Chris Hefferman

After 1,155 days of writing my first line of code in Swift, I was offered a job as an iOS Developer.

That translates to a little over three years, which might be too long for some, and throughout that time I had heard I should be ‘job ready’ within six months to a year. For my own personal circumstances however, it was as long as it needed to be.

As someone without a computer science, or even degree level background I thought i’d explain how I got to the offer and in the process hopefully provide some inspiration and gusto to others looking to do the same.

If you’re starting out in Swift and iOS development, you might be wondering what a framework is and how to use one in your app. This article will go into a bit of this detail, explain what Swift Package Manager is used for and how to implement a simple framework.

During the white boarding process for Share the Load, Ben and I identified that we wanted to use a couple of third party frameworks to make the project more realistic of a ‘commercial’ app than LotR Quiz is currently.

While recently designing an API for our Share the Load project, I asked Ben why we were writing some of our methods without adding any functionality to them.

Ben explained that it’s good practice to define what methods you might need before diving straight into writing code that will compile. He likened it to building a house in that “you wouldn’t start a house by laying the bricks, you’d start with the blueprints.”

As mentioned in my ‘Everyone Starts Somewhere’ post, one of the things that needed improving for my Lord of the Rings quiz was how the database of questions were stored.

To do this, I think it’s worth diving a little deeper into how in the current app works, what improvements Ben suggested to make a more realistic ‘consumer’ app, and then what we did next.

One thing Ben and I agreed on when we first started discussing the intricacies of how we wanted our project to work was that the development should be as close to a ‘real world’ scenario as possible.

I mentioned in my previous post some shortcomings opportunities that my LotR Quiz app presented, and i'll be going into a few of them in this post to explain why it made a great candidate to work on and re-build from the ground up.

Welcome to my very first blog post!

I will primarily be focusing on documenting the decisions, thought process and progress of the ‘Share the Load’ project, I also intend to sprinkle in some of my other iOS Developer journey stories and anything else that I find interesting!