I’ve officially arrived at the end of the 100 Days of SwiftUI! It’s been an absolute blast going through this course. It was my first time doing something like this and documenting each and every day, so it seems only natural to look back on the course and share my thoughts on how I experienced it, what I’ve learned, what was good and what could’ve been done better.
The 100 Days of SwiftUI Experience
First of all, I want to offer gratitude to Paul Hudson for creating and continuing to update this course. It’s an absolutely amazing source of knowledge for beginners and experts alike.
When I started this course over 3 months ago, I was not sure what to expect. The idea of doing a bit of work every single day seemed appealing to me, as it would ensure that I would get a constant stream of learning.
In practice, that was the true for the first 40 days or so of this course. Up until that point, I was cruising through and I felt I had a very good grasp on every subject that was taught. I also managed to do the challenges and I didn’t have to put in excess time. This was important, because I already have a full time job and other obligations.
After those 40 days, the subjects got tougher, which is only natural as you advance deeper and deeper into the SwiftUI subject matter. However, what bothered me a little was that from that point forward, was that that the course felt just a little less cohesive and less beginner friendly. Just a reminder: all of this is from my personal point of view and this is not a knock on this course, it’s just how I experienced it.
With the difficulty ramping up, I was repeating videos more and more to try to get a good sense of what I was being taught. This made it a bit difficult to squeeze in the SwiftUI challenges as my time was limited. During the second part of the course, I therefore decided to skip challenges and come back to them later. Something I’ll be doing soon.
Way more positives than negatives
All in all, the positives outweigh the negatives by a large margin.
First of all, Paul is a great teacher and he clearly knows what he’s talking about and his passion for SwiftUI comes through in his videos. His passion and energy is infectious and ensured that even on tough days, I carried on with the course. His two Samoyed’s didn’t hurt either!
Then there’s the learning material itself. I’ve already talked about how I experienced the first and second half, but even though I found the latter half of the course more difficult, the quality of the articles and videos was always top notch.
The same goes for the challenges and especially the milestone projects, where we created apps from scratch. They were well thought out.
As for the negatives, besides the feeling of the course being a bit less cohesive than I would’ve liked, I also was a bit disappointed that the solutions for challenges were locked behind a subscription. Don’t get me wrong, Paul is an instructor and of course he deserved to get paid for his teachings. For the course, however, even if it was just for the first third of the course, it would’ve been nice if, as a complete beginner, the SwiftUI solutions were included.
Wrap up
That’s it for the final wrap up and review! In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be returning to past SwiftUI challenges and provide updates on them. I’ll also be expanding my learning and trying my hand on creating a few simple apps from scratch, without any help. I’ll be sharing progress on that as well of course. Until then, thank you for reading!
100 Days of SwiftUI – Day 100 – Review