And now for something slightly different. I'm not sure how others perceive this, but I find it very difficult to keep on track of all the exciting developments in the Swift community. There're so many fascinating GitHub projects, valuable conference talks, educational blog posts, insightful Twitter discussions and fantastic newsletters that it is hard to keep yourself updated on recent developments. To make matters worse, the scope of Swift is also expanding from iOS/watchOS/tvOS/macOS development to Linux server development and now even Android development.

There're several great Swift & iOS newsletters that remedy this situation in part, but they only appear once a week and usually showcase a limited, curated selection of what happened during the week. There's also the reddit Swift community, but the myriad of subreddits (like iOS, Mac, programming, etc), again, requires the visiting of multiple different locations in order to get an overview ¹.

After feeling constantly overwhelmed and underinformed, I decided to try to do something about this. I'm an avid reader of Hacker News, and, to me, it feels as if what's missing is a place like Hacker News ² but solely for everything Swift. A place to share interesting Swift tidbits and (maybe) discuss them.

So without further ado, let me introduce SwiftWatch:

SwiftWatch tries to be this place. I'd not call it a community or a social network. Rather, it is a place to share interesting Swift news. You have to register with a Twitter or Github account, in order to (ever so slightly) decrease the likelihood of spam. Commenting is possible, but I don't envision this site to be a source of great discussions. Instead, I'd be more than happy if people start using it to post interesting Swift developments.

If you have any feedback regarding Swiftwatch, feel free to contact me on Twitter.

As you can see, @renelindhorst ³ and I have already been feeding the page with a couple of links which we deemed interesting enough to post them.

The site is based on Monocle, an open source link sharing platform. I'd have rather developed something in Swift but that'd have consumed too much time. If SwiftWatch survives (i.e. if it gains decent traction) then I'd seriously consider rewriting the guts in Swift3 + one of those nice Web Frameworks (like Perfect).

Thanks for reading!

PS: In case you're wondering "SwiftWatch" is named after the peculiar habbit of birdwatching, "a form of wildlife observation in which the observation of birds is a recreational activity". I found this a particularly good fit as the core objective of this site is quite similar.