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Point-Free is a video series exploring advanced topics in the Swift programming language, hosted by industry experts, Brandon and Stephen.
We dissect some of the most important and interesting topics in Swift programming frequently, and deliver them straight to your inbox.
We cover both abstract ideas and practical concepts you can start using in your code base immediately.
Download a fully-functioning Swift playground from the episode so you can experiment with the concepts discussed.
We transcribe each video by hand so you can search and reference easily. Click on a timestamp to jump directly to that point in the video.
We finish a sneak peek of our upcoming Structured Queries library by showing how queries built with the library can be reused and composed together, and how we can replace all of the raw queries in our application with simpler, safer query builders.
Last week we released SharingGRDB, an alternative to SwiftData powered by SQLite, but there are a few improvements we could make. Let’s take a look at some problems with the current tools before giving a sneak peek at the solution: a powerful new query building library that leverages many advanced Swift features that we will soon build from scratch.
We celebrate 7 years with a live stream! We discuss some recent updates around our popular Sharing library; open source SharingGRDB live, which is a new lightweight alternative to SwiftData that is powered by Sharing and GRDB; and we give a sneak peek of an upcoming series and library.
We add sorting to our SQL builder, which will give us a powerful, succinct syntax for controlling the order of results. We will start small but build up to parameter packs and even a custom result builder to get the most flexibility out of our API.
We now have a type-safe syntax for generating SELECT statements using key paths to the columns we want to select, but while this syntax is nice and what many existing libraries use, we can do better. Let’s introduce a more advanced syntax that leverages variadic generics and supports more complex query expressions.
We begin to build a type-safe SQL query builder from scratch by familiarizing ourselves with the SELECT statement. We will explore the SQLite documentation to understand the syntax, introduce a type that can generate valid statements, and write powerful inline snapshot tests for their output.
SwiftUI is Apple’s declarative successor to UIKit and AppKit, and provides a wonderful set of tools for building applications quickly and effectively. It also provides a wonderful opportunity to explore problems around architecture and composition.
The Swift language has grown over the years and become more and more powerful. It now boosts a comprehensive static type system (generics, existentials…), a suite of concurrency tools (actors, dynamic isolation…), and most recently even ownership capabilities (consuming, borrowing, non-copyable types…). In “Back to basics” we will focus on just one part of the language in order to uncover the deep theory behind that feature as well as provide concrete advice for writing real-world code.
Architecture is a tough problem and there’s no shortage of articles, videos and open source projects attempting to solve the problem once and for all. In this collection we systematically develop an architecture from first principles, with an eye on building something that is composable, modular, testable, and more.
If you have ever created a binding using the get:set: initializer, you may want to reconsider. Doing so can hurt SwiftUI’s ability to animate your view. Luckily there is a better way. You can leverage @dynamicMemberLookup and subscripts to derive new bindings in a way that allows SwiftUI to propertly track where the binding came from.
You may have heard that “mocks are bad” and that they cause you to test the mock rather than your application’s actual feature. That doesn’t have to be the case. It is totally fine to mock a dependency to a system that you do not control, such as the file system. You do not need to test that saving and loading with that dependency works, but you should test how your application behaves when it tries to load or save data. For example, if loading data throws an error, do you show an alert to the user?
Watch us live write a complex SQL query to load “really important reminders”, and seamlessly integrate that state in our app. The database will automatically be observed for changes so that we can re-execute our query, and the view will immediately update when the data changes.
Due to the amount of discussions that reference @pointfreeco, we added their logo as an emoji in our slack.
Thanks @mbrandonw @stephencelis for the very pedagogical series with @pointfreeco Excited and looking forward to learn from the series
Please stop releasing one amazing video after the other! I'm still at Episode 15! #pointfreemarathon #androiddevhere
The best thing, that happened to me for a while. @mbrandonw and @stephencelis really provide a lot of new information according to #ios development and #functionalprogramming. All info could be used in real production without boring academics.
We have this thing called WWTV at #PlanGrid where we mostly just listen to @mbrandonw and @stephencelis talk about functions.
Really love this episode - thanks @mbrandonw + @stephencelis! Understanding Swift types in terms of algebraic data types is such an elegant way of seeing the # of possible values your Swift types will represent 🤯 #Simplifyallthethings #GoodbyeComplexity
Three recent @pointfreeco episodes were so interesting I stayed in the treadmill 3x as long as usual and watched them all in a row! Walking may be challenging later/tomorrow... 😮
@pointfreeco ❤️: Thank you! 🧠: … The brain can’t say anything. It is blown away (🤯)!
Through videos you constantly introduce ideas and patterns only to later reformulate them into more general ideas. This is awesome and helped me understand a lot of programming concepts. Well done!
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