4 tips to improve your Swift knowledge

These are the actions I applied to catapult my knowledge in Swift when 1.0 was released.

When Apple revealed Swift at WWDC ’14, I took it has an opportunity to jump-start my iOS development skills. Although I did know Objective-C, I was more focused on multi-platform and Ruby development. But, this new language set the ground for me to become “of the great ones”.

To reach this goal I followed these f0ur (4) steps:

Follow smarter people than you.

As soon as I made the switch to Swift I looked up people that were already pursuing the same goal. It wasn’t that hard, a lot people were and are really excited about this new language.

Start a blog, Medium counts as well.

Thanks to this step in particular, posts like this one and several others have been published at all. It all started when I attended dotSwift ’15 and was reminded by watching a talk from Ash Furrow that we should all start a blog. They don’t only allow us to share knowledge to everyone and ourselves, but also allows to think more clearly about a problem. Nothing helps you understand something than trying to teaching it to someone else.

Create projects that have no future whatsoever.

We all have those projects that never see the light of day, simply because we think they are not good enough or because we started doing “the next big thing”. This sounds like a sick cycle, but is actually helping us learn new things that normally we wouldn’t be exposed to. Plus, there is nothing wrong with failing or just building things for fun. We see it everyday in websites like Product Hunt, where most of the products featured daily rank between jokes and niche.

Share everything, with everyone.

Github is probably the website I visit the most, not only as a consumer but also as an active contributor. Since I started with Swift I have been publishing more and more repositories related to this new language. One can literally see how all my ideas, and theories about making iOS apps have been evolving since then.

It is important to remember that when we talk about programming we never really stop learning. I recommend watching as many WWDC sessions as you can, as soon as they are released and also checking out the amazing free talks hosted at Realm.io.