I’m writing this after my fifth day of progress in the 100 Days of SwiftUI online course offered by Paul Hudson. But why – why am I doing this and why now?
It’s a combination of things. I left my position as Head of Product Design at Tails.com just as the pandemic lockdown was kicking in. Not a great time to be looking for work, but as it turns out, a great opportunity to spend time at home. I’ve been driven toward self improvement in a number of areas. As a lifelong tech and design nerd, I feel like I’ve missed out on the app thing – I could have/should have been well positioned to conquer the App Store age, but to date, my contribution has been limited to the Cloud Voice Express app that I helped to design while at BT Business. (Good concept, technical execution was never destined to be great, hence the somewhat dismal App Store rating.)
I’ve made several starts and stops with developing apps over the years – Phonegap (now Cordova) was promising early on. Objective C always left me confused. Swift has been appealing since the start and I made it through a Udemy class in 2018, coincidentally, while commuting to my gig at BT.
I see SwiftUI as an important step for Apple, particularly as they drive for streamlining cross-platform developer workflows. I made a quick start on my own but very quickly realised that I was lacking some core knowledge to get me beyond grabbing snippets from tutorials and Stack Exchange. I want to learn more and now seems like the perfect time.
I’ve got a few app ideas – not certain that any of them will be money makers, but if it can keep me busy, build some new skills and even keep a few kids mildly entertained if the apps I’m thinking of are good enough to launch, then that’s a good starting point.
One of my key strengths lies in my ability to crossover from one thing to another – a developer who gets design; a tech-savvy designer. Creative Technologist as my business cards once read. Time will tell if I make it all the way through the 100 days, but so far, so good.