For the past year I’ve been listening to some awesome podcasts and hearing updates from developers as they describe their transition, or in Marco Arment’s case, dipping their into SwiftUI.

I started my career as a web designer and frontend developer. Learning CSS and HTML was a challenge for me at the time, but I figured it out and stuck around long enough to understand the principles of responsive design, media queries, and all the little tinkering that comes with understanding how stuff fits onto the browser. From there I turned my attention to WordPress, customizing sites at a holistic level and helping businesses build enterprise level plugins for the WordPress space. Things got more abstract and I focused on the user experience overall, less on the code.

Focusing on design is important, but there’s tremendous value in understanding the structure of how a thing gets built. I allowed things to get too abstract without realizing the nuances of what my fellow engineers were building. For the last eight months I’ve worked alongside an awesome mobile app team, building out the experience in Greg. As things are starting to shift toward SwiftUI (or at least that’s the statement Apple made, we’ll see what happens in reality) it felt like the right time to give things a try.

So I bought a Udemy course and dove in. I’m shocked. There’s something about how SwiftUI operates that just clicks in my brain. I understand it. This doesn’t mean it will be easy, or even that I’ll really figure it out. But something about the mental model between Swift and SwiftUI appeals to me; perhaps this goes back to my HTML/CSS roots. We’ll see. For the first time in a long time I’m excited about code again, and bringing my designs to reality.