Why bother learning Swift/SwiftUI at this stage in the game?

I’m a long time user of Apple products, probably since about 2009 or so. I still have the first Macbook Pro I ever bought. I also have the first Mac Mini i ever bought. Somehow, I managed to have around 5-6 mac books. Currently 4 sit unused. I have the M2 and the M3.

As far as mobile devices, similar story although I don’t have as many devices laying around. There might be 2-3 mobile devices laying around. A really old iPad, and actually let me truncate this here… I have a shit ton of devices.

My first was the iphone 3G or 3GS, I can’t remember.

Since the release of the app store, I dreamed of building an app, but I could not wrap my head around Objective-C for the life of me. It just is not a very approachable language in the way Javascript and Python might be for me. Its lower level and as such requires a lot more boilerplate code to get any momentum going.

I envisioned being able to bring ideas to the growing app ecosystem occasionally but I have always fallen short in those endeavors.

You can imagine my frustration as a web developer and microcontroller tinkerer, not being able to harness these devices to build apps.

Fast forward to today, I feel like I have even less time to spare – seems apps are released lightning fast these days. I know for a fact, I don’t have as much energy like I used to. I used to stay up really late to build but would end up grinding against problem after problem. Its quite draining… working on a new project and running into wall after wall. It is pretty frustrating to not be able to make progress. This virtually guarantees that you develop shiny object syndrome.

For me, I started thinking: why not use some other development language, ie JavaScript, PHP, Python… People were creating things with electron and I took a semi successful crack at it building something similar to the Citizens app before the Citizens app was a thing. There were quite a few open source frameworks to explore that could yield a multi platform native app.

However as much as I could do with Javascript, I found myself yearning to use a *gasp* WSYIWYG sort of tool (XCode) that I use to write event driven logic with. My fondness of that sort of thing hearkens back to the days when I was first introduced to engineering with Visual Studio 5.0 which was at the time for me a bit of a revelation. The user clicks a button in an interface, and what happens next is what you programmed.

So here I am, at a bit of a crossroads career wise looking at Swift/SwiftUI as the path forward in developing something (anything) and finally releasing it. I have a couple ideas I would like to get to.

So thats my why.

I have been a professional software engineer for roughly 20Y which actually is like a baby still (always learning) and I want to have some tangible IP out there vs being another faceless team member working tirelessly for some web property effortlessly blending into the a grayed out background.

Thats never been me, I got into this field because I am a creator.

So I’m going to create some shit.

See you soon.