UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS: Learn advanced Swift and SwiftUI on Hacking with Swift+! >>

Swift Career Guide

Swift Career Guide

If you're looking for advice on building your resume, answers to common interview questions, interactive Swift coding tests, or more, you've come to the right place – we have all that and then some.

1. Skill Review

Go through 100 skill reviews for the fundamentals of the Swift language, all using your browser – all free.

2. Coding Tests

Try your hand at multiple online coding tests to give you a taste of what you're likely to face in interviews.

3. Interview Questions

Work through over 100 free interview questions, ranging from the specifics of UIKit to system architecture.

4. Career Advice

Get advice on how to get the right iOS development job for you, regardless of your level of experience.

Note: You don't need to work through these things in order, but it's recommended.


Skill Review


The first and most important step towards building your career is clearly understanding what your skills are right now – as well as understanding the things you aren't so strong at.

  • For folks at the very start of their career, the absolute best place to start is my free online Hacking with Swift book. It teaches you Swift and iOS development using 39 hands-on projects, so you learn by making real things.
  • For folks with more experience, start with my interactive Swift reviews. These work through about 100 of the fundamentals of the Swift language, and will help you solidify your learning in no time.
  • If there are any parts of those tests you struggle with, you should watch the corresponding video in my free Swift in Sixty Seconds series, or refer to the glossary of common Swift terms to help fill in any gaps.
  • For more advanced roles, you should read through some of the example code on my What's New in Swift site. In particular, set the minimum version to Swift 5.0 then choose the highest maximum version – this will present code samples from the latest versions of Swift, where you're more likely to find gaps in knowledge.
  • To fill in gaps in your knowledge of Apple's libraries, see my Swift Knowledge Base. This contains over 600 answers, solutions, and tips for writing iOS apps using Swift, and you can either browse by category or search for something specific.
  • Finally, if your skills are in Swift and you're joining an Objective-C company, or the other way around, help is at hand: try my Objective-C to Swift conversion cheat sheet, or read Objective-C for Swift Developers.


Coding Tests


Every company needs some way of assessing the skills of the developers it hires. Sometimes that's a take-home test, sometimes it's a whiteboard test, sometimes they want to chat about your algorithmic knowledge – it's hard to tell which you'll face, so you should focus your energy carefully.

  • To practice your knowledge of Swift's workings, try my series of Be the Compiler tests – you're presented with source code, and are asked to decide what the output should be.
  • If you want to hone your ability to spot errors in Swift code, I have a Spot the Error test generator – each time you try it generates source code with a new error, and asks you to identify where it is.
  • I wrote a whole book dedicated to the kinds of problems people are asked in interviews: it outlines the problem, provides hints to help you solve it, then provides multiple worked solutions so you can learn as you read – check out Swift Coding Challenges.
  • Finally, I sometimes post articles with coding challenges that help identify interesting idiosyncrasies of the Swift language. Try them out here and here.


Interview Questions


Once you've made it to an interview, it's your time to shine as you show them what you're capable of. Hopefully you're fully up to speed with the latest that Swift and iOS has to offer, but if not I can help here too.


Career Advice


Regardless of where you are in your career, it's always a good idea to get advice from others on the topics that matter to you: are you ready to take on more challenges? How should you craft a great resume? How can you get started speaking at conferences or meetups?


Recommended Reading


Almost everything above is completely free, so hopefully you can find something helpful regardless of your level and take the next step towards where you want to be. However, I also have a range of Swift books that can help you learn faster, particularly you have specific goals in mind:

  • Pro Swift is specifically designed to help you hone your Swift skills so you write better code – you'll learn about functional programming, protocol-oriented programming, and much more.
  • Swift Design Patterns helps you write better apps by teaching the fundamental patterns of Apple platform development: delegation, selectors, template methods, and more.
  • Testing Swift teaches you how to make the most of unit tests, UI tests, and more, and even includes material on test-driven development in Swift.
  • Swift Coding Challenges provides 64 graded challenges that ask you to solve common whiteboard challenges in Swift. Each challenge provides hints to help you along, plus multiple possible solutions with explanations to help you learn.
  • The Swift Power Pack provides six books in one discounted bundle, including both Pro Swift and Swift Coding Challenges. This one bundle is designed to help you go from knowing nothing about Swift to being ready for your first junior development job!


Good Luck!


If you've made it this far you've already shown a great desire to succeed, and that's awesome. Swift and iOS are exciting technologies to work with, and I hope you're able to find the perfect job – and the perfect company – to help you grow.

If you have questions for me about anything above, or if there are things you'd like me to add, I'd love to hear from you: you can follow me on Twitter @twostraws.

 
Unknown user

You are not logged in

Log in or create account
 

Link copied to your pasteboard.