Swift by Sundell - The last Swift by Sundell newsletter

👋 Hi everyone!

Ever since I started Swift by Sundell back in 2017, I’ve always aimed to focus on a healthy mix between what I personally find interesting and important to pursue, and what I think the community would find the most valuable.

After all, the main reason that I still, four years later, still spend a large part of my time creating articles, podcasts, and other kinds of material for the Swift community is because I’m truly passionate about Swift, iOS and Mac development, and the communities that have formed around those technologies.

However, we’re now at a point where I don’t feel like this newsletter fulfills either of my two main focus goals. Even though I realize that some of you reading this really enjoy getting this newsletter once per month, the overall community interest in it has definitely been fading over the past year or so. That while my other channels have kept growing, and the overall interest and excitement for Swift by Sundell is arguably stronger than it’s ever been.

Partly, that’s very likely because I haven’t really felt inspired to work on this newsletter for quite a while. There are of course a ton of different ways that I could’ve improved it, but at this point, I’d much rather spend my time and energy on writing articles, producing podcasts, and eventually (hopefully!) getting back to making videos and conference talks again. I feel like those projects are where I can truly continue to make significant contributions to the Swift community, so that’s what I want to focus on.

So I’m afraid that this will be the last Swift by Sundell newsletter, at least for now. I want to thank all of you so much for subscribing, reading, and following the newsletter, regardless of how long that you’ve been a subscriber. Even though this particular journey is now coming to an end after two and a half years, it’s really meant a lot to me to have so many people subscribing to these emails.

If you still want to keep up with my work, then I think the two best ways of doing so (besides just regularly opening up swiftbysundell.com and checking what’s new) are Twitter and RSS. You’re also always welcome to contact me via email if you have any questions or just want to talk about Swift. I try my very best to reply to as many people as I possibly can.

Now, for the last time, here’s your monthly summary of everything that was published on Swift by Sundell during the past month.

📖 Articles

New articles of various lengths are now continuously posted on Swift by Sundell. These articles were published during the past month:

Automatic handling of property wrapper default values

How the compiler can automatically map default property values to property wrapper initializers, even when a wrapper accepts multiple arguments.

Bindable SwiftUI list elements

Setting up two-way bindings between the elements in a collection and a series of SwiftUI views, and a few things that can be good to keep in mind when doing that.

When can Swift’s return keyword be omitted?

Let’s take a look at exactly when we can omit the return keyword, and how that relates to SwiftUI’s DSL.

Using Combine’s futures and subjects

How Combine’s Future and Subject types enable us to build many different kinds of functionality without having to write custom publisher implementations from scratch.

🧭 New Discover page

Swift by Sundell Discover lets you explore everything that the site has to offer on a given topic. This topic was added during the past month:

Combine

Discover how Apple’s Combine framework can be used to model increasingly complex asynchronous operations as reactive pipelines that emit values over time.

🎧 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:

93: “Combine and Core Data”, with Donny Wals

Donny Wals, book author and iOS developer at Disney Streaming Services, joined me to give practical tips on Combine and Core Data. How to manage and test increasingly complex Combine pipelines, and how come the opinions on Core Data are so divisive? Also, working on internal SDKs and frameworks, and taking a pragmatic approach to unit testing.

94: “A Mac-like Mac app”, with Benedikt Terhechte

Benedikt Terhechte returned to the show to discuss the pros and cons of using technologies like Catalyst and SwiftUI to build Mac apps, and also to share tips and tricks on how to use AppKit for use cases that Apple’s more modern frameworks do not yet support.

🙌 Thanks for reading

That’s the end of this edition, and this newsletter in general. Over the next few weeks, I’ll delete this entire mailing list from Mailchimp, and I won’t be keeping any copies of it, so you don’t need to manually unsubscribe from it.

Thanks again for reading and for subscribing!

- John