My company Hearsay Systems organized an internal iOS development bootcamp, hosted by CodePath. I’ve been working with our mobile team a bit, and really want to hone my skills on app design, so this would be a great opportunity to dig into it. The only worry was that I haven’t done coding for a long long time (even though I have the background). I needed to polish my sense of coding before the class started, so I can catch up with the rest attendees — they are all full-time engineers.

Get started

Luckily, I know that Udacity has some free courses on iOS, so I headed there. I followed its tutorial and finished Pitch Perfect, an intro course to iOS development in Swift. You can also check out its other intermediate iOS development courses.

This helped me to reduce my fears about XCode and Swift :)

Pre-work for the bootcamp

Only those who were able to finish pre-work, aka “get warmed up with XCode and Swift”, can enroll in the class. I spent hours on it and here’s my final result. I’m very proud of myself!

It can definitely get better. There was a time that I wanted so much to have animations on the screens, but I was not able to do it, because I didn’t know how, so frustrating. I’m sure I’ll learn about animations down the road.

Another hiccup for me was github. Obviously, as a designer whose latest experience about version control software was SVN (almost 5 years ago), I needed to catch up. I had such a headache trying to figure out why after creating a Github repo, the XCode project folder I copied from another place was not accessible. I ended up discovering that creating folders in the repo solved the accessibility issue. Apparently, Github wanted to track project documents as soon as they’re born in the repo, not born at another place and moved into repo later. Anyway, problem solved, only after about six hours ;)

Onto the class!