Following the Swift Evolution can be time-consuming, but Swift newsletters enable you, as an app developer, to stay current. The language is moving fast, and new features appear every year. While you might be able to develop apps without adopting new features immediately, finding a structured way to keep yourself in the loop is necessary.
I’ve been developing apps for over 15 years and have developed a structured way to keep myself updated using newsletters. It’s important to know you’re not required to understand how to apply everything, but knowing what exists can be essential when solving complex problems.
Learning how to search is more important than knowing everything
Before we dive into ways of keeping yourself up to date, I want to emphasize you’re not required to know everything. I’m still searching on Google for simple things like changing the navigation bar background color. While I know it’s possible, I don’t always know exactly how to do it anymore.
That’s the essential part: knowing it’s possible is more important than knowing how to do it.
Therefore, don’t try to teach yourself how to apply everything that comes out of the Swift evolution, but aim to stay up-to-date on new feature releases using Swift newsletters. You can prepare yourself how to apply a feature when you’re ready to use it in a project.
Create a structured way of learning
Creating a structured way of learning is essential to keep improving yourself every week. I even aim to create a better version of myself every day, even if it’s small.
The best way to create a structured learning curve is by subscribing to one of the popular Swift newsletters:
- SwiftLee Weekly
Sent every Tuesday with a list of curated Swift, SwiftUI, and app development-related articles. - SwiftUI Weekly
Sent every Monday with a list of curated SwiftUI articles & videos. - Swift Evolution
Sent every month with an overview of exciting developments on Swift Evolution.
After subscribing to all three newsletters, you’ll be in the loop on Swift Evolution changes, articles from the community, and SwiftUI-dedicated content.
How to use newsletters to your advantage
Many Swift newsletters are full of articles, videos, and other content, while you’re likely only interested in a subset of these. It’s unrealistic to expect yourself to read every piece of content. Instead, I recommend scanning through the article summaries provided by the newsletter authors and picking the ones that spark your interest the most.
Ideally, you would have a way to save those articles to read later. Doing so is a great way to enable yourself to read an article when it best fits you (e.g., on the couch or in bed). At a minimum, scanning those articles to know what they cover will educate you about the existing Swift evolution features.
Manually checking in on the current Swift evolution status
Swift’s official blog contains a dedicated Swift evolution page:
While Swift newsletters bring you more than language improvements, this is a great website to peek at the current language status manually. In the above image, I’ve filtered to view accepted proposals only, which will tell you which new language features will appear soon.
In the above example, I realized SE-412 Strict concurrency for global variables will help me prepare my project for Swift 6. I was about to convert our global variables into non-mutable variants, but after scanning this proposal, I realized a new solution would appear soon!
Conclusion
Staying up to date is essential for us app developers as the Swift evolution is going fast. Swift Newsletters are my preferred way to create a structured way of learning, creating a better version of myself every week. You don’t need to know everything, but knowing the existing features lets you dive in when you’re ready to use them.
If you like to prepare and optimize, even more, check out the optimization category page. Feel free to contact me or tweet me on Twitter if you have any additional tips or feedback.
Thanks!