Hello world!

Welcome to my first blog! In this blog and future posts, I will document my own journey as a developer. My name is Wouter (pronounced as Wow-ter where the last ‘w’ is silent) and I’m an iOS-developer.

I’ve been inspired by many other developers to write blogs to organize and write my own documentation. Besides coding, I’m also participating in a Dutch podcast about programming called CodeKlets.nl. You can listen to my materials starting at season 3! In today’s blog, I want to discuss my way of studying Swift.

Notion screenshot

I’m a real big fan of using Notion, in which I organize my thoughts. Sometimes I catch myself having shiny-object syndrome, and by documenting my progress per course, I’m able to get a hold on this habit. Although I’m still learning, it could be well possible that I’m not sure where to put my reading materials. Therefore, I’ve made a list of “Unordered items” where I’m able to look at occasionally.

Since this topic uncovers the big magical world of iOS-development, I’ve decided to make a mind map first in which I can always go back to if I feel like I’m missing out on a topic.

Mind map made through Whimsical.com

Just remember that this structure works for me so far. I’m not bound by chronological order; however, I do recommend starting with the basics of the Swift language first before progressing. Sources I started out with are the following:

Excercism for practising my coding fundamentals through puzzles. It has a nice mentoring element inside which helps you approach problems through different solutions.
HackingWithSwift is amazing for starting out. Paul Hudson teaches these courses. First, he goes through the basics, which you could combine with his app Unwrap, and when looking for a greater challenge try Excercism! My recommendation is picking 100 Days of SwiftUI, even though I’m doing the classic Swift one first. But that’s a tale for another time :).
Always felt like going to Uni but unable to afford a good school? Stanford has an entire course dedicated to developing in SwiftUI! This includes homework and exercises to practice on. I’ll probably finish this course too because it goes more in-depth, but it depends on preference. For example, the third course goes deep into MVVM architecture, which is used extensively in SwiftUI.

For those who came this far, thank you for reading. For those starting out with Swift, let me tell you that I started off as an economics major and finally have my first job as an iOS-developer. My final tips for your journey are as follows: Stay consistent, even when it’s an hour per day. Write down your progress, and above all: Have fun!