The Grandaddy of Swift Code Examples!
- Mar 16, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 21
The Grandaddy of Swift Code Examples!
If you have spent any amount of time learning Swift, you have almost certainly encountered code examples.
Every tutorial contains them.
Every book contains them.
Every blog post contains them.
The Swift Programming Language book contains hundreds of them.
The problem is that most examples live in isolation. A developer reads an article about protocols, follows a concurrency tutorial, watches a SwiftUI video, experiments with generics, and perhaps studies ARC before an interview. The examples are useful, but they are scattered across dozens of websites, books, videos, courses, and documentation pages.
Eventually something interesting happens.
You realise that learning Swift is not the difficult part.
Finding the example you need when you need it becomes the difficult part.
The Problem With Modern Swift Education
The Swift community is fortunate to have an enormous collection of learning resources.
Apple provides official documentation.
Paul Hudson provides Hacking with Swift.
Angela Yu has taught thousands of developers through her Udemy courses.
CodeWithChris helps complete beginners get started.
Kodeco contains years of articles and tutorials.
Stanford's CS193p course remains one of the most respected educational resources in the iOS community.
The problem is not a lack of information.
The problem is that information becomes fragmented over time.
A developer preparing for an interview might suddenly need to revisit ARC. The following day they may need a refresher on closures. A week later they may find themselves researching actors, property wrappers, access control, protocol extensions, value semantics, or generics.
The information exists, but it often requires jumping between multiple websites, browser tabs, videos, books, and code repositories.
This is particularly frustrating for experienced developers because they are rarely learning these concepts for the first time. More often they are simply trying to revisit knowledge they already acquired years earlier.
Building A Swift Revision Wall
The idea behind the 3DaysOfSwift playground collection was surprisingly simple.
What would happen if we gathered a large collection of Swift language topics into a single place and made every example downloadable, executable, and available directly inside Xcode?
Instead of reading about closures, you could open a playground and experiment with them immediately.
Instead of searching for a concurrency example, you could launch a playground dedicated to async and await.
Instead of hunting through documentation for a protocol example, you could open a playground focused entirely on protocols and protocol-oriented design.
Over time, that idea evolved into a growing wall of downloadable Swift resources covering many of the language features and concepts discussed throughout Apple's Swift Programming Language book and commonly explored throughout professional iOS development.
More Than Forty Downloadable Playgrounds
Today, the wall contains more than forty downloadable Xcode playgrounds covering twenty-nine Swift language features and concepts.
Topics include:
Protocols
Closures
Generics
ARC
Concurrency
Actors
Property Wrappers
Structures
Classes
Enumerations
Access Control
Error Handling
Extensions
Value Semantics
Reference Semantics
Opaque Types
Existential Types
Advanced Operators
The @main Attribute
Application Architecture
Each playground focuses on helping developers interact with the language directly rather than simply reading about it. Because the resources run inside Xcode, developers can modify examples, test assumptions, introduce errors, and observe how Swift behaves in real time.
This practical interaction is often where understanding develops most rapidly.
Why Xcode Matters
Many learning resources present Swift as static text on a webpage.
There is nothing wrong with this approach. Articles, books, and tutorials remain incredibly valuable. However, there is a significant difference between reading code and executing code.
When a developer opens a playground, changes a value, adds a new property, modifies a protocol, introduces a concurrency bug, or experiments with a generic type, the language becomes something they actively interact with rather than something they passively consume.
That feedback loop is difficult to replicate elsewhere.
The ability to observe Swift in action, test ideas immediately, and experiment without the overhead of creating a full application is one of the reasons playgrounds have remained such a powerful learning tool throughout the history of the language.
Not Designed For Complete Beginners
Interestingly, the playground wall was never intended to replace beginner learning resources.
If somebody is learning Swift for the first time, there are excellent places to start.
Apple's Swift book remains essential:
Apple's SwiftUI tutorials are outstanding:
Hacking with Swift continues to be one of the best community resources available:
CodeWithChris, Kodeco, Stanford CS193p, and Angela Yu's courses have also helped countless developers enter the industry.
Those resources teach Swift.
The playground wall serves a slightly different purpose.
Learning Swift And Studying Swift Are Different Activities
A pattern emerges as developers gain experience.
During the first year, they spend most of their time learning.
Several years later, they spend more time revising.
The language features they once studied intensively become familiar enough that they stop thinking about them. Eventually some concepts drift into the background simply because they are no longer being exercised regularly.
This often becomes obvious during technical interviews.
A developer may have used protocols for years while feeling slightly uncomfortable explaining protocol-oriented programming. They may understand ARC perfectly well while struggling to recall terminology they have not discussed recently. They may work with closures every day while finding it surprisingly difficult to explain capture lists under interview pressure.
This is where the playground wall becomes valuable because it allows developers to revisit important concepts quickly without searching across dozens of different resources.
Why We Call It The Grandaddy
Calling the collection "The Grandaddy of Swift Code Examples" is obviously a little tongue-in-cheek.
However, there is a serious idea underneath the joke.
Most Swift examples on the internet exist as individual fragments. A protocol example lives on one website. A concurrency example lives on another. An ARC example appears in a book. A generics example appears inside a tutorial. A property wrapper example appears in a WWDC session.
The wall attempts to bring a large collection of those concepts together into a single place where developers can browse, download, execute, modify, and study Swift directly inside Xcode.
For developers preparing for interviews, revisiting language features, or strengthening their understanding of Swift fundamentals, having those examples organised and accessible can save an enormous amount of time.
Final Thoughts
The Swift community has produced some of the best educational resources in the software industry. Apple, Hacking with Swift, Stanford, Kodeco, CodeWithChris, Angela Yu, and many others have helped developers learn the language and build successful careers. The goal of the 3DaysOfSwift playground wall is not to replace those resources. The goal is to complement them by providing a practical environment where developers can revisit the language itself through executable examples.
If learning Swift is about acquiring knowledge, studying Swift is about retaining it. The playground wall was built for developers who want a fast and practical way to keep that knowledge sharp.
Good luck.
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