This month at the NSManchester iOS developer group we ran a Swift hack session because for many iOS developers it can be difficult to find the time to pick up Swift outside of business hours during which Objective-C is the predominantly used language.
The hack involved adding new functionality to the NSManchester app which was created primarily as a learning exercise, allowing the community to try out new things as well as to get feedback from and exchange knowledge with peers. Only having to support the latest major iOS release gives the community the opportunity to experiment with APIs available only from iOS 9 onwards e.g. UIStackView which frequently can’t be used during the working day owing to the need to support previous releases of iOS.
The source code for the app is hosted on GitHub and all are welcome to contribute new features whilst learning Swift. To get started, just fork the repository and when done, raise a pull request to request the feature be merged into the main codebase. Raising a pull request will automatically cause Travis CI to build the codebase so that you can determine whether the code to be merged will break the build. To keep the build stable, only pull requests which are marked by continuous integration as building successfully will be merged. The up-to-date build status of the app can be viewed here. Happy hacking with Swift!
NSManchester takes places at 7pm on the first Monday of each month at Madlab in the Northern Quarter, Manchester. To keep up-to-date with the latest news, follow us on Twitter.