast and where new people don't run away screaming. At least most of the time :)
The talk is based on lessons learned while building PSPDFKit for iOS since 2010, yet most parts will be applicable to any language and team.
video @ App Builders Switzerland 2017
How to Run a Distributed Company. (video | slides)
| Location | Date | Conference |
|---|---|---|
| Singapore | Jan 18 - 19, 2024 | Closing Keynote @ iOS Conf SG slides (video) |
| Chicago | April 30 - May 2nd, 2023 | Keynote @ Deep Dish Swift slides |
| Location | Date | Conference |
|---|---|---|
| Singapore (Remote) | Jan 20-21 2021 | iOS Conf SG slides video |
| Remote | April 16 2021 | Swift Heroes Digital 2021 |
| Remote | April 29, 2021 | WeAreDevelopers Live – iOS Developer Day |
| Remote | May 27th, 2021 | mDevMeet 2021 |
| Remote | June 28 - July 1st | WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2021 |
| Location | Date | Conference |
|---|---|---|
| Paris, France | April 2 | Swift Paris Online #2 |
| New York, US | April X | Spotify Engineering Conference (Cancelled, COVID-19) |
| Remote | April 15 | WeAreDevelopers Live |
| Berlin, Germany | April 27-29 | PDF Days Europe (Cancelled COVID-19) |
| Lugano, Switzerland | May 11-12 | App Builders (Remote, COVID-19) (video) |
| Aveiro, Portugal | June 25th - 26th | SwiftAveiro (Cancelled COVID-19) |
| Brazil | Nov 5-6 2020 | NSBrazil (Cancelled COVID-19) |
| Remote | Oct 1-2 2020 | Swift Heroes Digital 2020 (video) |
| Location | Date | Conference |
|---|---|---|
| Karlsruhe, Germany | Dec 3-4 | heise MacDev 2019 |
| Buenos Aires, Argentina | Nov 28-29 | Swiftable |
| Berlin, Germany | Nov 12-13 | {codemotion} Berlin (Cancelled) |
| Paris, France | Oct 8-9 | FrenchKit (video slides) |
| Kraków, Poland | Oct 3-4 | Mobiconf 2019 |
| San Jose, California | June 4 | AltConf (Talk about CI Infra) (video) |
| Vienna, Austria | May 8-10 | Pioneers'19 |
| Budapest, Hungary | April 12 | iOS Conf Budapest [Cancelled] |
| Vienna, Austria | Feb 21 | Apple Store Vienna Talked about How We Work at PSPDFKit |
| Porto, Portugal | Feb 4 | CocoaHeads Porto Talked about How We Work at PSPDFKit |
| Location | Date | Conference |
|---|---|---|
| New York, US | Sept 4-5, 2018 | try! Swift - Hacking Marzipan (slides video) |
| Vienna, AT | July 12, 2018 | Cocoaheads Vienna, Talk about Marzipan |
| Prague, CZ | June 15, 2018 | mDevCamp, 2 Talks: iOS part of the Keynote + Highlights of WWDC 2018 & Hacking Marzipan |
| San Jose, US | June 4-8, 2018 | WWDC 2018 (No talk, but let's meet up!) |
| Berlin, DE | May 14-16, 2018 | PDF Developer Days |
| Berlin, DE | May 13-16, 2018 | UIKonf - Building Personal Brands for Introverts (slides video) |
| Vienna, AT | April 25, 2018 | Founder & Investor Talks at Vienna University of Technology (event) |
| Lugano, CH | April 16-17, 2018 | App Builders Switzerland 2018 (video) |
| Atlanta, US | March 12-14, 2018 | Teki Con🍍 (slides) |
| Paris, FR | January 29, 2018 | dotSwift 2018 (slides, blog post, video) |
| Location | Date | Conference |
|---|---|---|
| Logroño, Spain | Sept 13-15, 2017 | NSSpain (Video on Vimeo) |
| Berlin, Germany | May 27, 2017 | STICKS & STONES |
| Vienna, Austria | May 11-12, 2017 | WeAreDevelopers (video) |
| Budapest, Hungary | April 25-28, 2017 | CRAFT Conf (Video on UStream) |
| Lausanne, Switzerland | April 24, 2017 | App Builders (Video on YouTube) |
Between 2013-2016 I've given talks at following conferences: (list incomplete, PRs welcome!)
https://vimeopro.com/steipete/conference-talks-peter-steinberger
- UIKonf 2013 (Berlin, DE) - How to bend UIKit to your will.
- NSConference (London, UK)
- Top Devs Share Their Reactions to WWDC 2016 (San Francisco, US)
- NSSpain 2012 and 2017 - (Logroño, Spain) - How to Run a Distributed Company. (video | slides)
- AltTechTalks Berlin - Foundation Collection Classes (Berlin, DE)
- Mobile Central Europe (Poland) - Practical Runtime Hackery (video)
- ⌘R Conf 2014 (London, UK) - Scaling Your Indie Business (video)
- Istanbul Tech Talks (Istanbul, Turkey) (highlights video)
- AltConf (San Francisco, US) - [Objective] C++: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (video) (One of the 5 most popular talks of AltConf 2015!)
- WeAreDevelopers (Vienna, AT) - Building a sustainable codebase: 7 years and counting (video)
- Bacon Biz (Philadelphia, US)
- Macoun (Frankfurt am Main, DE)
- Cocoaheads meetups in Vienna, Germany, Ukraine, Stockholm and abroad.
Video Recordings for some of my talks can be found at my Vimeo.
Peter worked with iOS since the inception of the iPhone and is an experienced speaker both on highly technical and management topics. He bootstrapped PSPDFKit in 2011 and made a successful exit in 2021. Prior to PSPDFKit, he worked as a Senior iOS Engineer at a startup in San Francisco and taught iOS and Mac development at his alma mater, the Vienna University of Technology. After a longer sabbatical, he's now looking for a new challenge.
Many of my past talks are on SpeakerDeck
More Pictures see the pitures folder in this repo.
- Semaphore CI: Peter Steinberger on his startup journey, quirks of PDF and what’s exciting about WWDC19 (May 29, 2019)
- The raywenderlich.com Podcast: Peter Steinberger – Podcast S09 E03 (May 15, 2019)
- Swift by Sundell Podcast: "Long-term code evolution"
Credits go to Felix Krause for the idea to post this here - thanks!