EPILOGUE
What now?
Congratulations on completing the 100 Days of Swift! I expect you’re feeling a number of different things right now.
I’d like to think that you’re proud of all the work you put in. Doing 100 days of coding might have sounded easy in the first week or so, but by week eight you probably had to work harder and harder to motivate yourself.
I expect you feel tired, both physically but also mentally. Honestly, I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted a week or two away from Swift. Trust me: you’ve earned it!
I hope you feel inspired for the future. This course was designed to expose you to a range of iOS features in a hands-on way, so you’ve learned about iBeacons, multipeer connectivity, SpriteKit, Core Image, Core Motion, and more. You won’t build an app that uses all those things, but everyone will take different things from the course and use those experiences to build their own dream app.
However, one thing you’re almost certainly feeling is a weird sense of emptiness. For the last 100 days you’ve been taking an hour or more out of your day to work on Swift – you’ve spent so long listening to my voice ramble on about UIKit selectors and similar, but now that’s all finished, so there’s a “100 Days of Swift”-shaped hole in your life.
The natural question your brain asks is “what now?”
Well, I have a few suggestions.
Support free learning
First, if this course was useful to you I’d like you to consider either subscribing to my tutorials or buying one of my books. I’ve provided everything here – all the daily introductions, all the videos, all the tests, and more – free of charge, because I want to help folks reach their goals regardless of their income.
But if you enjoyed this course and want to fund my continued free work, you should consider subscribing to Hacking with Swift+ – a tutorial service that delivers high-quality videos and articles to help you do your best with Swift.
Hacking with Swift+ even includes my massive Ultimate Portfolio App course, which walks you through building one SwiftUI app that has great architecture, testing, accessibility and more, while also using Core Data, CloudKit, Apple Pay, notifications, haptics, and more. Heck, I even show you how to port the app to macOS, tvOS, and watchOS, all so you can show off your new skills to potential employers.
Alternatively, you could buy a book from me:
- Pro Swift teaches you advanced Swift skills.
- Swift Design Patterns teaches you advanced iOS app architecture.
- Testing Swift teaches you how to write tests to make your code more stable.
- Swift Coding Challenges gives you a range of coding problems to help you pass job interviews.
Ship an app
It’s one thing to code an app but quite another to ship an app. You need to spend far more time finding and fixing bugs, testing on various devices, and of course taking screenshots, writing descriptions, and more.
So, for all the apps you’ve built so far – including all the challenges that you wrote yourself – you’ve done the first 90% of the work, but if you want real experience it’s time to do the second 90% of the work and actually ship the app.
Help this course get better
This was the first time I created a course like this one, and there are lots of things I’d like to go back and improve. I already added an interactive chat widget to day 6 to help explain closures better, I went back and added explanations to all review questions to help explain to folks why they got answers wrong, and I’m keen to rewrite project 16 – the benefit of teaching Safari extensions is outweighed by Apple’s APIs being so bad, so I think I need to replace that with something else entirely.
You’ve now finished the course, so if you’d like to tell me what you thought and how I can improve it, please do!
All you have to do is fill in this Google Form with your feedback.
And finally…
Throughout these 100 days I’ve tried to inspire you, make you think, and perhaps even make you laugh with a range of quotes from people in our industry and beyond.
Today I’d like to sign off with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”
I’ve always said that programming is an art, and that you shouldn’t spend all your time sharpening your pencil when you should be drawing. Well, now it’s time for the sharpening to stop and the drawing to begin – I hope you enjoy it, I hope you reach your goals, and I hope you find great success with Swift and iOS!
Need help? Tweet me @twostraws!
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100 Days of Swift
The 100 Days of Swift is a free collection of videos, tutorials, tests, and more to help you learn Swift faster. Click here to learn more, or watch the video below.
