Swift by Sundell - Swift by Sundell Newsletter #26

👋 Hi everyone

Even though Swift by Sundell has been my main focus since the start of 2019, I’ve always been doing various kinds of client work on the side as well, both to help finance the work that I do for the community, and because I really enjoy working with various teams around the world on different kinds of projects.

Also, since the very beginning, it’s always been very important to me to gain real-life experience working with a given technology before I write about it. I truly believe that in order to give someone advice and tips on how to use something, you first need to have used it yourself — and unless an article is called something like “A first look at...” or “Exploring...”, every single article that I’ve ever written has been based on that sort of real-life experience, and doing client-work is a great complement to my own projects in that regard as well.

Up until this point, however, I’ve maintained more or less a 80/20 split between my own projects and the client work that I’ve been doing, but this past month, I’ve started moving that towards more of a 50/50 split — both to give me increased economic stability during these uncertain times, and because I’ve really missed being a part of a larger team for a longer period of time.

I bring all of this up since, during September, I did reduce the amount of articles that I typically produce during a given month, since I’m now spending more time on various kinds of client work — and that’s likely going to be the case for a while going forward. Now, don’t worry, my weekly articles, my tips, my podcasts, and this newsletter are not going anywhere — I’ll keep sharing as much as I possibly can with the community. It just might be that I’ll now publish two pieces of content per week instead of three or four.

That being said, thanks so much for being a reader, a listener, or however you prefer to follow my work, and now let’s get started with the recap of September’s articles and podcast episodes.

📖 Weekly articles

For 189 weeks, I’ve been publishing a new article about Swift every Sunday. These articles were added during the past month:

Building modern collection views in Swift

An overview of the key new UICollectionView APIs introduced in iOS 13 and 14, such as compositional layouts, diffable data sources, and cell registrations.

How Swift 5.3 enhances SwiftUI’s DSL

A roundup of some of the most impactful ways in which Swift 5.3 enhances the overall experience of building views using SwiftUI.

Creating generic networking APIs in Swift

A few techniques that can help us share common networking logic, while also utilizing Swift’s advanced type system to make that kind of code more robust.

Encapsulating SwiftUI view styles

An overview of the tools and techniques that we can use to create a clean separation between our view hierarchy, its styles, and the components that we’re looking to reuse across a given project.

🎧 Podcast episodes

The Swift by Sundell podcast is a bi-weekly show featuring special guests from all around the Swift community. You can find it in your podcast player of choice, for example Apple Podcasts or Overcast. These episodes were published during the past month:

81: “How big iOS teams typically operate”, with Carola Nitz

Carola Nitz, iOS developer at Netflix, joined me to discuss how larger iOS development teams typically operate, and how smaller teams can prepare their code bases for future growth. Also, organizing remote conferences, balancing feature development with bug fixing, and much more.

82: “Translating designs into code”, with Jordan Singer

On this episode, Jordan Singer joined me to discuss various approaches of turning designs into fully implemented UIs, how to manage things like mock data during the development process, and when to turn a given view into a reusable component. Also, the story behind the Airport app and Jordan’s recent SwiftUI experiments.

⭐️ Swift tips

I love to share shorter tips, tricks and techniques with the community. You can also find all of the tips that I’ve ever posted as mini-articles right here. These are the tips I shared during the past month:

Showing view controllers, rather than pushing them

Using the pushViewController method on UINavigationController is a very common way to add a new view controller to an app’s navigation stack, but it turns out that there’s a much more flexible and robust way to perform that kind of operation.

Creating closure-based UI controls using UIAction

One of my favorite new additions in the iOS 14 version of UIKit is that we can now add closure-based actions to any UIControl, in a way that’s officially supported, through a brand new suite of built-in APIs.

😊 Until next time

That’s it for this edition! I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. I always love to hear your feedback, so feel free to either reply to this email, or contact me on Twitter @johnsundell. I read every single piece of feedback that I get, and I try to reply to as many people as I possibly can.

Thanks for reading! 🚀

- John