How to stay up to date with Swift and the Developer Community

As a developer learning never stops. That’s really exciting but also time consuming. Swift quickly became the most popular programming language and that means that a lot of people are doing cool stuff with it. This post is a collection of resources and ways to stay up to date with Swift and the associated developer communities.

If you have any suggestions of links/resources to be added to the list, please leave a comment and we’ll update the lists.

Blogs

Reading blogs is one of the easiest ways to stay up to date. I recommend using Feedly or a similar tool to stay up to date will all your favorite blogs in one place.

• Apple’s Swift Blog
• Erica Sadun
• Cocoa With Love
• Cocoa Is My Girlfriend
• Ray Wanderlich
• objc.io
• NSHipster
• Airspeed Velocity – A blog about the Swift language. Rarely about iOS or OS X programming
• We ❤ Swift – Swift Tutorials, Books and more
• iOS Developer Tips – Swift tips, tricks and tools for iOS developers.
• FlexMonkey if you are interested in 3d graphics or pushing the limits of swift
• mhorga.org – Swift Metal Blog
• Use Your Loaf
• codeplease.io
• Ole Begemann
• Chris Eidhof
• Unicorn.tv
• Alexandros Salazar
• iOS Blog
• Thomas Hanning
• Mike Ash‘s blog is one of the most hardcore blogs you will ever read. You will not regret any time spent there because you constantly learn new stuff.
• Medium

Newsletters

Another way to get the most important news is to subscribe to newsletters:

• iOS Dev Weekly – the first iOS newsletter
• This Week In Swift – the first swift newsletter
• iOS Goodies
• iOS Cookies – A hand curated collection of iOS libraries written in Swift
• Realm – talks and articles from around
• Indie iOS Focus Weekly
• raywanderlich.com Weekly
• Release Notes
• Swift Weekly
• Thomas Hanning

Communities

Need help from a swift developer? Try here:

• there are two subreddits dedicated swift swift and iOS(/r/swift /r/iOSProgramming). This is a good place to ask general questions, ask for advice or an opinion, find someone to work with, etc.
• Quora – questions
• Stack Overflow: if you have a specific technical question that you didn’t find the answer for on Google then you should try posting a question on Stack Overflow
• Swift Programming Language public group on Facebook
• There are thousands of Swift Communities on Meetup.com search for your local ones
• Swift Google Group
• Open Swift
• iOS Developers

Twitter

Relevant hastags: #swiftlang, #iosdev, #iosprogramming

People, organizations and bots to follow:

• SwiftLDN
• Chris Lattner
• NSHipster
• Rui Peres
• Dave Verwer
• Orta
• Ray Wanderlich
• Natasha the Robot
• Nacho Soto
• Erica Sadun
• We ❤ Swift
• Tiago Almeida
• Big Nerd Ranch
• Matt Thompson
• Nate Cook
• Phil Wright
• Brian Gesiak
• Jameson Quave
• Paul Hudson
• Michele Titolo
• Stephanie Shupe
• Novall Khan
• Ayaka Nonaka
• Kristina Thai
• Cocoa Dev Blogs
• The Swift Chronicle
• iOS Creator
• Swift Trends
• IHeartSwiftLang
• Swift Weekly Brief
• Swift iOS Dev Tips
• So So Swift
• Simon J Gladman aka Flex Monkey Author of Core Image for Swift

Open Source Swift and Swift on Linux

Swift is open source. The main place to start with this side of swift is Swift.org. Anyone with a good idea can help shape the future features and direction of the language trough the Swift Evolution Process. Once a proposal is refined and approved, it becomes a release goal, and is tracked as a feature of an upcoming version of Swift.

Swift Weekly Brief is a community-driven weekly newsletter about what’s happening in the Swift open source projects at Swift.org.

Swift.org announced the Server API Workgroup, a team of dedicated professionals that will make the basic components needed to get Swift ready for the web.

Top Swift Web Frameworks

There have been a number of benchmarks and of them consistently show one thing Swift is faster than node. Server side Swift is here! Still young but here.

• Vapor – 8.700 ⭐️
• Perfect – 10.200 ⭐️
• Kitura from IBM – 5.100 ⭐️
• Zewo – 1.500 ⭐️

Video

• WWDC – requires an Apple Developer subscription to view. Watching these videos is the easiest way to get up to date with the new versions of OS and new language features/changes. (Don’t tell anyone but you can find most videos on youtube)
• realm – new talks from around the world – really cool talks are synced with slides
• pomo.tv – a collection of over 700 videos about Mac, iOS and Swift.

Real life Swift

If you enjoy meeting new people and learning new things you should definitely check your local Meetups or go to a conference near you:

• awesome list of Cocoa Conferences
• iOS Conferences
• Swift Conferences

Education

In case you aren’t a swift developer here’s how you can become one:

• go over the basic syntax and practice it by solving a few exercises from our Swift Programming from Scratch book. We have a collection over 100 basic programming exercises
• to get a deeper understanding of the language you can read Apple’s Swift Book
• if you want to learn iOS you can find an awesome free tutorial on Hacking with Swift or and a free video course from Stanford
• you can try Swift online in our sandbox with different code examples

If you are willing to pay a few bucks we can recommend the iOS Spellbook to complement your learning.

Misc Resources

• Cocoa Controls a catalogue of over 5000 open source iOS/macOS/tvOS/watchOS controls.
• SoSoSwift the biggest Swift tutorial aggregator
• Flat Icon is a good place to search for free graphics for your app.
• Awesome Swift Education
• 21 Open Source Apps written in Swift

Thank you for reading!

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Have fun learning all the things swift!

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