How I Taught Myself Swift And IOS Development

My love for the swift programming language started back in 2014 when Apple announced swift as a new programming language for building iPhone and Mac applications. Immediately I knew I had to begin learning this brand new method of developing. At the time of starting to learn swift, I only new the barebones of how to build a website and was just getting to grips with HTML and CSS which are worlds apart from the skills required to build a good ios app. At the time of beginning to learn ios development, I was 15 years of age with a new mac mini that my family had brought me as a Christmas present in 2015. I immediately dived into learning from the ground up having only really experimented with javascript a tiny bit before to help make my websites more interactive. For those of you asking did you do computing at school, well we kinda did but our school mainly focussed on just doing ICT which was basically just how to use Microsoft word and excel. We did use to use scratch a bit in early days and here is an example of a game I made back in 2012 when I was 14 my first game. This game won best in my class at the time and I'm proud of it as my first stepping stone into programming.

Moving on after I got to grips with mac os one of the first programs I installed was Xcode. Being eager I jumped right into building an app with Xcode and was completely overwhelmed by the number of buttons and files that I did not understand and part of me thought there's no way I'm going to be able to do this. I took a step back and began following this swift tutorial by Rob Percival. It was great it dropped me slowly into the world of a completely new way of programming that was new to me. Even the excitement of getting a button click to do something on my phone was amazing to me. Over the next few years, I lost touch with IOS applications a bit with having to focus a lot on my GCSE and A-level results in order for me to go and study computing at university.

Having successfully gotten into uni I began programming IOS apps in a large amount of spare time that you have at the university. Here was the first ios app that I nearly published f1 times. It basically converted the time of each f1 race into your local time. I'm a big f1 fan so this was great fun to make. Looking back now the code for it is very badly written with loads of repeated code but at least it was a start.

In the second year of university, we had a module dedicated to mobile application development. This was my time to shine. It was probably the module that I tried the hardest at in the second year. The module was mainly teaching how to use Cordova to build mobile apps which were good due to the limited time constraints that we had in the module with just 3 hours a week of lectures and only 8 months to complete the module. For the final assessment, we had to build a mobile application. I chose to make my mobile application using Xcode. The app was called Disturb and was designed for users to not use their phone. Disturb.

Moving on I am now on a placement year at a web company called essential marketer. Once my boss found out I could program mobile apps he started getting me to program mobile app for him or at least prototype ideas he had. The main one we have stuck with is an automatic driving tracking application which automatically starts tracking how far you drive when it detects that your driving. We all think it's pretty cool and should be hitting the ios app store soon.

so that's my journey so far. Ios development has taught me that the best way to learn any programming language is just to do it and put the hours in no matter how hard it may be.

Thanks, Scott Andrews