Swift Guild
Article Summary
Taylor Ledingham from Hootsuite reveals how their iOS team mastered Swift in just 90 minutes per week. When Apple dropped a completely new language in 2014, most developers panicked—but Hootsuite's Guild system turned it into a team superpower.
In 2014, Apple released Swift and gave iOS developers a massive challenge: learn an entirely new language while still shipping features. Hootsuite's engineering team used their Guild system (dedicated weekly learning sessions) to tackle Swift collectively, turning what seemed like an impossible task into structured team growth.
Key Takeaways
- Weekly 90-minute Guild sessions focused on Swift tutorials, challenges, and coding standards
- Team solved Ray Wenderlich coding challenges together, learning variadic parameters and higher-order functions
- Shared knowledge sessions built confidence to write and modify production Swift code
- Guild summaries posted on Yammer helped recruit talent from other language backgrounds
Dedicating 90 minutes weekly to collaborative learning gave Hootsuite's iOS team the technical foundations and confidence to adopt Swift in production code.
About This Article
iOS developers at Hootsuite needed to learn Swift's variadic parameters and higher-order functions like map, reduce, and filter. These concepts didn't exist in Objective-C, and the team had to pick them up while keeping production code moving.
Taylor Ledingham's team worked through Ray Wenderlich's Programming Challenge #3 together. They used downcasting to the 'Any' type alias and wrote solutions as single return statements instead of loops.
Team members became confident writing and modifying Swift code in production on their own. Shared design patterns and best practices made it faster for the iOS team to solve problems.