What’s up, everybody? Welcome to the episode of the podcast with these people. Now I know that’s not the usual introduction. All will be explained or at least we’ll try to convince you. The other person is still Geoff.
Peter:
How are you doing, Geoff?
Geoff:
I am still here, surprisingly.
Peter:
Alright. And and I’m still here, not surprisingly, and probably much to everybody’s disappointment. So this is a slightly unusual episode. First of all, let me make it clear because I know that there’s been some recently. This is not one of those announcements like a lot of other podcasts.
Peter:
Well, this is the last episode. No. That is not what this is.
Geoff:
However episode was the last episode.
Peter:
The last episode was the previous episode. This is the next episode that is now or back then depending on what you
Geoff:
What what I meant was last episode was the last episode of the compiled swift podcast.
Peter:
That that that could be true, but it’s not the last episode of a podcast. And Fair enough. And we’re gonna explain everything, folks. Right? If you thought the end of lost was confusing, there ain’t nothing.
Peter:
We got this. Okay. So we’re gonna be slightly different in this episode. We’re gonna be explain some changes or the the other way of putting it is what the hell did Peter do this week? That’s the other way to to explain it.
Peter:
So it’s kind of one of those, alright, everything was renewing as far as, services and everything else for the podcasting, this week. Well, actually the what’s today? Yeah. The day of recording this, today is the day that they just billed me. So it is also afforded time to sort of reflect upon where we’re at, where we think we wanna go, or or maybe more accurately me.
Peter:
I I I guess we should say I’m kind of the cause for all of this. Now don’t worry folks. There’s still gonna be a swift podcast out there. Let us make that very clear. Right?
Peter:
We’re not suddenly gonna become like one of those true crime podcasts or something like that. But we are pivoting in a good way, I think is how I would describe it. So I’ll I’ll start by diving into this. Right? When when this podcast was first invented and the idea came along and as I say on the website, it was to serve a purpose that I needed and hopefully to serve a purpose that other people needed as well.
Peter:
At the time, Swift was obviously brand new and wanted to put something out there. Now over time, there has of course been changes. Right? You know, Swift is, there there is, you know, a lot more to making apps than there used to be. Right?
Peter:
So when I started this, to me, the idea was pretty clean-cut. Oh, yeah. Apple’s new language is Swift. I want to learn Swift. Hey, I’d love to learn how to make podcasts better, so I’ll make a podcast about Swift.
Peter:
And that’s how it stayed for a long time. And then, a co host came along and now I’ve caught you up to today. I know pretty pretty short history. Right? But it’s not what it used to be And there’s a lot of other tools, a lot of other things and we’ll talk a little bit about what I’ve noticed in the metrics as far as what people seem to be interested in.
Peter:
But, Geoff, you wanna you wanna jump in there as far as, you know, how we’ve seen the ecosystem change and and why we think there’s scope for more?
Geoff:
Yeah. And I mean, this is obviously something that exists well beyond podcasts, but it has been the case over my entire career certainly that mobile was this humongous thing. It was it was the thing. And, you know, we had a lot of ourselves put into that, a lot of knowledge put into that, and there were a lot of people wanting to learn and wanting to know a lot about mobile. And especially over the last two or three years, it definitely seems like mobile has kind of hit a point of maturity where it’s no longer the hot new kid on the block.
Geoff:
And so what we’re looking at and what we’re seeing is, you know, a podcast that is very much focused just on Apple, just on iOS, just on one particular language is not really something that people are finding compelling these days. And it’s not just podcast. Like, I we’ve seen this with conferences. We’ve seen this with in person meetups. We’ve seen this with all kinds of things.
Geoff:
And so in order to keep providing quality content, we need to kind of expand our scope beyond just a very small specific niche.
Peter:
Yeah. And I think an important point there that you hit on is now that Swift is mature, right, I think, okay, I’m not gonna say SwiftUI, for example, is mature, but it is certainly stable for one of a better way of putting in, is along with that comes the problem of there is not something to talk about every week. Right? There’s not something new. There’s not something radical shift.
Peter:
There’s not controversy. There’s always controversy. You know, so there are times that we struggle and and we have ironically, we do have a list of topics. But as Geoff and I have been looking at the topics recently, it’s kind of been one of those, yeah, we don’t really want to talk about that. It’s not that interesting.
Peter:
And and a key part driver for me and I’m I’m gonna from my perspective is it has to be something I’m interested in for me to be able to really sort of passionately dive into it for one of a better way of putting it because I think that that makes that comes across in the recordings. Right? If you don’t sound interested, people pick up on these things. And I I didn’t want that to be a thing. And at the same time, I didn’t want to stop making the podcast because I don’t want to speak for Geoff here but Swift is still my main language and it is the language that I use to make apps, right, and everything else.
Peter:
And it is very much the thing that I I live and breathe a lot of the time. Still professionally make apps. But there is not enough interesting happening every week to keep telling folks about it. Right? And that was part of the reason that we switched to a two week release schedule because it gave us time, not only time to do our projects, which you’ve heard us talk about in other episodes, but also time for us to gather up, do our research and, you know, the community is a big part of this as far as what they’re interested in.
Peter:
And we also have other interests. You know, I think it’s a fine line, Geoff, right, between defining something as another interest and this is another tool in the box that I use to get the job done. Right? Mhmm.
Geoff:
Abs absolutely.
Peter:
Yeah. And so we thought, you know and and and folks who’ve followed some of my other podcasts that sort of I’m doing this series about making an app right now and that was also part of what got me thinking about this was Yeah. I want to talk about some of these other tools that I use to make apps, some of these other approaches, the whole app production ecosphere, I guess, is how I would describe it. Right? And it became very apparent in the metrics when I looked at them.
Peter:
The folks out there listening to this podcast also have interest in these because see the, you know, the numbers bless you audience. Thank you so much. The numbers are going up all the time. It’s fantastic. And that actually applies a lot of pressure as well to keep delivering and keep delivering good content.
Peter:
And it also tells us that you know we could sit and recite code until the end of the day but I don’t know about you Geoff but I I couldn’t listen to someone just talking about, you know, like, oh, and and then
Peter:
you go in here and it’s this and dot that. And that’s not where I’m at when I’m listening to these podcasts. Right? It’s more about listening and being you know, almost feeling like you’re listening to someone have a conversation with you about app development as opposed to, you know, this is the code I wrote. You you know what I mean?
Geoff:
Yeah. Pod podcasting is not the medium for which to explain in-depth technical perspectives. You know, it it’s it’s very hard to read code out out loud in a way that makes sense. And so, yeah, we’ve definitely already kind of been pivoting away from that and more towards the, you know, general best practices, general tooling, general, like, personal and career growth and that kind of stuff going forward. And trying to look into more of these general things and less focused on the specific implementation of it in one particular language for one particular platform.
Peter:
Yeah. Absolutely. Because we’re also very aware as as probably a lot of long term developers are out there, it is part of the process. And we know certainly from friends of ours, right, that we we’ve had conversations with, just up to the other day. You know, making apps and releasing apps, it’s not hard to make an app.
Peter:
It is very hard to make a successful app. It can be very hard to get it successfully through app review and add into the store and to get people using it. And we have certainly seen from the feedback that we’ve got people are very interested in these things because, you know, again this is all part of the journey. Right? And this is what we’re sort of getting at here is as we go through these other parts of the journey that we’ve not really spoken too much about before, we are very conscious that other folks are going through them too and clearly want to have more information out there and conversations about it.
Peter:
Fantastic. That’s why we’ve got the discord. That’s why we do this. This is why we do our live streams and the recognition that it’s not just the Swift language. Right?
Peter:
There there there’s all these other things like Geoff, for example, I don’t know how many streams you’ve done at this point where you’ve been using Twist, for example, but it’s an integral part of your process for making apps with Swift.
Geoff:
Yeah. I mean, and and it’s not just even specifically things that are for building iOS apps, you know. I’d love to spend more time talking about my IDE of choice. I’d love to spend more time talking about, you know, AI tools, the abilities that you can use with them. And that can be true whether you’re building a mobile app.
Geoff:
That can be true if you’re building a desktop app. That can be true if you’re building a server side back end or a website. And so it really I I think it limits us to say we’re only gonna talk about one particular language, and there are so many things that we can discuss that are helpful. Yes. Certainly to people who are developers in Swift doing mobile development day to day and things that are still helpful even if you have a day job where you’re doing something completely different.
Peter:
Right. Right. I mean, you know, how many times have we had folks say to us, hey, I need to do a back end like you say for for my app. I gotta call some APIs. I gotta do some kind of server storage, some kind of server setup.
Peter:
What server side language should I use? Should I use, you know, like, we covered Vapor and, Hummingbird and all those kind of things. And so we wanna open it up to have those conversations and to say, you know what? It is perfectly fine to keep asking those questions and and we we certainly have plenty of thoughts and discoveries ourselves. I’m I’m currently working through discovering AI, for example.
Peter:
So, you know, but we want to talk about that because everybody’s talking about that and therefore there’s conversations to be had. I want to learn from folks. And so we want to share that information with them and uncover those topics. So we will still absolutely Swift and and Apple platform development is very much our core thing. It’s not gonna go away but we are going to be covering these other topics as well.
Peter:
So if there is, for example, an episode that you’re like, I’m not really interested in that, skip it. Catch the next one, I think is what we’re saying. Right? It gives us an opportunity to, I guess, demonstrate what we know, but also demonstrate that there are so many other parts to the equation of of making apps.
Geoff:
So as you might have noticed on your feed or in your favorite podcast player, we are currently named the untitled app developer podcast. And we left that very much as a placeholder to kind of announce this and say, yes. We’re expanding our scope. We are no longer going to be the compile Swift podcast because we are no longer focused solely and specifically on the Swift language. But we’re obviously not gonna be the untitled app developer podcast forever, and that’s where you come in.
Geoff:
We would like you, as a community, to suggest, like, what kinds of things do you think of when you think of app development as a whole? What are the things that you think of when you think of our podcast? And reach out to us either on our Discord, on our live streams, on our social media, on Apple’s podcast reviews, with any ideas that you have for an app development podcast name, what we should be calling ourselves going forward. We’ll, probably not put this up exactly to a vote, but we would love to take whatever ideas you have into consideration.
Peter:
Yeah. Absolutely. Because for for better or worse, you know, when it started out and for the longest time, it was just me. And therefore, you know, at this point, so many folks come to me and know me and they’re like, oh, you’re compiled Swift. Yes.
Peter:
That that is part of the problem when you’re doing something like this is the branding works so well, but it works so well to brand it as me, which was never really a goal. It just worked out that way. But at this point and and as with our discord, right, I never I I didn’t want it to be a me thing. I Part of the reason for the name compile swift was, well, okay, firstly it’s catchy, right? But secondly, that it’s right in there, compilation.
Peter:
Right? It it I wanted it to become a community thing which it very much has, thanks to the listeners and, you know, like the dev club, discord and things like that. And therefore, I want to move this into a more of a, you know, yes, we host it. We do it. But it is a conversation with folks.
Peter:
It is a two way thing, and and to get away from, oh, the compiled swift guy. Right? I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s not hurt me at all. Far from it.
Peter:
But I don’t want it to be, you know, the thing that is Peter. Do you know what I mean? And so, that’s kind of what we’re looking for here and and also recognition because it’s it’s not right that for example, you know, poor Geoff. He comes along. He’s the co host.
Peter:
He’s great at it, but it’s like but it’s compiled swift and he’s that other guy. And and and and therefore we wanna sort of fix this glitch. Right? That’s it folks. So reach back to us.
Peter:
Right? There’s gonna be links in the show notes as usual. Best place to get us is always gonna be on the discord where all the other fantastic folks are including a lot of the listeners. But however you wanna do it, please reach back to us. We are here for you.
Peter:
That is part of the goal and the driver for this. And with that, that is what we’ve got in this episode. Geoff, let’s do it one more time for the last time on the what was Compile Swift podcast, now gonna be something else podcast. Where will they continue to find you?
Geoff:
Cocoatype.com on all of the socials and everything.
Peter:
There you go. You can find me. I’m still I’m still on compileswift.com. That’s the irony. We also need to find a new domain name.
Peter:
So, maybe. We’ll see. And you can reach me at peter Witham dot com. But again, go to the dev club discord. That’s the best place to get us and everybody else with a conversation.
Peter:
Take care, folks. We will speak to you again very soon. We promise.
