Swift by Sundell is back!

I never actually decided to stop writing Swift articles. It just sort of happened. In fact, for the past two years as this website has been very much dormant, I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve sat down at my desk with the intent to write and publish a new article, or the number of times I’ve added “Write a new article” to my ever-growing list of reminders and to-dos.

In the summer of 2022, I became a dad, and it changed everything. In a whirlwind of happiness, excitement, sleep deprivation, and general confusion, my schedule was turned completely upside down. Family quickly replaced work as my number one priority, and anything non-essential felt like it’d have to wait. Work-wise, all that I really had any energy for was my freelancing work, and the thought of spending any nights, weekends, or other spare time on article-writing or podcasting felt ever more distant.

Even as I started regaining some of that work time (and sleep!), my routine of regularly publishing new Swift articles had clearly been broken, and getting back into it started to feel like quite a challenge. I had also settled on a very nice, comfortable schedule when it came to my freelancing work, which let me work with multiple clients on different kinds of projects, all while giving me enough time to spend with my family. So, I was happy, and didn’t really want to mess with that schedule by adding anything to it.

But as time went on, I started to really miss Swift by Sundell. Over the past two years, I haven’t lost my passion for Swift, or for programming in general for that matter, and being able to share my thoughts and experiences regarding Swift was something that I really wanted to get back to.

However, there were two main obstacles in the way.

First, I have written a lot of Swift articles over the years. So many that, honestly, I’ve completely forgotten many of them. So, anytime I wanted to write something new, I had to start by researching whether I had already covered a similar topic before, and if so, whether what I was planning to write conflicted with what I had previously published.

That started to become quite tedious, especially since many of my old articles are now out of date (both because of Swift/platform changes, but also because I’ve changed my opinions and coding approaches over the years). That meant that, in order to cover a given topic, I really first would have to go back to a number of old articles and update them to all make sense as a whole. That both significantly increased the scope and time required for more or less any new article project, and ended up giving me a sort of “writer’s block”, as I scratched numerous article ideas because “I’ve already written about something similar”.

The solution to that problem — meet the Swift by Sundell Archive. What I’ve done is that I’ve moved every single article that I’ve previously published on this website into an archive, that both preserves them (and their URLs) into the future, and also enables me to effectively hit RESET on my article-writing. Any topic is now up for grabs again, and I can cover any Swift API, tool, or technique that I’d like from a modern perspective.

The second obstacle was simply time. Even though I now felt very motivated to get back into writing articles, my schedule was still completely filled up with freelancing work, workshops, and other commitments. This is where my good friends at Genius Scan had a, well, quite genius idea. They had been looking for ways to get the word out about their high-quality document scanning SDK (which I’ve contributed lots of code to as a freelancer, by the way), and had a proposition for me — how about they’d fund all of my article-writing time over the next six months, in exchange for some promotion on the website?

So that brings us to today — and I’m excited to announce that for the next six months (at least!) you’ll see new articles published regularly on this website, covering a wide range of Swift topics. In fact, the first brand new article, ”Modern URL construction in Swift” is already available, with more to come shortly. It feels so great to be back writing again, and I hope you’ll enjoy the new articles that I’ll publish.

I want to sincerely thank the fine folks at Genius Scan for helping me bring Swift by Sundell back, and to everyone in the Swift community who has reached out over the past few years with encouraging and supportive messages.

Welcome back to Swift by Sundell!