I’ve long had an interest to dabble in iOS app development, specifically personal finance and productivity app development. But I lacked a crucial component, a mac to develop on. Now that recently changed by the grace of one of my cousins, who decided to give me a 2020 MacBook Pro.

Needless to say I was shocked, but incredibly appreciative. After getting the macbook all set up with Xcode and all my other usual programming tools like VSCode and git, I began searching around for content to learn Swift programming, and specifically SwiftUI. I came across Paul Hudson aka @TwoStraws aka Hacking With Swift on YouTube, and started watching his Build your first iOS app with SwiftUI video in which you follow along developing a simple application called Trekr to get a feel for some of the syntax and methodology behind iOS app development using SwiftUI. I learned about how assets are managed and referenced, some of the different views available like NavigationView, ListView, and TabView, not to mention structs and classes and even a bit of MapKit.

I think it was a fantastic way to start learning SwiftUI as it’s more practical, at least for me, to learn more about programming by actually making working things. I’ve got his Build your second iOS app with SwiftUI video sitting in my Watch Later now, just waiting for my next session of learning.