This issue, I’ll keep this short and sweet. I hope you’re all staying healthy and at home.

Enjoy the issue!

Apple announced that WWDC 2020 will be an online-only event, and many of us are learning how to work remotely from our homes while we cope with the on-going health crisis. I hope everyone is staying safe.

Meanwhile, Swift 5.2 has been officially released with Xcode 11.4. So take a break from the news and spend some time updating your projects!

Another fortnight passed by, another Swift Weekly Brief. Enjoy!

I’ve been keeping myself busy the last two weeks with exciting things going on at work, and visiting other offices. We’ve also been hard at work on preparations for the SwiftAveiro conference, which I’m co-organizing this year.

All in all, cool stuff going on!

That said, here’s what kept some other people busy these past two weeks…

The last two weeks were rather busy at Apple. A new Xcode 11.4 beta, Swift Crypto library releases and making Swift Playgrounds available for Mac.

On top of that, the Swift repository now has more than 100,000 commits!

I think I don’t have to mention much more than that a lot of fantastic information on the distant future of Swift has been shared in the last two weeks: the road to Swift 6, progress on the Function Builders proposal, and more. 🎉🎉🎉

This is a big issue with lots of interesting topics being discussed!

The holidays are over and during that time a lot has happened.

• Swift 5.2 nightly builds are now available
• folks have discussed and compared Swift and C++
• a book about Swift by Swift community members and creator of Swift Chris Lattner was released — and all proceeds go to charity!

But now let’s enjoy the news!

One. Five. Zero. One hundred and fifty. 150 issues! What an awesome milestone for this project, and fitting as the last issue in 2019 (this was accidental, I swear!)

My gratitude to none other than Jesse Squires first and foremost, for starting this project and keeping it going up until issue 100. Thank you to Kristaps Grinbergs for helping out behind the scenes over the last months, as well as writing a few issues. Thanks to all other authors and those people helping behind the scenes for everything. You are the ones making this newsletter possible!

Lastly, thank you all dearly for reading and sharing the newsletter! When I took over this project from Jesse, I did so for two main reasons: I wanted to keep up to date with what’s going on with Swift, and have the possibility to share that with all others interested as well. And I feel that has worked out quite splendidly! Looking forward to continuing the journey in the next year.

And with that said, before we jump into the news from over the last two weeks, I want to wish you all a great end of 2019.

Earlier today, I finished my last working day of the year. All the holiday feelings are there now! I hope that you’ve had a great last weeks, including a great Thanksgiving for those who celebrated it!

And a big special thanks to Kristaps for helping out with this issue; I would not have been able to write it without him. 🏎

I’ve been having a great last two weeks, including a trip to Spain for work — it’s always great to talk to the people in remote locations and meeting up with them in person.

I also feel (like some of you, probably) that the holidays are really just around the corner. Swift Weekly Brief will be here for another two issues this year; so don’t worry about that.

Speaking of the holiday feeling, it seems like a lot of interesting things are still going on when it comes to Swift, as you can read about below.

With the ServerSide.swift conference having taken place for the second year, there are a lot of exciting updates on Swift on the server — and more!

Swift is seeing continuous improvements over the last weeks, including a new bunch of changes that are backed by interesting proposals.

I’ve had a great week in Paris, attending and giving a workshop at FrenchKit. I hope you’ve all had a great week too!

I also wanted to mention that this month is Hacktoberfest, a yearly, month-long celebration of open source software. A perfect time to contribute to (Swift) open source!

And with that, here’s what’s been cookin’ in the last two weeks in terms of Swift.org and other Apple open source projects.

Full steam ahead: with Swift 5.1 released and the release process for Swift 5.2 outlined, we can look forward to another wave of improvements to the Swift language coming up.

A lot of new hardware to talk and think about from Tuesday’s Apple Event. And a lot of new software to look forward to — which includes a whole lot of the features the Swift team has been working on. I’m very much looking forward to the new software in particular, and the app updates it will bring.

While I have the feeling I’ve had a busy two weeks, it seems like I haven’t been the only one…

Summer is almost over and it seems that the Swift community is getting ready for some big product announcements later this year. Nevertheless we had quite an intense last two weeks in the Swift.org open source projects.

Podcast episodes to listen to, interesting proposals and tools that help you go through all Swift packages. And more.

It has been a while! The previous issue was beautifully crafted by Kristaps Grinbergs. Thanks again so much for that!

With all the heat (in Europe, at least…) I hope you’re keeping it cool.

It’s already the middle of summer and lot of people are having summer break. Despite that, the Swift team and community members have been active as always. A lot of important pull requests have been merged and created. Not mentioning a lot of active discussions on the forums.

It has at this point already been more than two and a half weeks since WWDC. While many are looking into the new tech announced there, as well as playing with the beta software, this is what has been going on in the Swift.org open source projects over the last two weeks.

So that was quite the week, wasn’t it? So many interesting things announced at WWDC. Although there were no groundbreaking announcements regarding Swift 6 or the open source projects, but with SwiftUI, iPadOS, Marzipan Catalyst, and more, the one word to sum up WWDC for me was overwhelming. In a good way, though!

Looking forward to the amazing things we’ll all get to do with these announcements next. And if we’re lucky, we might even get to see some of the tools in open source and/or on other platforms… Here’s hoping.

With all of that happening, it has been relatively (read: very) quiet when it comes to proposals, although a few updates to proposals related to the new announcements are underway, so expect updates in two weeks!

T-4 days for WWDC 2019! Oh yes, if somehow you missed that, it will start after the weekend. Looking forward to everything that’s new, including potential news about the future of Swift… fingers crossed!

For those that are attending, have an awesome time! And also make sure to say hello to Kristaps… he might have Swift Weekly Brief stickers to give out. Make sure to share pictures of where you put those :-)

Also, and I missed to include this two weeks ago, John McCall shared something I wanted to point out to all of you reading, and in particular, those directly involved with the Swift evolution process:

I’d like to thank the community for its patience and its commitment. I know we’ve had a lot of proposals recently, and some of them have been contentious, and it can be a lot of work to keep up with Swift Evolution. You really are appreciated; thank you for everything you do to help make Swift a better language.

Well said.

With WWDC coming up in just two and a half weeks time, there is still a lot going on when it comes to Swift.

I hope all of you had a wonderful last two weeks! I wanted to share that I recently tweeted reaching out to people to talk about iOS, careers and more. And it has been a really rewarding experience! It is quite different from a newsletter like the Swift Weekly Brief, but it is great to get to interact with the Swift community like this!

And with that I wish all of you another two good weeks. Until the next issue :)