SwiftLee Weekly - Issue 304


This week's SwiftLee Weekly covers:

  • The importance of being your own end user
  • SwiftLee in 2025: A year in review
  • NSSpain Conference videos!

Enjoy this week's SwiftLee Weekly!

THIS WEEK'S BLOG POST

SwiftLee in 2025: A full year as an indie developer

It's that time of the year: reflecting on milestones and achievements. I can't believe the year is already coming to an end, but looking back, I'm fulfilled. In this week's article, I'm sharing my highlights and I look forward to future milestones.

SPONSORED

RocketSim: Build iOS apps up to 2x faster with enhanced Xcode Simulator tools

Boost your productivity with powerful features like network monitoring, location simulation, design comparison overlays, grids and rulers, Simulator Airplane Mode, and professional captures with device bezels. Developers report significantly faster workflows when building, testing, and verifying apps. Download from the Mac App Store.

CURATED FROM THE COMMUNITY

Shipping at Inference-Speed | Peter Steinberger

When I met Peter Steinberger last October, I was impressed by his AI workflow. He’s now sharing all the details in this article, which I’m sure you can learn from!
steipete.me

Explicit Dependency Injection → Livsy Code

How do you deal with dependency injection in your apps? A singleton? It might not always be needed, and Artem Mirzabekian is here to share why.
livsycode.com

AI (Without the Hype)

NSSpain released their 2025 edition talk recordings, and they’re a great watch for the holidays. Here’s one by Joe Fabisevich that I’m sure will inspire many of you.
build.ms

Swift Package Manager Mirrors for Local Development

An interesting approach to tweaking an internal Swift package that a project depends on by using dependency mirroring.
kunat.dev

How to Find a Winning App Idea (Before You Waste Months Building the Wrong One)

You have an app idea, and you directly start building. I mean, AI makes that easy these days. But what if you can prevent yourself from building the wrong app idea?
youtube.com

SWIFT EVOLUTION

An overview of last week's Swift Proposal state changes. Check them out when they're in review, as it's your opportunity to influence the direction of Swift's future.

There have not been any state changes in the past 7 days.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON

Eating my own RocketSim-Food

This week I realized something interesting: I'm no longer an end-user of RocketSim myself as much as I used to be.

I knew this, of course, but I didn't realize it enough. Back in the days, I worked on iOS apps on a daily basis at WeTransfer. I was in a constant need of what RocketSim offers. These days, I'm developing new RocketSim features based on creative insights.

When I started the From App Idea to 10K MRR YouTube Series, I also started working on an iOS app. I became my own end-user again! The impact of it is just unmatched. Features I thought worked great, don't work how I imagined it at all. They're not bad, I'm just able to apply my user-experience study background more precisely.

It results in a parallel development experience. While developing the app for the YouTube series, I'm also actively improving RocketSim. Small UX improvements, but also large stability improvements for something like the Network monitoring feature.

At the same time, I'm embracing AI. In fact, AI is writing much more code than I do these days. Anything I can do to make AI more knowledgable on the outcome of the code it writes can improve the development cycle. This is where the future of RocketSim comes into place: I want it to give AI agents eyes.

One of the first things I've been running into are network request optimizations. I noticed duplicate requests in RocketSim's Network Monitoring, but what if AI could notice these? What if I could hook up an MCP server and let AI tell me what to improve? What if AI could tell me what opportunities there are inside the network responses?

Becoming my own end user has changed my perspective again. I'm back to ideation creativity, and I'm embracing it.

This is also the final SwiftLee Weekly of 2025. With that, I want to thank you for all your support, for continuously reading my newsletter, and I want to wish you all the best for 2026!

Antoine

SwiftLee Weekly by Antoine van der Lee

Swift Evolution updates, 5 top community articles covering Swift development topics.

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