Learn Swift from scratch in 30 days

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To be exact, I started learning Swift 30 days ago. Three days ago, my first public beta app was approved by Apple. This public beta version is nothing compared to the final product, but for me, it is a great achievement.

I don't have a degree in computer science or the professional experience required to be a developer, but in the past five years, I have been a product manager in a software development group and have made some Ruby on Rails applications for fun. I have always wanted to get more directly connected with my busy work, so I decided to start writing code.
Why iOS and Swift?

Mobile is huge; mobile is personal. I want to make software that people actually use, and I love the intimacy that people have with their phones. Our phones know so much about us - when we wake up and go to bed, where we are and how we get there, our calendars, our conversations with friends and family. This is where I'm interested, and I've been an Apple user for a long time, starting with iOS. I briefly played around with Objective-C, which was scary, and Swift has always been a favorite.
The benefits of constraints. Developing apps within the confines of an Apple platform, a screen that fits in your pocket, requires good constraints. These constraints keep me focused on what I want to learn (as opposed to the endless rabbit holes of web development [4]) and push me to innovate around the user experience.
Swift is a rapidly evolving language. I love getting involved at the beginning, watching the language grow and evolve, and being part of a small community - that's why I love working at startups. Startups allow you to work on a problem with a less mature language, join a smaller group, and try to connect people and things. I'm excited about the possibility of contributing to the language and community.

Beginner Resources

I started this journey on July 1st with the idea of ​​making a really simple app. Keeping that in the forefront helped me to be motivated and apply what I learned.

I spent a lot of time scouring the internet to find the best resources, tutorials, and courses for Swift. There are a lot of great resources for beginners, but most of them assume you've never written a line of code and start from a very low level. For example, this is a variable, look at variable jumps. Other resources are technical articles and reference materials (including Apple's documentation), which seem to have a premise: you have extensive experience or are switching from Objective-C to Swift.

Here are some great resources that I found very useful for beginners at my level:

Paul Hegarty's Stanford University course, Developing iOS8 Apps with Swift, is available for free on iTunes U. I started here and completed the first five lessons and a homework assignment over a week. The course quickly became challenging, so after I got started, I paused to find a more practical course below. However, it's a great course and Professor Paul Hegarty knows his material, so I plan to return to it. If you get stuck on the exercises (and you can't find the solutions in iTunes U), this website explains the setup and approach for each problem.
Apple's Swift programming language tutorial. If you have some previous programming experience, this Swift language book is very easy to read compared to Apple's iOS SDK documentation. It is clear, concise, and quick to scan, and you know where to find certain concepts when you get stuck. Big Nerd Ranch has created a Swift Pre-reading Assignment for its bootcamp that covers similar concepts but has more practical examples for beginners to practice.
www.raywenderlich.com. This looks like some guy's personal website, but don't let the appearance fool you. This site is the best resource I have ever come across. If you have never created an iOS app, sign up for the newsletter and visit the "Epic Tutorial" - it feels epic for a moment, but you can do it in a day if you want. This tutorial was my first dive into the weird world of iOS development and it reveals a lot of secrets that can easily daunt beginners. I personally refer to this tutorial when I develop my own apps to refresh my memory on certain features or functions in Xcode. After you complete this tutorial, there are a ton of other free tutorials on the site that I carefully selected to learn concepts that helped me with my app ideas. There is so much great content that I want to go back and check it out sooner.

(Approximate) timeline

Week 1: Immersion. I immersed myself in the lectures and exercises in the Stanford course, read through a lot of Swift language books, and completed the "epic tutorial" from www.raywenderlich.com. After that, I was ready to start working on my app.
Weeks 2 and 3: Polishing. The day I started writing code, I happened to start a 12-day sailboat trip in Maine. Coffee, calm water, and a place where I spent hours every morning. Without internet access, I could focus deeply in Xcode instead of juggling 40 browser tabs. This forced me to stop and really think about what I was trying to do and why. During these days, I found myself thinking about code and coming up with new approaches that I couldn't wait to try the next morning.
Week 4: What I’m currently working on. There was a steep learning curve, but I was able to be more productive in a day than in previous weeks, which was amazing. On the last day, I cleaned up the code and figured out the weird edge cases [Note 2], which was amazing and really satisfying. As a product manager, I was tired of these scenarios and assigned multiple small tasks to engineers. It felt good to be able to remove these tasks myself. Finally, I created a basic app icon in Sketch, followed the steps to upload it to iTunes Connect, and submitted it to Apple as a public beta app. This version took less than 24 hours.

In July (according to RescueTime), I spent 25 hours in Xcode, 2 hours and 52 minutes in the iOS simulator, 4 hours and 23 minutes in Preview5 (reading tutorials), and 51 minutes on Stack Overflow. I also read a lot on my phone.
Swift Community

Here are some other things I did to get involved in the Swift community:

Subscribe to We ❤ Swift's newsletter
Subscribe to Dave Verwer's iOS Dev weekly
Follow the tag on Medium: "Swift"
Watch the podcasts at www.raywenderlich.com Find a local meetup (I’m involved with Brooklyn Swift Developers* and iOSoho)
Join a Slack group: (1) helpMeCodeSwift is a small group I stumbled into. There are only a few active people now, but they are super friendly and never get annoyed with any newbie questions. (2) swift-lang slack is a big group with questions and answers, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of beginners, and I feel a little uneasy about entering this kind of conversation. Maybe I should just create a channel for beginners.

I have said so much, these are the ones I found helpful. If you have other excellent resources you want to recommend, please write in the comments what you like and why it is good.

The first meetup I attended was a talk by Dave Grandinetti called "Learning Swift the Euler Way". Dave had developed a tool I was excited to check out called EulerKit, which contained some helper methods for solving Project Euler problems. I attended the first two times, but after that I struggled.
Finally, my first app - RoundTrip

My app, called RoundTrip, is for New Yorkers who ride the MTA bus and like to optimize their subway fares. It's a very simple tool.
RoundTrip — MTA AppRoundTrip — MTA's app, stay tuned!

Figure out how much to put on your MetroCard so you don't have any money left over. If you top up more than $5.50, the MTA will give you an 11% bonus, and the minimum amount you can top up is 5 cents. These two conditions combined make it difficult for people on the go to do mental math.
Evaluate your monthly rides and see if you can save money by buying a 30-day, unlimited MetroCard. You can also log your trips and see statistics on how often you ride.

If you would like to become a beta tester or want to know when you can get the app, please sign up here or follow @helloroundtrip.

Thanks for understanding my journey, and thanks to @cm and @amrithap for reviewing an early draft of this post.

I'm looking for a job or internship as an iOS developer! If you have an opportunity, please contact [email protected].

My twitter is @katiesmillie and my website is katiesmillie.com