Happy Holidays! And see you in 2024

We’re in the final stretch of 2023 and it’s time to start wrapping up the year.

This year has been very hectic, bizarre, but also fun and super rewarding all at the same time.

We started off this year pretty normal. I’ve worked on my usual kinds of projects and an had amazing trip to iOS Conf SG in Singapore. The conference was truly amazing, and Singapore was so much fun. I’ve also had the pleasure of hosting workshops at Adyen and KLM at the start of 2023. I also had the pleasure of spending a little bit of time working with a client that was making heavy use of SwiftUI in their macOS project and had some performance problems. Working on this app was tons of fun even though it wasn’t always easy to pinpoint the exact performance bottlenecks. It became pretty clear to me that SwiftUI on macOS has more quirks than it does on iOS.

In late March my and my wife got the keys to our new house and we started a big renovation project where we essentially stripped the entire house, rebuilt pretty much everything on the inside and had an extension built as well. This project took until early November which means that it consumed most of my year.

This meant that my time had to be split between family, work, conferences, and working on the house which definitely wasn’t easy.

During the second quarter of the year I’ve started thinking about my plans going forward for books, the website, and my workshops. I actually ran an experiment where I hosted some online workshops that people could buy tickets for. This went really well and I fully intend on doing more of that in 2024! So you can definitely look forward to new online workshops in 2024.

Another big thing that happened this year is that my wife is pregnant with our second child. We’re expecting a baby girl in mid-Februari and I’m extremely excited about that.

Due to the renovation project I do have to admit that I’ve pretty much missed all of my plans for the second half of 2023. My plan was originally to spend a lot of time with SwiftData, record a bunch of videos to accompany both new and existing blog posts, and to start planning some video courses that I had wanted to release in early December.

These projects have now been moved into 2024 and I still fully intend on working on these projects in the new year. Video is a format I’m not very familiar with but I’m excited to be trying out video content and giving it a fair chance. It’s pretty clear that video is a format that lots of folks like and it makes a ton of sense to me to see if it’s a format that I can enjoy working with.

Another huge milestone for 2023 is that I released my Practical Swift Concurrency book and Practical Bundle. Both have been received amazingly well by the community and I couldn’t have been happier with the reviews that I’ve received so far.

I’m not one to do big goals for an entire year. Instead, I try to focus on forming habits and keeping a steady pace working on the things I find important and exciting. For the first half of 2024 video content will be a big part of what I’ll be exploring. I will also be working with SwifData in some personal projects so that I can re-explore the possibility of working on a Practical Swift Data book for iOS 18.

What achievements for 2023 are you proud of? And do you have any exciting projects planned for 2024? Tell me all about it!

Cheers,
Donny

Practical Bundle

Level up your development skills with my Practical Bundle. The bundle contains all three of my Practical books. You will get Practical Combine, Practical Core Data, and Practical Swift Concurrency in a single convenient purchase. The bundle saves you about $15 compared to buying all three of my books. It's a great deal, and a fantastic way to deepen your development knowledge.

🎶 Currently on repeat 🎶

If you follow me on Twitter you probably know that I play guitar. I'm a huge music lover and want to share this with you. In this section I will share a new album that I've been enjoying a lot every week.

Architects - Seeing Red There are very few bands that just can’t miss for me. Architects is one of those bands. I enjoy every single thing they put out even if it’s quite different from what they usually do. Their latest single is louder and heavier than a lot of their recent work and I’m here for it. Give it a listen if you’re into loud music, you’ll probably like this. Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Music

Other content that I really want to share with you

Practical Core Data

Practical Core Data introduces you to all the essential ideas, concepts and principles to get you up and running with the framework as soon as possible.

Practical Swift Concurrency

Your journey into Swift Concurrency will start with a general overview of the available concurrency constructs in Swift. After that, you will await your first methods calls and work your way up to building a complex and highly concurrenct system. We also go over important skills like testing async code as well as profiling and debugging your code through Instruments. In other words, Practical Swift Concurrency helps you build a strong foundation and mental model around all of the essential ideas, concepts and principles to get you up and running with the concurrency in Swift without making anything more complex than it needs to be.

Practical Combine

This book will take you on a journey through Combine using realistic examples. First, you will learn about the basics. You will learn what publishers and subscribers are in Combine and what they do. After introducing you to the basics, you will learn how you can use Combine to drive your user interface, or respond to user interactions. You will also learn how Combine can be used in a networking layer, how you can use Futures to make any asynchronous work your app does compatible with Combine and you will even learn what it takes to build your own Combine Publishers.