It’s been an awesome year since Apple announced Swift!

Thousands of developers have rushed to write code in swift – we can see over 41.000 public repositories on github and 36.000 questions on stackoverflow.

The number of Swift repositories is growing day by day:

Number of github repositories:

Number of new github repositories that appear each week.

Redmonk predicted that Swift will be in the top 20 most used programming languages by Q3 this year. In the 2015 Developer Survey we can see that Swift is the most loved programming language – over 77% of those polled said they already develop with Swift and will continue to do so. In another survey done by Vision Mobile we can see that 20% of mobile developers were using Swift just 4 months after it was introduced.

The open source community made a bit over Swift 400 libraries/frameworks in the past year. Out of which I mention my top 5:

Alamofire is an HTTP networking library written in Swift

Surge is a framework that provides high-performance functions for matrix math, digital signal processing, and image manipulation. It harnesses SIMD instructions available in modern CPUs to significantly improve performance of certain calculations.

SwiftyJSON makes it easy to deal with JSON data in Swift

Dollar is a Swift library that provides useful functional programming helper methods without extending any built in objects. It is similar to Lo-Dash or Underscore.js in Javascript.

Cartography will help you set up your Auto Layout constraints declaratively with ease!

We ❤ Swift

I remember last year, me an Silviu where watching the live WWDC stream and we saw Swift – it was an ecstatic moment. We rushed to download the book Apple released with the language. In about an hour me and Silviu went through the whole book page by page scanning the code examples and language descriptions learning what Apple has been working on. We were so happy with so many things about the language – it made programming on iOS cool again.

Immediately after that we started working on a blog – what later became We ❤ Swift and published our first tutorial –How to make a simple tableview with iOS 8 and Swift. We got a lot of readers and we started making more tutorials out of which I want to mention:

We were working on a iOS Swift course and we kept hitting the same wall – there is no resource that teaches you how to code in Swift that puts in enough basic notions to be able to follow the material we wanted to present. So in the end we decided to spend some time to make that resource. In the beginning we started with a book with a bit of theory and a lot of exercises – Swift Programming from Scratch in 100 exercises – you can read the whole book for free!

Soon after we started working on the book we were experimenting with playgrounds and we figured out that we can hack them – we made an app that tells you if you correctly solved an exercise from the book or if you made a mistake.

Team

Andrei started programming when he was 10, after training for four years he won a bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2009. In the last 5 years he has worked as an iOS developer for local companies and as a freelancer.

Silviu has 4 years of iOS development experience and is currently working as a consultant on multiple iOS projects. He enjoys learning and teaching to others. In his spare time he likes to work on computer graphics and math.

Collaborators

Claudiu helped us make the book better for people who are learning to code – he knew nothing about programming – except that he wanted to learn it. He even added an exercise to the book – 2.5 Breakfast. Now he is learning iOS and digging into low level C details in order to better understand how computers work.

Raul started working on a couple tutorials – we recently posted the first one NSTimer in Swift. Raul started programming from 6’th grade. He participated in national contests on Programming and Physics until he graduated from college. During college he built an autonomous robot A.T.T.K. and his own OCR library after college. Raul is working as a freelancer in iOS and Swift and he loves to share his knowledge with others.

If you want to write articles for We ❤ Swift – give us an email!

Top Swift links

Beginner

Intermediate and Advanced topics

Code

Video

Finally here’s a teaser for an article we’ll be publishing later this week: