Going Mobile
I started my programming journey almost a year ago and I’ve recently had a change in philosophy. I’ve decided to exclusively develop iOS apps using the new Swift language Apple debuted last year. This decision did not come lightly. Many conversations, read blog posts and internal pondering if this would be the right move took place before I came to the decision to invest my limited time in learning iOS development.
After extensive thought on this subject, I’ve dove in head first to learn as fast as I possibly can. My knowledge of web apps and understanding of Object Oriented Programming Languages such as Ruby have been extremely useful in learning Swift concepts. Xcode and the entire development process of iOS is so different, but the more I learn the more my own personal experiences with apps is helping me further my understanding. This is truly an exciting time.
So, why did I come to this conclusion? My wife originally planted the idea in my head when I first started to learn to code. It was a profound yet simple argument. The vast majority of the time she is on her phone, and the majority of that time is spent in apps, so why don’t you learn how to build these? I’m paraphrasing but when I think about it, it’s also the case for my own behavior. I spend the majority of my time in apps and I’m generally most excited about the possibility of what native apps have the capability of doing.
At the time I shrugged this off because I was in the infancy of my coding journey and the majority of the resources I found were for the web and Ruby on Rails. Just to be clear, I 100% don’t regret starting with the web. It was essential to understand the fundamental layers of how web frameworks work and this has and will continue to be profound in my iOS development. However, the argument she made began to creep into my mind which became inescapable to my thoughts.
Now, I could get all Benedict Evan’s and quote statistical data on why mobile is taking over the world or as he explains it “The smartphone is the new sun,” but seriously if you haven’t read his work, you should. I’ll leave him to make the technical arguments to why mobile is the most important piece of hardware in the world and to the future.
The decision became clear. To build solutions that solved my own problems I needed to develop software on the platform I spend the most time.
As I was writing about my Ruby on Rails coding journey, I will begin to do that for Swift and iOS development. Writing technical blog posts is to help me better understand the concepts I’m learning and has been enormously helpful. It was the sole reason for taking the part-time work at Codecademy as an Advisor. The experience of helping people to fix a bug or point them on the right path is a blog post in itself and I’ve loved the experience so far. I’ll get to that another time. For now, expect to see this blog full of Swift and iOS development post.
Happy Coding