Intro and Goals

Hi all, this will be my 2nd time around at learning to code with Swift, I’ve followed Chris for many years now and love the way he teaches. The first time around I went with a start-up group but it didn’t turn out that well for me.

I’ve over 50 but under 100 so not sure how much info I can absorb nowadays but I’m willing to give it a good go.

I’m heavily into Grassroots football (soccer) and use an app quite heavily to report on the games for my club, as do other clubs, this app is about to be removed from the app store here in the UK, I’m looking at replicating this as there is no other app out there that compares, it’s going to be a very long tough journey, I even asked on Fivver for somebody to recreate for me, over £16k I was quoted because its a full-stack - whatever that is, once I got up from the floor I thought about giving it a go myself, I’m under no illusion that I’ve probably set myself up for failure.

Anyway, that’s me and I’m about to give the 14 days trial a go so wish me luck.

Cheers,
Chet

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Hey Chet, thanks for sharing your story!

Like you, this too is my second try giving Swift a shot. I gave up a few years ago ~2017, when it was still in the UIKit/ Storyboard phases. Then, I found that I could build something, while I followed along with the instructor/ his videos. However, when I was on my own, I was completely lost! I couldn’t do anything. One of the most valuable things I get from CWC+ is the loads of challenges Chris provides. He and his team did a great job at this.

You can read more about my journey with app’s via the link below. I learned how to create full-stack apps over the past two years as well! Still, a mobile app is a whole different ballgame. There’s so much to learn in Swift, and I’m constantly learning new things in this language. Praise God I’ve finally gotten to the point, where I can read others’ code and even provide solutions! That was one of my biggest goals, and something completely foreign to me, when I started out at your stage.

Hey sorry to hear about this, but glad you’re giving it a shot! Why not email the app owners about this, and ask if there’s any way you can help out, or keep it on the App Store, or even if they could make their code open source? Perhaps, you could fundraise from fellow football fans, and raise the money needed to support the infrastructure costs, or whatever’s needed to keep it going. It’s possible that you could even get paying people to support the server’s costs, because it’s become so cheap in recent years.

WOW I had to do a double-take on this. I think Fivver == £5 and not something 3,200 times that cost! It’s BS that it should cost so much, because it’s “full-stack.” That’s outrageous. Besides, with Databases as a Service, like Firebase, you can easily make your app “full-stack.” It’s a fancy term for front-end code, computing/ user experience on the user’s machine (JavaScript on a website/ HTML5/ CSS, or a SwiftUI app), and a back-end (database, any server-side code).

If you like, I could help you build this. Shoot me a DM for more details. Otherwise, I think you could definitely learn how to do it yourself! It’ll just take a bit of time. Don’t let your age discourage you either, there’s plenty of older folks on the platform as well. Plus, you can always come to the forum for help from other learners, or CWC+'s awesome teaching assistants.

Cheers,
Andrew
Washington, D.C.

P.S. while the app still exists, do a screen recording of it!! Go through the major screens within the app, recording it all. If it goes away completely, this will save you critical time in the design phase. The design will already be done, so you would just need to create it with SwiftUI/ write the backend code. It’s much easier even with this stage complete, plus you won’t have to kick yourself, if you were like what was that feature/ screen I’m forgetting?

Love your story, I got sidelined and ultimately lost all interest going forward, with me being slightly dyslexic it takes a while to sink in and I do tend to lose interest while reading, for me is the reason I do love video tutorials.

I’ve tried this, they are just going to concentrate the app in their own country. On asking about releasing the code for me to crowdfund it, they never got back to me which normally indicates a no.

I know I had to verify his quote by asking him to spell it out as I thought it was a typo

I may just do this - thanks and thanks for the welcome too, its nice you went out of your way to respond.

Chet

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PS, I do not know how to DM through here

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Welcome to your journey.

I’m pretty new here, too, but I’m pleasantly susprised how many people are of my age group (over 50) and are getting into this.

One of my main “mental hurdles” with Swift is in “unlearning” preconceived notions that I’ve picked up over the years from other languages.

I’m often sitting looking at the code thinking “Huh? That’s nonsense…” but this is because I’ve done it a different way in the past. If I “block out” the past, I then re-look at the code and think “Actually, that makes sense…”

I love learning new stuff (when it makes sense!).

Keep a log/journal/blog/diary of your journey and put something in it after every lesson - even if it’s only a couple of lines summarising what you’ve covered. I’m doing this, as are others, and I think it’ll help in the long run.

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Hey Chett, thanks for taking a read! Yeah, it’s long, I don’t expect everyone to read through each post. I’m using that thread as a daily coding journal for myself. It keeps me going. I have slight dyslexia, occasionally mixing up strings of numbers/ letters that are short, but nothing serious. That sounds so tough, can’t imagine going through school like that, especially because in the past, people weren’t accommodating to that. Glad you can look at the videos instead :slight_smile:

Oh wow - I didn’t expect this. I’ve heard that it’s easy nowadays to make apps work for different languages/ locals, so that’s a shame they decided this.

Yikes! What languages are you referencing? How does Swift compare to them?

Nothing particularly horrifying, just that you get set in your ways after thousands of lines of code. Things that you didn’t realise had become second-nature get so ingrained in your mind that seeing it done slightly differently throws you.

An example of one that I’m particularly slow at grasping right now is the simple ForEach - the bit that goes { index in. I’ve never had that before.

I’m so used to doing something like foreach ($array as $key => $value) {} and iterating through an array that way. That made sense to me because it was so simple.

I’ll get there!

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