Issue 212 – January 7th 2020

It must be a time for things to come to an end. Over the Christmas period, the Vapor core team have announced that Vapor Cloud will be shutting down as of 29th February. Check out the link for more details as well as guides on migrating to other platforms such as Heroku. It doesn’t mean Vapor is dead though. Far from it. @tanner0101 has already detailed many of the new changes for Vapor 4 and with IBM recently announcing that it will not continue working on Swift (and therefore Kitura) in 2020 , I really hope the community get behind Vapor and help push it forward.

Looking for some tips on how to run your next open source project? Look no further than this article from @brentsimmons details how he and the team run the development of the popular open-source RSS reader – NetNewsWire . I like the structure of their approach and it’s got some great ideas that are worth thinking about for your next project.

With Swift a little over 5 years old now, @johnsundell takes a look back at how Swift has changed, evolved and developed as well as some of the things that are coming in the future. I’ll be really interested to see if the 2020s see Swift fully breaking out of the Apple ecosystem.

@v_pradeilles takes an interesting look at one of Swift 5.1’s new features – property wrappers – and how we can actually use them to wrap functions as well as data opening up a whole range of new possibilities.

Although Swift’s strongly-typed nature provides huge benefits there are occasions when it’s strict typing gets in the way. This is where type erasure comes in. It’s a complicated topic but this example from @rockthebruno provides a great example of type erasure in practice, illustrating how you can use it to build a dependency injecting routing framework.

Apple’s Vision framework has come along way in the last few years gaining a number of exciting new features and improvements. 2019 was no exception and in this article, @chughanupam provides a summary of all of 2019’s new features along with links to articles that show many of them in use.

If you’re looking to get up to speed with SwiftUI this year, then make sure you check out this post from @mecid which brings together a whole host of articles he’s written over the last six months on different aspects of working with SwiftUI. It’s a good place to start if you’re looking to get up to speed.

With a new year typically come new goals. Whether it be self-improvement, side projects, publishing your next (or first) app or simply learning something new – habits are a powerful tool in moving you forward and with the challenges ahead for me in 2020, this article from @jordanmorgan10 rang true in so many ways. Have a wonderful 2020, thanks again for all the support over the last five years and go out there and see what you can build.