About Me

Learning Swift, Server-Side Swift, and the Future

I have been extremely busy so I haven't made the time to write any blog posts. In this post I want to give a brief overview of what I have been up to and what my short-term plans for the future are.

Learning Swift

The biggest reason I have not been contributing to this blog is that I spent several months writing two editions of a book about Swift called Learning Swift. The books are written for someone just starting to develop apps in Swift. Writing them was probably the hardest thing I've ever done (clearly I have not had a very hard life) and I was really burnt out on writing afterwards. I wrote a more extensive post describing the process called The Most Difficult Thing I've Ever Done - Writing a Technical Book.

Server-Side Swift

I also took a full-time job with a development shop based in Denver, CO called Chronos Interactive. It was a great decision because it gave me some more income stability, they have been incredibly supportive of the extracurricular things I want to accomplish, and it has allowed me concentrate more on developing instead of on finding new work. Most importantly, I have been able to gain lots of experience with a myriad of different frameworks and technologies through my work for them. It was through client work for Chronos that I was first able to experiment with technologies like Golang, CoreBluetooth, iBeacons, and especially, Server-Side Swift. However, on the negative side, we have been absolutely swamped with work lately. Luckily, that has awakened and re-inspired me to pursue other goals again that I will discuss later.

I am most excited about using Server-Side Swift. I now have a client app on the app store called OnBeat where, not only is the app written in Swift, but so is the backend service and web app. It has been a fantastic learning experience and it also inspired me to rewrite my blog in Swift which I have now done. I will go more into detail about how this site is implemented using Swift in a future post.

The Future

Now that you are caught up with the big events, let’s talk about the future. Through a confluence of events I am more inspired than ever to start writing for this blog again.

  • First, I have finally worked my way out of the pile of work I had for Chronos.
  • Second, I recently read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. While I don’t agree with all the methods the author discusses in the book, especially because its world view reminds me strongly of Donald Trump, it reminded me to think about finding other sources of income than just a salary. Providing valuable content on the web to create a community is a great start.
  • Third, I helped my good friend Allison Johnson publish her first children’s book Braving Bedtime (I definitely recommend checking it out if you have young children and they are scared of going to bed). I enjoyed helping her and I realized that I am ready to write again.
  • Fourth, (and most importantly), I have enjoyed writing Server-Side Swift more than any other backend technology that I have ever used. I have written sites and services in Wordpress, Symfony, in PHP from scratch, Ruby on Rails, Golang, and more. Never before have I actually enjoyed the process and wanted to do it more. Even in the short several months I have been using Server-Side Swift I have learned a lot and I realized that I have a lot that I can share about it. That will be the primary focus of most of my upcoming posts.

So I have several posts already planned out centered around Server-Side Swift and I will do my best to keep the quality content coming. I am also in serious discussions with the owners of Chronos Interactive about spinning off a direct-to-consumer app business. It will incorporate reviving my app Notecards and much more. That will also be a goldmine of experience to share with you.

If any of this sounds valuable or interesting to you, I encourage you to subscribe to future posts below.