A rundown of the tech courses and tutorials I started but never finished, including Udemy purchases, 100 Days of SwiftUI, MIT’s Missing Semester lectures, and Stanford’s CS193p, with brief notes on why each was abandoned. I argue that quitting a course in favor of building real projects is usually a good trade, since courses are mainly valuable for discovering tools and concepts you didn’t know you needed...
A few weeks into the Zero to Mastery Complete Web Developer course on Udemy, I compare it with Paul Hudson’s 100 Days of SwiftUI across several dimensions: video versus text format, pacing and depth, how current the content is, student exercises, and cost. My early impressions are positive, though the course is faster-paced and less hands-on than the SwiftUI counterpart...
Reflecting on podcast advice that building a real app beats endless tutorials, I share what a day and a half of working on my own SwiftUI project turned up in my search history, covering topics like Core Data filtering, file exports, date formatting, and NavigationView quirks. The experience supports the podcasters’ point: a real app forces you to push through hard problems you would otherwise sidestep when just noodling around...
I keep a few pre-written blog posts in reserve to maintain a daily publishing schedule and streak, but one tired evening the buffer ran dry. The resulting deadline pressure pushed me to finish a minimum viable version of a half-started project...
A short introductory post explaining why my blog exists: I want to publicly track my progress through Paul Hudson’s 100 Days of SwiftUI, and I believe that writing about a topic forces a clearer understanding of it, an approach known as the Feynman Technique. A Fireship video on the topic is embedded...
My review of Unwrap, Paul Hudson’s iOS app for learning Swift, which pairs short videos and written lessons with true-or-false questions about Swift code. Though the quizzes sometimes test error-spotting rather than the specific lesson topic, I found they sharpened both my syntax knowledge and my ability to spot mistakes in code. The app is a good way to use spare moments on a phone, even for those not following the Hacking with Swift courses...
After needing to run small C and C++ snippets and missing Swift Playgrounds, I look at options for scratch coding on an iPad. A C Language app works via an online compiler but feels sluggish, and some paid apps advertised as offline compilation actually send code to a server. Free online compilers that support many languages, including C and Swift, turned out to be a handy alternative...
I rewrote a Swift checkpoint exercise after the original unsaved code was lost, with the task being to count the unique elements in an array of strings. The solution casts the array to a Set, and I reflect on having encountered sets twice recently, in the 100 days course and a podcast episode, calling that kind of spaced exposure high-quality learning...
