Hello dear friends! My name is Kirill. In this post, I will tell you about my journey into iOS development, and why this journey has not yet ended.
Just a beautiful picture behind which sleepless nights are hidden in attempts to understand programming anew.
At the time of writing this post, I am 24 years old, I am in the status of an intern, I live in the region, I receive a scholarship. The purpose of this note is not to advertise some service, not to assert itself, but to talk about the intricacies of self-education and your results.
I specifically do not use in the post some terms that are not clear to everyone, such as OOP, graphs, binary trees, because now we are not talking about my skills, but about the process of moving into a new field for me.
It all started with the fact that somewhere in the 9th-10th grade I turned onto the humanitarian path – linguistics opened the doors in front of me and I, as if extinguished, learned English.
At the same time, earlier I made some progress in computer science, delved into Visual Basic, but over time it was all covered with a layer of linguistics, management and philosophy. By the way, English was the most useful to me in my life, but I will talk about this a little later.
When it came time to choose a further place of study, my choice fell on a local linguistic university. The direction was chosen “Advertising and Public Relations”. It was the path of least resistance – no mathematics, physics and other technical issues.
While I was studying, I freed up time for myself by reducing unnecessary pairs in the daily schedule, and instead of them, I either worked for hire or freelanced with small orders for SMM and translation of texts. There really was a “lafa” at the university: I even went to study in Germany and no one noticed my absence. However, after taking a dip in what is called “public relations”, I realized that I had really taken a wrong turn. Not there at all.
About where I went “after college”
When I worked as a marketing manager in an American company, I communicated well with my project manager. She had access to the library of a notorious publishing house. Once a project manager showed me the book “Swift for Kids”, for which I am very grateful to her.
Book cover for Swift for Kids Mann, Ivanov & Ferber Publishing House
For those who are a little off topic: Swift is Apple’s programming language that replaced Objective-C. I confess that I was afraid of Objective-C at the time when it was written. Actually, they write on it even now, when it comes to project support, but new features and applications are written on Swift.
After reading this book, I began to rethink. That is, a person who spends so much time in public relations and advertising can enter Swift and iOS development? By coincidence, I have been using macOS on iMac for 6 years now, so I didn’t have to dance with a tambourine over a hackintosh or a virtual machine on a PC. I tried the most minimal steps in Swift. Plus or minus it turned out for me, BUT – I didn’t have a foundation in terms of IT. There was only a superficial understanding from reinstalling systems to some light functions in OOP, but no more.
If you have read up to this point, you have mastered my portrait:
humanities by education;
who last coded 10 years ago;
wants to become an iOS developer.
From here we will talk in more detail why iOS and what happened next.
iOS, my plan and first steps
So why iOS? Yes, I could take on front-end or back-end development, or even delve into data analysis. I’m just used to iOS as a system (first iPhone in 8-9 grade). I like the system, I like working with mobile phones.
Then I matured to retrain in order to fulfill my goal – to become an iOS application developer. But how to be? I have a job from 10:00 to 19:00. Still, you can find time for what you really want to do. Therefore, the time frame did not become an obstacle.
I made a clear plan, an important part of which was an airbag in case of job loss, for tuition fees, as well as money for some small expenses. I understood that I would not get off with any free courses and that I would need outside mentoring one way or another. When the plan went into action, I lived according to the following scenario:
→ work → to save up for a dream → to become what you want.
During the day I did my main work, and in the evenings (and in my free time at work) I delved into the syntax of the Swift language, solved simple problems, fixed questions and searched for answers on Google.
At this time, I used the following resources:
The Swift Programming Language – Apple’s official book on the Swift language;
the book “Swift for Children”, which started it all, I constantly climbed there if I could not understand what was written in the documentation;
official documentation of the Swift language;
SwiftBook – a community where complex issues are explained in simple terms;
Course “Swift Marathon” by Alex Skutarenko on YouTube;
Paul Hegarty’s course “Developing iOS 11 Apps with Swift by Stanford”;
free part of the iOS development course on Udacity;
free Swift basics course at CodeAcademy (without PRO subscription);
30 days of Code on the Hackerrank website – you can also do tasks on the basics;
free 7-day trial of Swift at Treehouse;
Swift Playgrounds is Apple’s official game for future developers (available on iPad and macOS).
As it is now fashionable to say, I do not pretend to be the ultimate truth. The courses, books and services that I noted above helped me to better understand what I was going to develop.