Now's a great time to learn Swift, because the iPhone is the biggest device out there and you could definitely build a career out of it and become very successful and potentially build the next app that everyone's using. Hi, my name is Chris. I've been at Meta for seven years and the last four years I've been working on Instagram. I first found out about Swift when the language was introduced about eight years ago. I found it to be this language which will make building an app even faster, even more beautiful. I love the simplicity. If you're writing code in a lower-level language, a lot of time you have to think about memory and these lower-level concepts. You're not really spending a lot of time just creating something beautiful or making something like feel the way you want it to feel as you scroll through the app. I think Swift really tries to make it so you can spend a lot more time thinking about that, really polishing the experience, building something that you really enjoy using, as opposed to trying to deal with some technical details that maybe are not really that relevant. Swift, I think it's still kind of like ramping up. Still I think in the industry is seen as kind of really only solving the iOS problem and kind of only really working on iPhones. I think in the future, Apple really wants to make it a language that's very versatile, that can do anything, maybe something like a JavaScript. But I think we're still far from that world. The questions ask if should I spend my career in Swift? It's really a question of how long has the iPhone going to be around. If you believe the iPhone is going to be around for 10, 20, 30 years, then Swift is going to be around for at least 10, 20, or 30 years. I would say pretty much every app that is on your phone right now probably has some Swift's, I think right now. If you really see the iPhone as like a way to build something incredible and distribute something incredible. It's definitely the language of choice. Do you really want to build something and be able to see it right away? It's always, I think the most motivating to build something, to create something from scratch, to see something onscreen, be able to press it, touch it like kind of how that interaction with it. I think a lot of times when people will start programming they'll create a website, they'll see something that's really, really cool. But all of us use our phones all the time every day. I think that feeling of putting something on your phone and creating a button or something where you could kind of go through your pictures or do something cool with it. It's just such a powerful feeling when you realize like wow, I can create anything. Big companies, tend to want to hire, maybe a little more experienced engineers when it comes to mobile development, I think the reason for that is it can be hard for a lot of mobile engineers to really get into a large legacy code base, maybe because a lot of big companies have a lot of Objective-C or lower-level languages. Most companies that I read about these days, especially in terms of startups, everyone's kind of mobile-first. If they're mobile-first, they're going to have at least a couple of iOS engineers, a couple of Android engineers. There's just tons of opportunities out there right now. It's really getting to that breaking of the career as a mobile engineer and really build out some amazing apps or whatever into a lot is Swift engineers who get really excited about building products. There's a type of engineer who is this hybrid of a product builder, a product designer. They really, really care about the experience themselves. Engineers like that. They want to spend their time in the product space like building something, designing, and making it beautiful. They don't want to spend a lot of time maybe in the infrastructure aspects of it. A lot of those engineers really like simple languages that help you abstract and spend your time kind of getting that aspect right rather than focusing on different sets of problems. Those engineers get really, really excited about Swift. I think in every industry, whether it's movie-making or programming, there's the people that want to create something, want to leave their mark. I think find that passion and that drive in what you want to create and go after it. I think if your angle is okay, I'm going to be most motivated to create something because I use my iPhone. If I put an app on the App Store and get my friends to use it, that's going to be the way to get them interested in when I'm creating then Swift is the choice for you.
