Big announcement this week: WWDC21 will happen from June 7 to 11. It will be online only, so everyone in our community can join in on the fun.

Kristaps asked me to take care of the newsletter this week. So hi, my name is Jeroen and I recently got involved with Swift Weekly Brief by running some infrastructure. Writing for you all is a bit of a leap for me, so let us know what you think!

Just like in issue 181 I will start by mentioning the wonderful work being done to build a more inclusive Swift developer ecosystem: Diversity in Swift.

As always Swift Evolution is moving fast. Quite a few interesting proposals have been accepted, and a number of interesting pitches have been proposed. On top of that, we’ve decided to add a community section below, to highlight a few members whose work we think you will like.

Thank you so much for reading, and enjoy issue 182.

We have a fantastic new domain: swiftweeklybrief.com. 🎉

I would like to personally thank Jeroen Leenarts for his tremendous help with the new email marketing platform.

This month is also an opportunity to celebrate the amazing women in our community. Holly Borla, a lead member of the Diversity in Swift work group, highlights many prominent contributers on the Swift.org blog. If you’d like to get involved, please message @diversity-work-group on the Swift Forums.

We’re glad to say that the Actors proposal is now under review. Some vast improvements are coming to Swift later this year!

There are so many great pitches for this year’s Google Summer of Code for the Swift language. Some of these pitches will be implemented by university students over the summer.

Thank you, everyone, for reading and supporting this project!

Another two weeks have passed in the blink of an eye. I’ve been busy launching my new project into the wild, listening to critical feedback from early users, and doing my best to improve it.

Jeroen Leenarts and I teamed up to improve the mailing list platform we’re using to send out this newsletter, and hopefully to cut costs. This week is the first real test. If this email finds your mailbox, then we know it’s working. :)

I want to thank all the supporters, sponsors and everyone in the Swift community who help make this project happen. If you have any ideas about things to change, improve upon, or help support this newsletter financially, please let me know.

Without further ado, we have some great news this time!

This month we are celebrating Black History Month, which makes this a good time to recognize those Swift community members who have had a tremendous impact on all of us. I want to thank them and everyone else who enriches and moves our community forward.

It’s sad to see that Swift for TensorFlow has been archived. On a positive note, the project shows us that Swift can be used for advanced experiments in machine learning.

Lately, I have been enjoying discussions on Clubhouse, the drop-in audio chat app. There is already a large Swift community putting on events like Ladies Who Code, daily get-togethers, interview coaching, even teaching Swift — thanks to Stephanie Chiu, Ting Becker, Vivian Phung, Paul Hudson, and Majid Jabrayilov for setting up some of these rooms.

We still have several sponsorship slots available. Please reach out to me through email, or say hello on Twitter.

Thank you. Now it’s time for the news!

The last two weeks passed by so quickly! I’ve been busy with a new project, launching this week, and I’ve been exploring SwiftUI 2 new features like LazyVStack, LazyHGrid, @StateObject and more. So far, I love it a lot.

In the interim, Apple released Xcode 12.5 Beta, which includes many important additions and fixes for the Swift language. We still need to wait a little longer for async/await, but it’s getting closer.

As always, thank you for supporting this newsletter. We are looking for all kinds of assistance - financial, putting together new issues, or contributing to improve the site. If there’s something you think you can do, we’d love to hear from you.

Now, straight to the news!

The last two weeks have passed very quickly. I volunteered to help my country plan and develop a system for distributing Covid-19 vaccines to those most in need. I hope everything runs as smoothly as it can.

I want to say thank you to the people and companies that have reached out about sponsorship. Thank you for that! It makes a big difference, and we still have free spots to support this newsletter and help us cover the running costs.

Lately, we have seen a rapid increase in new proposals from the community. It’s been great to see new folks joining and expressing their ideas. That means there’ll be more for us to cover, so let’s get on with the news.

We are back from the holiday break. Whether you celebrate or not, I hope you took some time off to relax after this crazy 2020. We’re now in 2021, and I believe this year we will slowly move back to a more normal life. I hope we can meet in smaller meetups at the end of the year and start to safely travel again.

We have significant updates from async/await field. A proposal adding this functionality has been accepted! There is a great video by Vincent Pradeilles demonstrating how we can experiment with it already using the Swift development snapshot. Check it out.

I want to end this issue by calling for sponsors. Swift Weekly is a great place to promote your solution or company and target the Swift language professional audience. You’d also be supporting a community-backed project. This email and website would not be possible without our sponsors. We need to cover running costs and have some exciting plans to bring this project to the next level. Financial support would go a long way towards achieving these goals.

Before heading into the holiday period, we have some great news about async/await. The proposal adding this functionality is under review. It’s a good opportunity to express your opinion.

We have some news from the Swift Server Workgroup. Three new people have joined to help support future efforts.

We end this year with a notable and very welcome initiative - Diversity in Swift. The Diversity in Swift workgroup will use the Community Showcase to brainstorm ideas and topics for these community-focused blog posts. The first post curates helpful resources for accessibility and inclusion in Swift, all made by awesome developers from our community.

This brief is the last issue of the year. We are taking a small festive break and will be back in early January.

Evoking the spirit of philanthropy, if you’d like to sponsor the Weekly Brief when we return, please get in touch.

Wishing you the happiest of holidays and a fantastic New Year! 🍷

On this day, exactly five years ago, Apple open-sourced the Swift programming language! Imagine how fast this language has moved, and what the next five years will bring.

We have some excellent news for server-side Swift development. Starting with the introduction of SwiftNIO SSH and an early version of Docker Desktop running on Apple Silicon, we can add Mac instances for EC2 which are now available from Amazon Web Services. I think this will open even more doors for Swift, and let developers build great products in even more places!

The last two weeks passed quickly. We now have Swift Evolution dashboard working in dark mode. How cool is that?

Great news for server-side folks. We have now Swift tooling for Kubernetes. Now you can orchestrate your server containers using language you know and love.

We’re close again to the Holiday season and there is a special schedule when merge access is locked. I think it’s great to take some time and unplug. I know from myself, it is hard to do it, especially if you’re passionate about a project you’re working on.

The last two weeks have been very active. Swift core team shared an article explaining Swift concurrency roadmap and multiple other great resources. I think it will be very exciting to see what is going to happen in near future.

There are awesome news from Swift on the Windows development side. The initial port of the Swift system has merged. It’s great to see Swift reaching new horizons and getting one step closer to total world domination. It is a famous quote by Chris Lattner.

The last two weeks were somewhat slow in the Swift open source world but then Apple published yet another open-source library - Swift Service Discovery. Apart from the announcement of the new iPhones we had some weird times with Xcode 12.1 and 12.2 beta 3 🤔.

To continue sending out this newsletter to your emails, we are looking for sponsors to cover the cost of the platform we are using. More info about that can be found here. Or you can reach out to me personally on Twitter @fassko. Thanks! 🙏

My last issue. I have had such a great time writing this newsletter with the help of some great friends, and I can’t thank all of you enough.

I’m very excited for the future of the newsletter now that Kristaps is taking it over, with me watching from the sidelines.

All the best,
Bas

An update on the Swift Weekly Brief from Bas:

After Jesse moved on to different project after issue #100, I’ve decided to move on to different projects now, too. I’ll stick around for issue 170, but that’ll be my last. You can read my blog post for more details. It’s been an absolute pleasure contributing to and helping out with this project, working with Jesse and Kristaps, as well as all other contributors and authors.

I took over the newsletter from Jesse as I wanted to keep this valuable research afloat — helping more than 10.000 subscribers and followers to stay up-to-date with what’s happening in the Swift.org and other Apple open source projects.

As Jesse said in issue 100, this still stands and I hope this project will continue through contributions from the community:

Gladly Kristaps will be taking over and will remain as the main contributor for Swift Weekly Brief. More contributors however are welcome. If you are interested, please get in touch!

All the best, Bas

In other news…

The last two weeks were full of surprises and new stuff. Xcode 12 was officially released along with Swift 5.3 as well as Swift docker images. The Swift repository moved to having a main branch as its default.

It did not stop there and as a surprise Swift on the Windows landed.

The last two weeks were pretty quiet, but I think it is about to change. I assume we will see a lot going on before the official Apple platform releases. Stay tuned!

Here’s a fresh update on everything going on in Swift in open source. Like every other week, really! It continues to be a pleasure being able to write and share this newsletter with you, keeping a digestable overview of changes.

Enjoy the brief!

Summer is already in its second half and seems that the Swift community has gained some steam before the official Xcode releases.

Additionally, the people working on Swift on the server have great news about AWS Lambda and Kitura is now a community project!

I think this is a calm before the (autumn) storm. We will have more awesome news in the coming weeks.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, we’ve been seeing a start to async / await in Swift these past two weeks. While this will take a lot more time before we can expect to see this land in Swift, it is an exciting thing to see. 🏎

Another two weeks have passed, so here’s another “Weekly” Brief. There’s lots of energy within the community at the moment, it seems — as there’s a lot going on.

This year’s WWDC was a blast. Despite what is currently happening in the world I think Apple created a small “development holiday” for all of us. I think a new online conference reached far more folks around the world than ever before. We got completely revamped developer forums, as well as many community-organized side events that were not tied to any physical location, which is great.

This year we got great new things, especially in SwiftUI, that are driven by new cool additions to the Swift language. And much more. Now we have a full summer to explore new stuff and get ready for new Apple releases and slowly for Apple’s own built silicon.

WWDC is now very, very near. Only a little bit more than a weekend before things kick off. Very exciting!

Also — a note regarding this issue’s sponsor. This was so unexpected — but so, so very kind. His point is spot on. Putting together Swift Weekly Brief time and time again is something I’m very happy to do, and it is a real pleasure to be able to support the Swift community this way.

But it isn’t always glamorous, so don’t take things for granted.

Thank you, Paul! ❤️

Enjoy WWDC everyone, and looking forward to a hopefully jam-packed issue in two weeks!

The previous issue has a more extensive introduction, so for this one I’ll keep it short. WWDC is coming up really soon — I’m very much looking forward to it and seeing/meeting people online. Come say hi if possible :-)

And so, another two weeks have passed. For me, time seems to pass so quickly and yet at the same time, slowly.

We’re now about a month away from WWDC20 “taking off” — what that means exactly is still a surprise, but I’m very much looking forward to it.

Also, today’s issue coincides with Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). It’s a topic very dear to me. There are some tasks on this website’s repository that aim to make the site more accessible. Any help on those would mean the world to me.

After all, I took over the curation of this newsletter from Jesse because I wanted to keep sharing what’s happening in Swift open source with all those others benefiting from it.

There are also still sponsorship opportunities for the newsletter, and I would greatly appreciate it if you could share that with those who might be interested in helping with the newsletter in that way. It allows us to keep delivering it to your inbox every other Thursday!

Anyway… there’s also news!

The last two weeks started quite slow, but now it seems that things are starting to heat up. Apple has released more information about WWDC 2020, announcing it will take off on June 22.

Also, Google Summer of Code 2020 students have been announced. They will be working on important and exciting projects for Swift over the summer, being mentored by the people at Apple!

It still feels strange to me that every time I start writing this introduction, I think about the two weeks that have just flown by. It makes me appreciate how valuable time can be, and makes it feel worth it to provide all of you with an overview of what’s been happening in the “world of Swift”.

I also want to give another massive thank you to Kristaps, whose contributions are what make it possible for me to continue writing these issues.

I’d like to encourage you to stand still and reach out to or thank someone that has been helping you — speaking from my experience, it really makes a difference.