Ever since the App Store opened its doors in 2008 I’ve dreamt of building my own app. However, way back then it seemed like a pipe dream. The digital revolution was hooking me into user experience, but I wasn’t in tech, and my coding experience was limited to poorly built side-projects in HTML and CSS. 

It was 7 years later, in 2015, that I finally attempted to move closer to my dream by signing up for a subscription on Treehouse. The knowledgable tutors, friendly experience, and promise of achieving my dreams filled me with an excitement I hadn’t felt since my Dad surprised me with Independence Day on VHS. I gave up after 2 months.

Since then my coding journey has been a cycle of failure. Every time I started anew the cycle would repeat where desperation followed excitement as the difficulty curve broke my spirit, condemning me to an eternity of uncompleted tutorials and half-finished Xcode projects. Even Angela Yu's highly praised iOS course couldn’t save me.

Last year I decided to give it one last shot as I came across Paul Hudson's 100 Days Of SwiftUI. This time something felt different. Paul’s communication style and regular acknowledgement of the difficulty curve made me realise something that I should have years ago; grit, determination, and consistency will pay off providing you’re consistently showing up.

Lo and behold, in April 2024 I started the course. 100 days later I completed every single tutorial. Thanks, Paul. You achieved the impossible. In the time since, I’ve cherry-picked tutorials that interest me the most; SwiftData, Charts, app-specific builds and more. Something’s starting to stick.

While I feel like real progress has been made, doing a bunch of tutorials isn’t actually getting me closer to my goal. So, at the end of last year I declared to the design team that 2025 is the year I ship my first app. I’m determined to do it. In fact, I’ve already started. The app is a “simple” alcohol tracker that I’m calling Units. While simple, it has a lot of core Swift concepts that will help me grow as an indie developer, setting me up for more complex projects in the future.

I realise this category is already well-covered, but that’s not the point, and I don’t really care. This is purely about getting something out there and seeing how it goes. 

One more thing. In the last year I’ve really come to enjoy the #BuildInPublic movement and want to take more of an active role. Therefore, as a side project, I aim to share progress as I go to keep accountable for progress, and hopefully help others avoid my many mistakes to come.

If you want to follow along, I’ll be writing more here, and on Threads. I already have things to write about, I just need to make sure it doesn’t stop me from doing the thing. I'm 10 years late already.