5 Simple things I do to grow as an iOS Engineer!
First, who am I and why should you care about what I do? Well, I’m nobody special but if you care about growing as an iOS Engineer and you are really struggle to do it, here’s 5 things that helped me. I’ll also include a list of people I follow and have subscriptions to. I’ll try not to repeat them so you may see the list dwindling as we go down.
1. Make a Twitter account.
I’m like most engineers and don’t like to have a social life. In fact, while writing this I can honestly say I’m not a huge fan of putting myself out there. However, I want other engineers to know that simply creating a twitter and simply following Swift Trends, Swift Language, and iOS Developer News has made a huge impact in my growth as an iOS Engineer. Each time I receive a notification from Tweeps regarding anything Swift or iOS related, I spend some time reading them and learning what’s new in the iOS tech industry. I don’t necessarily tweet back or anything and because of this I’m able to still learn and stay to myself by reading what they tweet about and comments left on the tweets as well.
Currently Following:
* So So Swift
* Swift for Arduino
* SwiftUI Lab
* SwiftConf
* Swift Weekly Brief
* Swift StackOverflow
* Swift Forever
* iOS Goodies
* I ❤︎ Swift
* iOS Dev Weekly
* CompileSwift
* Chris Ching
* iOS Dev Feed
* Swift Dev: some Developer
2. Subscribe to YouTubers.
I’ll start by saying this:
YouTube itself is a University!!!
Nowadays, Anyone can learn anything on YouTube and this is a perfect place to start learning if you haven’t started already. There are so many videos that can help with beginners to advancing your growth as an iOS Engineer. A few YouTubers I am subscribed to are CodingWithChris, Lets Build That App and iOS Academy. I’ve learned so much from these guys and I’d recommend these channels to anyone starting out or looking to solve some issue that they may have already put a tutorial for. They explain it very clear and when coding along you learn so much more. There were a few times where my code wouldn’t work as easily as there’s because of a typo or I’d miss a part of the video, but because of that I was able to strengthen my debugging skills. YouTube is definitely one of my favorite places to grow as an iOS Engineer!
Currently Subscribed To:
* Sean Allen
* Essential Developer
* Kilo Loco
* DesignCode
* Swift Arcade
* Paul Hudson
3. Follow Feedly.
I only heard of Feedly from other iOS Engineers and once I downloaded the app, I was hooked on it. I would find myself reading new and old articles for hours about tips and tricks or just new design patterns and architectures that have really elevated my iOS engineering growth in general. Most of the articles you find here are actually written by YouTubers and Tweeps. However, there are a few sources I found to really enjoy like SwiftLee, Swift by Sundell and Ray Wenderlich. These articles are really good at helping you understand new and improved ways to write swift code. They give details on the dos and don’ts with examples of bad and good ways of writing code.
Currently Following:
* Hacking with Swift
* App Coda
* Swift Blog
* Swift.org
4. Use your GitHub account.
Every developer should have a GitHub account. It’s not just for working and storing your projects on it. You can request access or simple look at open source projects and learn a ton just by looking at the way the code is written. Believe it or not you can see where good practices are used and with experience fix any bad practices you can identify. It really does help you learn when diving into other people projects and simply reading and trying to understand the written code. You’ll find yourself looking up new frameworks that are being using and how to work with them. I’d definitely recommend following dkhamsing because you can pull his open-source-ios-apps and just start tinkering with it. I will not be listing any more I am following because with this source you’ll have plenty to experience with but feel free to browse around for more out there.
5. Make a Medium account.
Of course I’m going to mention Medium. There are plenty of iOS and Swift articles written here about almost anything you are learning in swift. New Frameworks, Architectures, Design Patterns, It’s all here. Medium has a fantastic library of articles about iOS Engineering written by iOS Engineers themselves. I mean here I am! I’ve learned so many neat tips and tricks here that have helped me grow in my career. I’ve found myself regularly looking at Medium documents on how to properly use frameworks and more. Here’s an example of a building your first Swift UI app with Ale Patrón.
Currently Following:
* Alex Zarr
* Combined Tutorials
* Swift Programming
Conclusion
I hope these things will help you progress in your growth as an iOS Engineer as it did for me. There are plenty of other things you can do to help with this like attending WWDC, looking at the sessions they provide, or simply reading The Swift Programming Language and learning different ways to accomplish things or more about the language itself. If there is anything I may have missed feel free to leave a response for the next developer reading this.
I’ll leave you with this.
Learn to code iOS Products a Swiftly way!
