Explore the wonderful world of advanced Swift.

Point-Free is a video series exploring advanced topics in the Swift programming language, hosted by industry experts, Brandon and Stephen.

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What to expect

New content regularly

We dissect some of the most important and interesting topics in Swift programming frequently, and deliver them straight to your inbox.

Wide variety of topics

We cover both abstract ideas and practical concepts you can start using in your code base immediately.

Playground downloads

Download a fully-functioning Swift playground from the episode so you can experiment with the concepts discussed.

Video transcripts

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.

Free episodes

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Episode 291 • Aug 19, 2024

We are going to take a Swift feature into the browser. We will set up a WebAssembly application from scratch, show how to run and debug it, and even set up some basic UI. And then we will integrate our existing model into it, all powered by the magic of Swift’s Observation framework.

Free 32 min
Episode 290 • Aug 12, 2024

It’s time to go cross-platform! We will take a feature written in Swift and use it in vastly different situations, including not only SwiftUI and UIKit, but beyond Apple’s frameworks and ecosystems. We will start with a baby step and introduce our feature to a third party view paradigm, Airbnb’s Epoxy.

Free 33 min
Episode 282 • Jun 3, 2024

We finish building a modern UIKit application with brand new state-driven tools, including a complex collection view that can navigate to two child features. And we will see that, thanks to our back-port of Swift’s observation tools, we will be able to deploy our app all the way back to iOS 13.

Free 31 min

All episodes

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Episode 301 • Nov 4, 2024

SQLite is one of the most well-crafted, battle-tested, widely-deployed pieces of software in history, and it’s a great fit for apps with more complex persistence needs than user defaults or a JSON file. Let’s get familiar with the library, starting with a crash course in interacting with C code from Swift.

Subscriber-only 36 min
Episode 300 • Oct 28, 2024

We zoom out a bit to get a greater appreciation for how Equatable and Hashable are used throughout the greater language and ecosystem, including actors, standard library types, SwiftUI, and more.

Subscriber-only 40 min
Episode 299 • Oct 21, 2024

We’ve studied Equatable and Hashable, their laws, and saw how value types as simple bags of data easily conform via “structural” equality. What about reference types? Reference types are an amalgamation of data and behavior, and that data can be mutated in place at any time, so how can they reasonably conform to these protocols?

Subscriber-only 32 min

Collections

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SwiftUI

Collection

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.

37 episodes 23 hr 50 min

Back to basics

Collection

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.

4 episodes 2 hr 22 min

Composable Architecture

Collection

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.

92 episodes 58 hr 30 min

A better way to create SwiftUI bindings

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.

Watch 7 min

Are mocks bad?

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 (after all, that’s the mocked behavior!), but you should test how your application behaves when it tries to load or save data. For example, is data saved after each change to your app’s data? Or, if loading data throws an error, do you show an alert to the user?

Watch 2 min

How should you perform async work in a non-async context?

We often need to perform async work when there is no async context, such as in SwiftUI button action closures. In such cases it seems that you have no choice but to spin up an unstructured Task, but you may have heard that doing so it bad. So what are you to do? Well, there is an easy answer…

Watch 1 min

What people are saying

Felipe Espinoza
@fespinozacast

Watching the key path @pointfreeco episodes, and I am like 🤯🤯🤯. Super cool

Meghan Kane
@meghafon

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

David Piper
@HeyDaveTheDev

Just finished the mini-series on enum properties by @pointfreeco! They pointed out what’s missing from enums in Swift and used SwiftSyntax to generate code to add the missing parts. Thanks for your work @stephencelis and @mbrandonw! #pointfree

Ilya
@rehsals

After diving into @pointfreeco series reading Real World Haskell doesn’t seem all that intimidating after all. Major takeaway: the lesser is word “monad” is mentioned the better 😅

Ferran Pujol Camins
@ferranpujolca

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!

Boris Bielik
@h3sperian

This is surely one of the best shows for Swift folks out there! The content and explanation is at a really high bar!

William Savary
@NSHumanBeing

Just became a subscriber! I'm binge watching episodes now! Great content! I'm learning so much from you guys. The repo for the site is the best go-to reference for a well done project and swift-web is something I am definitely going to use in my projects. Thanks for everything!

Arjun Nayini
@anayini

We have this thing called WWTV at #PlanGrid where we mostly just listen to @mbrandonw and @stephencelis talk about functions.

Mike Abidakun
@mabidakun

Every episode has been amazing on Pointfree, yet somehow, you've managed to make these Parser combinator episodes even better!!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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