I guess every developer has its favorite question to ask a candidate during an interview. Mine is “what do you read to get up to date with the state-of-the-art of iOS development? “. I believe the answer tells a lot : you can have a better idea of how bad the candidate wants to learn. The perfect situation is when the candidate teaches you something, of course. Let’s try to analyze it.
Newsletters
Newsletters are great. You get curated, regular news in your mailbox without doing anything. You get a list of trending topics and you can choose what to read. Also, because you have them in your mailbox, you can always use the search tool to get your hand back “that link that you remember but you didn’t read because you didn’t have time”. There are plenty of interesting newsletters in the iOS world :
My favorite, of course. Dave Verwer has been collecting the best articles in the iOS world for what feels like forever. I can’t remember a time when iOS Dev Weekly did not exist. In my opinion, when someone asks you how to be a better iOS developer, this should be the first link to send. Every week, you get a list of articles from all kind of subjects : announcements, tools, code, design, jobs, business, …
If you are doing iOS development in 2017, there’s a pretty big chance that you’re writing Swift. Swift news by Natasha The Robots tackles the same kind of subjects than iOS Dev Weekly except that it only talks about the Swift language. It’s a really recent language that evolves quickly and you can’t follow every Pull Request on GitHub so it’s good to have a summary. The cool “feature” of this newsletter is a weekly selection of Swift libraries.
Every community has its “stars” or “elite”. They have public discussions, think about problems and talk at conferences. The iOS community is no exception. Here’s a list of a few influencers you might want to follow :
GitHub / StackOverflow
Okay, so now you have everything set up to follow discussions but programming is also about code, right? If you want to know more about the iOS world, spend some time on GitHub and/or StackOverflow. When you see an issue you can fix or a question you can answer, do it. You’ll learn a lot by helping others and it will also make your resume shine!
Non-iOS topics
I strongly believe that one way to be better at one technology is … to be interested in other technologies. When you only read about the same topic over and over you’ll probably end up reading the same kind of patterns, the same solutions to the same problems. When a developer has the curiosity to get out of his/her comfort zone and learn something totally different, this is when things get really interesting. You’ll learn what kind of problems apply to which language, stack, technology and how they can be resolved. Even if it does not seem to apply on your specific iOS issue, it will help eventually because you’ll be tempted to apply a new solution to an old problem.
And you, what do you read to get up to date with the state-of-the-art of iOS development?