Eugene BelinskiSwiftly — the one-stop Swift reference site for busy coders
Today I’m excited to announce Swiftly, the one-stop quick reference spot for Swift developers! The culmination of 8 months of work, Swiftly has Swift 5.1 guides covering:
- the basics: variables, optionals, closures, if statements and so on,
- basic types such as Ints and collection types such as arrays,
- structs and classes, and their properties and methods,
- operators such as plus and minus,
- functional methods like map,
- and more!
The idea
In January 2018, I launched iOS Ref. I had gotten tired of searching for the same iOS information over and over again, like iOS versions by device and device resolutions. To my surprise, it really took off on Twitter and Reddit, becoming the 17th highest all-time submission on /r/iOSProgramming!
Around that time, I was spending a lot time developing in Swift, but also in other languages. Working in a software agency meant that I was coding in Kotlin and Java for Android, JavaScript for React Native, and even C# for Xamarin. Switching between Swift and Kotlin got particularily irksome, given that the two are oh-so-similar and yet oh-so-subtly-different. I would sometimes forget the syntax for basic things like enum declaration and array mapping.
Worse yet, searching for how to do basic thing X in Swift meant that I always ran into outdated Swift 2 StackOverflow answers. At this point Swift 2 might as well be considered a different language from modern Swift. And although the official Swift book was always a reliable source, it tended to read more like a textbook, verbose and heavy on conceptual understanding, when all I really needed was a quick refresher.
Ultimately I began writing Swift-specific pages for iOS Ref, and soon realized that the number of pages I wanted to write would quickly crowd the whole site. That’s when the idea for Swiftly came in: by combining to-the-point reference sheets with a clutter-free website and a memorable site name, I could do to Swift what iOS Ref does to iOS. I started working in February 2019, and eight months later, I’m ready to share it.
The future
Although I’m launching Swiftly today, my work here is not done. I’m still writing reference guides for more advanced Swift topics such as protocols, extensions, errors, and access control. And of course, just as with iOS Ref, I plan on sticking around for the long haul to update Swiftly to Swift 5.2, Swift 6, and whatever other iterations the Swift programming language takes in the future.
I hope that Swiftly can become a reliable long-term reference site for all Swift developers for years to come.
