Looking Back, Looking Forward
👀 Looking Back
Happy New Year! 🥳
In something approaching a tradition, we'd like to take a moment and reflect on the past year. Several milestones stand out, with Swift Talk crossing into double digits and our weekly Swift Tip reaching its first anniversary, but let's start with perhaps our most major work: the publishing of a new book.
📗 App Architecture
Conceived in a "hallway track" conversation in early 2017, after a long gestation period and several rewrites, our latest book App Architecture finally joined the world in May. Co-written with Matt Gallagher, it takes a single app and fully implements it in five design patterns. For the first time, we wrote the book with video in mind, filming an integrated series with Matt to accompany it. We even recorded weekly video Q&As for our Early Access readers, who asked some great questions. We're glad to say you liked it! Many of you chose the full Ebook + Videos bundle, and we're really excited about the future of this format.
It wasn't the only birth in 2018. Shortly before publishing Chris became a dad. Early Access readers heard the good news in a short introduction to their weekly Q&A.
📺 Swift Talk
Our subscription video series, Swift Talk, crossed the 100th episode threshold, and we celebrated with our first live Q&A. We made 51 episodes in 2018, bringing us to over 130 episodes!
Not resting on our laurels, we also ported the Swift Talk backend to Swift — you'll hear more about this soon. 😉 The performance (both in terms of speed as well as memory) has increased hugely. For us, it's much more fun to work in Swift, and the increased speed and safety helps us introduce new features faster, gift subscriptions being the first example. 🎁
📺 Most Watched
It's always interesting, and sometimes surprising, to see which episodes you watch the most.
The most watched episode in 2018 was... Tiny Networking Library, our first ever! This year, for our first public episode, Tiny Networking Library Revisited, we return to 2016 and update the library using more contemporary techniques.
Looking at episodes released in the last year, here are the top five:
🥇 Sharing State between View Controllers in MVC
🥈 Refactoring Imperative Layout Code
🥉 Extensible Libraries 1: Enums vs Classes with special guest Brandon Kase
🙌 Building a Form Library: Introduction
👏 Extensible Libraries 2: Protocol Composition
With the number of episodes increasing, we introduced Swift Talk Collections in 2017 to help you navigate by topic. One year on, here are the top three:
Thanks to everyone who watched! A very special thank you to our subscribers, you made it all possible.
If you'd like to support us, you'd be very welcome!
📚 Most Read
2018 was the year we launched Swift Tip, our series of compact weekly posts highlighting interesting or useful techniques. Many of the techniques emerged from Swift Talk, our other weekly series. Of the 43 tips published, February's String to Data and Back was by far the most popular, and you'll find many more useful techniques in the archive.
For those long form readers, App Architecture was our most popular book. Once again, our sincerest thanks to everyone who took part in the pre-release, your feedback was invaluable.
Advanced Swift, co-written with Ole Begemann and Ben Cohen, follows as a close second.
🔮 Looking Forward
This is the year of Swift 5, which has a whole bunch of improvements. We're quite happy that the language has mostly stabilized, as most improvements won't affect existing code. We'll be updating all our books to match.
We have a full year of Swift Talk ahead too, with some exciting ideas about how to bring the experience closer to our audience. Stay tuned!
We'd like to thank everyone we've worked with, both directly and indirectly. Special thanks go to Brandon, Degrau, Juul, Morgan, Matt, Natalye, Ole, Paulo, Quinten, Wouter, and Wei. We couldn't do it without you.
Good luck with your projects! We can't wait to get started.
Best from Berlin,
Florian and Chris
