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.
