I have a project idea that has been bugging me for years, and I finally feel like it’s time to work on it. It’s an app, with a server-side back end. In the past I had been focused on startups and making a business, but I realized that at this point in my life and career, I’d rather stretch and expand my technical skills. Admitting that lets me focus on it as a cool technology project, and demands that I learn new things, as opposed to starting a company, which would require me to use what I could be most productive with right away.

I’ve been a Clojure fan for years but was never had more than intermediate mastery of it, and never used any of the amazing cutting edge libraries from that community. But the combination of ClojureScript, various React wrappers (Om, Reagent, etc), React Native wrappers, and Datomic is such a compelling stack that it has kicked me into action. This talk from David Nolen is a great summary of the state of advanced Clojure:

As much as I would love to lean on the Clojure stuff, I have been burned in the past when I didn’t know the stack underlying a cool library. So over the next few months, I’m going to learn Swift and iOS, and then React. For Swift, I’m using this course on iOS 9 and Swift Mastery. Several iOS developers recommended the Stanford iOS course from iTunes U, but I wanted a course that covered the newest version of Swift, because of the big recent changes.

I plan on writing up my experience learning Swift, and downloading Xcode 7 (3.6 GB) gave me plenty of time to write this!