More and more companies rely on mobile apps, so iOS developers are in high demand.

The talent shortage keeps driving salaries higher and higher, even for entry-level positions. So, it’s understandable that more and more people want to start a career in iOS app development.

Money is not everything, of course. Many of us do it to create something we are proud of, that makes a difference in the lives of many people.

Becoming an iOS developer takes some effort though. Whatever your motivation, here is a detailed, step-by step to become an iOS developer.

Continue reading →

When developing iOS apps in Swift, you are bound, sooner or later, to encounter weak self references. That’s especially true in the callbacks of network requests.

At first, weak self references might seem puzzling and, sometimes, annoying. In this article, we will see why they are needed and how you can fix them in your code.

Continue reading →

Computed properties are one of the basic features of the Swift language. But despite their simplicity, they are a great tool to keep your code clean and free of bugs. I rely heavily on computed properties for any code I write.

Continue reading →

Since the introduction of SwiftUI, I have seen many developers write all their code inside views. Unfortunately, the simplicity of the framework seems to encourage a return of many poor practices.

But you do not build robust, maintainable apps by gluing together random pieces of code.

Sure, you can search on Google for specific tasks, copy and paste some code into your project and make it work, somehow.

That works if your app is small and simple. But as soon as you go beyond basic tutorials, you inevitably get serious problems.

That’s why the MVC and MVVM patterns exist. In this article, we will see how they apply to SwiftUI.

Continue reading →

Networking is a requirement for most modern iOS apps.

Networked apps usually interface with a remote web service that provides the data. And often, this web service is a REST API that returns data in JSON format.

Writing the networking layer of an iOS app, though, is not a simple task. To make asynchronous network calls, you need to use many features of Swift and UIKit, like the URLSession class and the Codable. Moreover, many parts of the app’s architecture need to interact, making the task more complicated than it seems.

Continue reading →

After the introduction of protocol extensions in Swift, Apple started pushing protocol-oriented programming.

Even if it was a new paradigm, it quickly got widespread adoption in Swift programming and iOS development. 

This is not a surprise. Protocol-oriented programming is a highly flexible paradigm with many benefits. One of my favorite applications is to create well-structured network requests.

Protocol-oriented programming solves many of the problems of object-oriented programming. Moreover, it works great with Swift’s value types, i.e., structures and enumerations.

Continue reading →

For loops are a fundamental construct of programming, and even more so of making iOS apps. If you want to become an iOS developer, they are a necessary tool you need to have in your toolbox.

But more important than simply understanding how they work, is to know how to use them for the different tasks you will meet in iOS development.

So, the aim of this article is not only to show you how Swift for loops work, but how to use them to solve the most common programming problems.

Continue reading →