Looking Back, Looking Forward
Happy New Year!
Looking back, 2017 was a great year for Swift. With Swift 4, we got key paths, Codable, multiline string literals, and much more. The community has been awesome too: we saw a number of promising new libraries, a rich variety of conference talks, and perhaps best of all, new voices joining the Swift community from all kinds of backgrounds.
It was also a productive year for us. All of our books are now updated for Swift 4, and many of the new features inspired Swift Talk episodes, which are now grouped together in a handsomely illustrated set of Collections. We also quietly started writing a new book last summer — more about that soon.
🏆 Most Watched
It's always interesting, and sometimes surprising, to see which episodes you watch the most. Here are the top five:
🙌 Tiny Networking Library — a bit of a surprise, the very first episode we made!
👏 Testable View Controllers with Reducers
Thanks to everyone who watched! A very special thank you to our subscribers, you made it all possible.
💡 Inspiration
We love experimenting with new techniques to make code simpler, and look for ideas both within and outside of the Swift community.
We believe there's a lot of inspiration to be drawn from languages like Elm, and we made a number of episodes about the Elm architecture in Swift, reducers, and view state. Our experiments with Incremental Programming were a direct cause of this: it's a technique that helps you achieve a programming style similar to Elm while directly working with UIKit.
Naturally, the changes in Swift have been a big inspiration as well. For example, we weren't too convinced by key paths at first, but they quickly proved to be indispensable, allowing us to write things like mutable shared structs, view bindings in pure Swift, and a small but powerful Auto Layout wrapper.
🔮 Looking Forward
We think 2018 is going to be a great year. In a few weeks, we'll start the pre-release for our new book. Watch this space! We're also looking forward to conditional conformance coming to Swift; it greatly simplifies the standard library, and opens up exciting new possibilities for type-safe programming.
We'd like to thank everyone we've worked with, both directly and indirectly. Special thanks go to Brandon, Degrau, Juul, Károly, Lisa, Morgan, Matt, Natalye, Ole, Paulo, Sarah, Rob, Wei, and Yuichiro. We couldn't do it without you.
Good luck with your projects! We can't wait to get this year started.
Best from Berlin, Florian and Chris