Episode description

The O’Reilly Programming Podcast: Applying the latest language features to build video games and containerized microservices.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk about Swift with Paris Buttfield-Addison, co-founder of Secret Lab, a mobile development studio that builds games and apps for mobile devices. He is the co-author of Learning Swift, and a presenter of the Learning Path Getting Started with Swift on the iPad and the video Ultimate Swift Programming.

Discussion points:

• The Swift Playground app, which Buttfield-Addison calls “a great programming testing environment and a concise way to get people up to speed with the language.”
• The appeal of the Swift language to game developers. “Swift is one of the few opportunities we have to develop games in a modern language for a platform we know people will actually use,” he says.
• Building containerized microservices with Swift: “It’s really interesting to see how far Swift has come in the three years it’s been around. You’re able to write a fairly full-fledged web framework, put it in a container, and deploy it,” he says.
• Buttfield-Addison explains why it’s easy to build a game in Unity: “You have to write less code, so fewer mistakes are on your side, and more is taken care of by the engine.”

I also talk with Brian Foster, content lead at O’Reilly and co-chair of O’Reilly’s Software Architecture Conference, about some of the most discussed topics (including microservices, serverless architecture, and reactive architecture) at the conference in April 2017.

Other links:

• The free report What’s New in Swift 3, by Paris Buttfield-Addison, John Manning, and Tim Nugent
• The next O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, October 16-18, 2017, in London
• IBM’s Kitura framework for building microservices written in Swift
• Apple’s SpriteKit for game design
• The books Mobile Game Development with Unity and Swift Development for the Apple Watch, co-authored by Buttfield-Addison
• Buttfield-Addison is part of the organizing team for the /dev/world/2017 conference, August 28-30, 2017, in Melbourne