Hacking with Swift Live 2021 raises $61,000 for charity

Make apps, make friends, make a difference.

Paul Hudson August 5th 2021 @twostraws

Hacking with Swift Live 2021 just finished, delivering three days of tutorials and workshops on all the major concurrency changes to Swift, the many improvements for SwiftUI, and more. Even better, because all our profits go to charity we were able to donate $61,000 to an incredible cause – everyone got to take their Swift skills forward, meet new friends, and make a real difference outside our community.

Just like last year, we donated all our profits to Special Effect, who help to bring joy, creativity, and confidence into the lives of people with disabilities. With the pandemic somehow still raging many charities continue to have a hard time raising funds, so we’re glad to play a part in helping continue their important work.

The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’m really grateful to everyone to bought a ticket, our individual sponsors, the many folks who bought diversity tickets, and of course our corporate sponsors.

This year we were lucky enough to have two platinum sponsors:

DuckDuckGo has a private search engine, a privacy-focused browser app, and a privacy browser extension, so I think you know exactly what their #1 priority is!
Instabug’s tools can help you find and fix bugs faster thanks to comprehensive crash reporting and performance metrics.

We also had three silver sponsors:

Backbase are building a software platform to help banks move faster in a digital-first world.
Emerge analyses your code to provide insights to help make your app size smaller, and even generates size diffs on every PR!
Bitrise offers fast, flexible, and scalable continuous integration and delivery for app developers, offering dozens of integrations with well-known tools.

Each of those sponsors went out of their way to support our event, not only making significant charity donations but also donating tickets to the event to many people from under-represented groups in our community, making this year’s event our biggest and most diverse yet.

Once again, this event wouldn’t have been possible without the help and support of the organizing team: Chris Rivers, Daniel Leivers, Ian Lockett, and my wife Ildiko. We all work really hard to bring this event to you and don’t get paid a penny – we send everything we can to charity.

I’d also like to thank Daniel Steinberg particularly, for giving up so much time to create and deliver a fantastic workshop on AsyncSequence on AsyncStream – Daniel continues to go over and above to help our community, and we’re just so grateful.

It has been fantastic seeing Hacking with Swift Live go from strength to strength. In our first year we raised $30,000 for charity, in our second year that rose to $38,000, and now we’ve shot upwards to $61,000 – that’s $129,000 raised for charity in just three years.

This is a testament to the extraordinary generosity of our community – it’s important that we invest in our skills to learn and share together, but it’s even more important that we support others as much as we can. Thank you for being a part of that!