Staying up to date with your iOS development skills
Finding quality content is hard, so I decided to create a list of places where you can find new iOS development libraries, talks, technologies and a lot of amazing topics discussed by our community.
My main goal this year was to learn iOS development by connecting more to the iOS community, focusing on people instead of just googling around. I started being more active on Twitter so I could read about things that other people were recommending, and then I started listening to Podcasts, being active on Slack groups…
Newsletters
I subscribe to a lot of newsletters because I’m always looking for what’s new in the iOS world so I’m always trying to be up to date on new talks, changes in open source swift, good blog posts….
If you don’t like to have a lot of emails on your inbox, you can always open a new email account just for the newsletters. Here are my choices:
- AwesomeiOS.Weekly: Weekly newsletter that showcases quality iOS libraries, frameworks and other iOS developer tools.
- Indie iOS Focus Weekly: Best iOS dev links, tutorials, & tips beyond the usual news.
- This Week in Swift: Best Swift resources, including news, blog posts, videos, frameworks, anything Swift.
- iOS Goodies: A weekly open-source newsletter divided by articles, tools/controls, business, UI/UX and videos.
- iOS Dev Weekly: iOS development links divided by news, tools, code, design, videos and jobs.
- Alsedi Mobile Development Digest: iOS frameworks and blog posts, design, Android, Game Development.
- Github Explore: Daily/weekly/monthly trending repositories, as well as repositories starred by people you follow.
Open-source
I can’t write enough about how much I learned by working on open-source libraries. Github enables you to learn things you don’t normally work with, since you can decide what to contribute.
Ok Lucas, but how do I start?
The easiest way to start is by finding a library that you already used before, and look at their Github Issues. There you can find requests for new features or common bugs. Some issues are really simple and your PR can make someone’s day.
A big problem Swift libraries are currently having is that their owners currently don’t have time and the library wasn’t updated to Swift 3, being useless to a lot of developers. A lot of libraries are really small and you could take 2 hours of your day and make the port to Swift 3, enabling the community to use that library again.
Tests! Tests, and more tests! As I said on my previous blog post, unit tests are important! Contributing to open-source let’s you learn unit testing by looking on other people’s unit tests and then implementing your own, raising the code coverage of a library.
For the past year, I really started contributing more to open-source and I was able to learn a lot:
- Markdown, thanks to AwesomeiOS
- Git branching & unit tests, thanks to EZSwiftExtensions
- CocoaPods implementation, thanks to LFLoginController
- 100% UI outside storyboards, thanks to LFTimePicker and DatePickerDialog
Podcasts
Feel like you don’t have time to learn new things because you have a busy schedule? Podcasts are perfect because you can learn (a lot!) while doing other things like driving, running, at the gym… even on the shower.
I use the awesome Overcast app to listen to my favorite Podcasts:
- The Phreaks Show : Weekly group discussion about iOS development and related technology by development veterans. We discuss Apple, tools, practices, and code.
- Runtime: Sam Soffes and Caleb Davenport talk about Swift, iOS, and other things they like.
- More than Just Code: A show about mobile development (& for those of you driving at home).
- Build Phase: Weekly technical podcast discussing iOS development and design.
Blogs
I’m not gonna spend your time talking about this because Paweł Białecki already made a much better job I could ever make:
Slack
iOS-Developers Slack Group is a community with twelve thousand iOS developers, always active on amazing channels such as #swift #tools #libraries #objective-c #functional and #design
Summarizing
We have an amazing iOS community that creates a 💩 ton of content. Because time is limited, learning new things is easier when other people recommended certain content on their Twitter, newsletter or blog.
How do you find iOS Content? Please comment below!
Special thanks to Txai Wieser for helping out!
