Start Small Every Time

A common theme among side projects seems to be that people become afraid, have doubts, or otherwise become reluctant to release their project until the thing is perfect, complete, and exactly what you envisioned when you had the idea.

I’ve spent my whole career writing software using the agile practice in some flavor. Most of that time has been spent using Kanban and Scrum. Now, I’m likely not very special in that regard - agile is the most popular way to write software in most industries. But my point is that if you’re not at least thinking about your side project like you do your day job when you go to plan or organize it, you’re missing out on channeling such a large part of your work experience.

It’s easy to start small. For me, every idea gets a private GitHub repository. You get a lot of them for free and you can make old ideas public whenever you need room or open the source up when you like.

Once I make this repo, I’ve already checked off a task in the project. It’s like making your bed after you get up. It’s that first accomplishment that moves things forward. Getting this specific step out of the way also saves you time later on because you need a repository for many things these days.

From here, just pick something small in any direction. When you get to the point that it’s useful to do a single thing, ship it. Do something with it. Open source it and write a readme and some docs. Do something with it and I promise you’ll feel so cool even if no one uses it!

Scrolling Spotlights

This week I wanted to just share a few things I found while scrolling that I thought were cool.

Typeframes by Lilian is super cool. Even if you don’t have promos to make, it’s pretty awesome to think that maybe one day the average indie apple developer could buy a SaaS product subscription and then be able to create something like this video.

About a week ago, Apple won a few patents for a few device accessories, and there was something interesting in there..

Could this be a testing device for developers working on apps for Apple’s new Vision Pro headset? A cheaper version of the headset itself? Hard to tell, but that is definitely an iPhone and I am definitely excited for whatever this is! 🥽

This next one is a bit of a niche include, but this is a book I’ve craved ever since reading Cracking the Coding Interview in college. That book was awful, but this is my jam. Mobile Software Engineering interviews shouldn’t be just general algorithms and data structures or generic LeetCode problems, they should be focused on what we actually do daily because it is so different!

But I’ve had such trouble finding an interview specific book for iOS and here it is, from Ishtiak Ahmed!

As someone who has been writing Swift since college, I’ve always loved niche Swift projects. The Server-Side Swift community used to be niche but long strides have been made with many of the projects since I first heard of the topic in 2016. This swift package from Tuist allows you to use super easy TailwindCSS styles in the views of your Server-Side Swift project.

Lastly, Reddit is awful for how they've handled themselves, and their leadership is awful too. Please support Christian Selig by checking out his Apollo store

That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, and if you loved the newsletter today, I would love it if you would give it a share somewhere!

Happy coding!

Morgan Zellers

P.S. If you have any suggestions, topics you'd like me to cover, or an app to share, please reach out! I truly value feedback and want to make Swift Sprints an engaging and valuable resource for the Apple developer community.