Paul Hudson, creator of Hacking with Swift

Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, I'm sitting here with Paul Hudson, he's my next guest on my interview podcast. Basically, most people know him as being the person behind hacking with Swift. But probably there's a lot more to this guy, then only just his website. So we'll dig into that in this interview with him. And we'll see what kind of little gems we can dig up in his past. So hi, Paul, how are you doing? Paul Hudson: I'm doing good. And I'm already confused. I'm pretty sure my life is like 24/7 Swift or that's what folks tell me. Never Sleeps. He's a robot, all that kind of jazz, you know? So yeah, it's just apparently nonstop swift for me. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Because every time that you publish something new on your website, people are also always amazed about how quick and how fast after the announcements and released by Apple, you actually have the content available? How do you manage that? Paul Hudson: I think what people don't realize is that the majority of my content isn't publicly available. You're seeing a slice of what I actually work on. You know, I have books on Mac OS, and watch OS, for example, look and see viewers. I've got a whole hacking reserve Plus subscription, which is all for subscribers only. So what do you see? Oh, yeah, Paul never sleeps. Paul works so hard. You're seeing 35% of my output, right? Imagine if you saw the rest of the stuff. I'm working on all the other things, all the book updates and similar. There's there's a heck of a lot that I'm working on. And I think nearly all of it comes from the same fundamental secret, which is far too much coffee. Now. Just kidding. Just kidding. It is work on what I'm excited on. What I genuinely am jazzed about right now is what I write about best. And so people see me jump around wildly from I'm being totally psyched about what you're up to right now. localization. And then next week, honestly, who knows. And I just get excited about stuff. I try stuff, break it, try stuff, break it again, again, again, and then write up my results. That's the entire Paul Hudson business marketing plans such attitudes, it's not very complex. Jeroen Leenarts: So how long have you been doing hacking with Swift? Paul Hudson: Why started at the same year, Swift was launched started in I think, October that year. And of the month after swift went final, sort of one month final. Jeroen Leenarts: How many years is that? Actually, because we're at swift five now. So that must be like Paul Hudson: 553. Yeah, so it was 2014. Whales, which started. So. So one of them now. Yeah, Jeroen Leenarts: but what were you doing? Before hacking with Swift? Paul Hudson: I was a full time iOS developer, like a lot of folks. And I had a lot of fun. You can obviously have a great time being iOS developer. I was working full time on iOS from iOS, I think four, point something point two ish, up to 10, nine, maybe nine ish. Okay. And then also, I've been doing iPhone West. Before that. I did I find I was three beforehand. But that was not full time. That was just in my spare time. Yeah, I was working as a developer having a lot of fun. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so let's hit the rewind button. Because when did you get an interest in programming computers, electronics. Paul Hudson: Ah, I'm one of those terribly boring geeks who did it from a very young age. And you know, I remember back in the old days of computing back back when things were made of stone, you'd get by MS DOS, and it would come with a massive manual explaining how das word. And it was a really comprehensive manual wasn't just like, you know, CD MK, Dyer and so forth. Yeah, it was really thick. But at the back, you'd say hey, here's how you can make your own batch files. Here's how you can run commands, so forth. And I read through that and thinking out some elite coder learning to make batch files when I was in my early teens, it makes the computer go beep. Pretty much yeah, I made increasingly complex batch files very, very long eventually, and then ended up getting into Games Workshop. I know that gi Rambo got into as well. He also had Games Workshop as a way to make games the kid and impress your friends by making games about them, basically. So hacking from an early age just trying things out, you know, Jeroen Leenarts: so So what make and model was the first computer that you got your hands on Paul Hudson: the very first one with a 286 we only had it for a very brief period of time. The first one I really remember the first actual PC we bought together was a 486 SX 25. Jeroen Leenarts: When in doubt, and model number oh, yeah, what I had Paul Hudson: 127 megabyte hard drive. And I sound like when I was a teenager, people saying when I learned to program we had punch cards and out of saying how 227 megabyte hard disk and I was trying to explain to my kid that my Mac in front of me here has an eight terabyte SSD and like putting that into gigabytes for was a massive leak. And then from there to gigabytes like the difference in the last 20 years is astonishing. Anyway. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, I got started on onset expectrum The things by car. Oh, it's a it's a robbery keyboard. Paul Hudson: Yeah, I was like your PC land. Yeah, of course everyone's a spectrum. We had a 48k with a plus two, we had a plus three. They were great machines. My dad actually made a game for plus two years ago. wasn't wasn't good. But he said he made one. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, played. I played a lot of manic minor I remember. Yeah, I'm trying Paul Hudson: I played was the game, the Kmart gauntlet, I played a lot of gauntlet, classic game run around killing ghosts and stuff. That's a classic game. Jeroen Leenarts: So but when you were messing around with, with those patch files, how old were you then, Paul Hudson: you know, I guess around 13 or so if I had to guess it only really kicked off, I think at 16. When on 15 inch, perhaps. I used to read magazines at the time regularly. There's one called PC plus magazine that was very popular. I'd buy every month they'd have software on the front of the magazine to do stuff. And once they gave away a very, very cut down version of Visual Basic. It was Visual Basic for custom control edition, I think it was called as designs, you could make your own controls like little widgets, like a little button or gauge or whatever. And this was what I had to work with us as working away. You couldn't show windows, you'd just have one window. And that was it. All you could do is this one thing. But then at 1616, my brother went to university, he's older than me. And he signed up for Microsoft's student scheme. And they mailed him Visual Studio, his visual C++ is VB six that had everything. I got my first time some actual software I could build actual things with. And it kind of exploded from there at 17. I took on vast amounts of PHP 18. I jumped ship to Delphi at the time. And it sort of just took on more and more speed from there really? Jeroen Leenarts: So did you did you have any formal education related to computer science or anything? Paul Hudson: Yeah, like I said, one of those very boring kids who could became laser laser focused on computing science. So for us, that's a GCSE at age 16 your exams not and then it's a level at 16 to 18. I had a levels in between sites as well. And then a degree in computer science at 21. So it was computer science, computing science and thinking science. And it's becoming more and more blinkered laser focused on this one topic, nothing else mattered. Just coding coding was my entire dream. And I was I was vastly misguided. But Jeroen Leenarts: so what university did you do your studies at the Paul Hudson: University of Greenwich in London, which is a beautiful building. It's the Royal Naval College, which is how many hundreds of years old? And there's an overarching, really, you know, huge pillars and columns and stuff of gorgeous painted ceilings, and some students try sleeping in the corner. But it was a lovely place to stay. Jeroen Leenarts: And it sounds like you have some fond memories of the place. Paul Hudson: I do. Yeah, I do. Mostly wasting time. I was a terrible student. I was really, really bad. I had such a long time of doing computing by myself. That when they came in said, hey, look, here's Java, I'm like, Yeah, okay, Java, I remember that from a long time ago. Come on, let's move on to the next thing. It all fell a bit 510 years ago for me. And so I remember, I looked at my exam results on the back of my certificate, and actually missed some final exams. I didn't even bother going to the final exam. I thought I don't I don't need this anymore is pointless. I got my first job in March before graduation, because in June, I see walked out and went to a job. Instead, I still managed to graduate with an upper second class degree. So I did okay, despite looking at an exam, I didn't just didn't focus didn't care didn't think they thought I was beyond it. And I was just doing so much better stuff in my head at the time. I was wrong, of course. But Jeroen Leenarts: okay. And you mentioned your first job. What was it, it was doing Paul Hudson: web stuff at a sort of digital real estate company in the very center of London, they were a spinoff from an actual real estate company. He used to build, you know, shopping malls and stuff. And they spent a lot of money and like silly amounts of money being building huge four, five meter models of shopping malls before building them. This is exactly what's gonna look like with people in the day to day, and they spun off this company to say actually, can't we just use 3d Studio Max at the time now 3ds Max, to model the thing virtually. And so they were building this plugin. So you could basically Model A 3ds Max and walk around the world directly in 3ds Max, and the same time and they brought me on at the time to do web stuff for them to build the website, make the website work and yada yada yada. And I did that I brought in immediately what Delphi introduced some internals. Okay, I started bringing PHP in. It was a lot of stuff being born at the same time, just because I was kind of having fun. Jeroen Leenarts: So And what year did you graduate? 2001 2001. Okay, so you worked at this real estate related company creating web stuff to properly sell they're? Yeah, they're they're mock ups. And they're the actual product, which is shopping malls. Getting crazy if you think about it. And so how did you go on from there? Paul Hudson: So after about a year, I was reading a magazine, again, called Linux format. Because I was running all my stuff on Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, the LAMP stack. Yeah. And I've read the magazine just to find out more about Linux that came with these cover discs. We can get Linux version to try it and store get he had he had it was it was great. And I at this time, I've been doing PHP for about five years. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so you're stuck with first company quite long. Actually. No, no, Paul Hudson: I started in that 97 doing PHP? Approximately, yeah, I did it through School University. And then I did it at this company for one year at the time. 2002 ish. And the magazine said they, you know, they had tutorials on Ruby and Perl. Actually, the poem was done by Charlie Stross, who now writes fantastic sci fi books, by the way. Anyway, so they had no tutorial on PHP. And I thought, well, you know, at that age, you have no idea how bad you are at the world. How clueless you are, you think you're great. Everything's I said, Hey, I could write you a PHP tutorial. And they went, Yeah, fine. Sure. Right. I didn't I didn't tell the company I just wrote tutorial mailed it off. They said, Great, put into print. Another one. And another one. Another one that and I think after like issues, I realized they were hiring for writers, for staff writers, which is sort of position of to base the writing monkey to come in and write stuff, basically. So I applied to be a staff writer at this magazine, then its format. They interviewed me and told me how much they paid, which is way less than what I was on, because it wasn't in London anymore. It wasn't coding anymore. I was writing. I said, Yeah, sure, like fun. And I went, and they immediately made me what's called a reviews editor, which is one up from a staff writer, but still fairly, Junior. I left coding to do magazines. Yeah, I joined this magazine company, I moved to a town called bath, which is why I left still, many, many years later, and worked as a journalist for the next eight years. Jeroen Leenarts: So was that also the moment that you was bitten by the writing books, so to speak, so that you actually discover that creating content and sharing it with the world was something that you actually liked doing a Paul Hudson: little bit? A number of things happened at the same time? First, I realized that being a journalist is great fun. I mean, honestly, I know it pays write badly, but there are very few better jobs in the world. You travel the world, meeting folks, interviewing them, having nice lunches, and fly home and write about it a little bit. And then go to the pub, we spent a long time a long time in the pub planning the next issue, when really was in a saying in elite to frontier. Why did the spaceships have tires if they were in space, wasting hours and hours and hours of time while drinking lots of beer. There's a fantastic job. And that was one thing, I loved the job very much because it was a great job. It was going nowhere, but it was a great job. The second thing was that the company obviously had a vested interest in making me a better writer. And so it's sent me on training courses, regular training courses, to do writing to do cover design to do management and much, much more. And the skills they taught me there I still remember today, very, very important things I remember going into a review, writing day long workshop how to review a product. And after lunch, there was an activity with like, there's like 15 of us in the room from various magazines. There's me PC Gamer tech radar, whoever at random room right from different magazines. And they said okay, we've been doing a whole morning of practice so far. It's now the afternoon. Let's put your skills to the test. We got to do is take these eight bottles of water, like branded bottle drinking water evianne and similar and write a 200 word review, okay, of all late at the same time, like a group test. Which of these bottles of water is the best? And I wrote an atrocious article like really bad because I went Okay, listen, you've got 200 words. Write this thing in. You've got eight bottles of water to you've got 12 and a half words describe each bottle of water. So I wrote this thing as basically like, Morse code almost, it's like, highly ended in there or like a telegram, you know, really condensed words of stuff. And it was completely meaningless. Not interesting. And at three were bad article, whereas the neck next to me was, I think it was PC format, one of the games magazines at the time. They said, Okay, they're eight bottles of water, these four, they're all junk, forget about those, I won't even write about those. And just pick four because waters water, right, there's these four, don't care, toss them away, all the remaining for these three, okay, I'll give those 40 words each. And the remaining one is the winner, I have an 80 words, bang, never a killer article. And so it forced me to recalibrate in many, many ways. Anyone could sit down and write 800 words about a random topic, sitting down and writing 200 words about the right topic. That's significantly harder. Okay, so the company had a vested interest in making me a better writer, a better designer, a better editor of magazines. So a number of things happening at the same time. And of course, at the same time, also, I had a lot of free time. So I was still doing vast amounts of coding for the magazine writing tutorials on PHP, or C sharp, or Ruby or even Python sometimes. But also, in my spare time doing vast amounts of hacking on elements, they still long enough, basically. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so you were like a staff writer, and then the review writer. And and and what happened after that, because there's still some time between that and you starting hacking with Swift? If I'm correct, Paul Hudson: yes. So I joined there around 2003. Approximately, most track. And then I wasn't I roughly eight years as a journalist, but we slightly more I can't quite recall the last two years or so I was actually editor of the magazine, which is again, great fun. You know, that's where every month you've got 133 pages that are completely blank. What do you want to put in there? Yeah, what's interesting right now, what is the zeitgeist of Linux right now? And so you're talking to folks giving them ideas, getting ideas, you know, really in touch with community? Again, a really, really fun job. But, you know, late iOS, too early iOS three, I'd already been hacking on at this point. Windows Mobile on Xbox 360. On Windows itself on Linux, you name it. I've been I've been making apps for it cuz I just have it stay still long enough. I write software for right. That's my way of thinking. Yeah. And then I wrote for iPhone, at the time, iPhone 3g, round about iOS 3.1, I released my first apps to the App Store. And we think the company then said, Hey, we think the iPad which is just about to land 3.2, it can be absolutely huge. We want in on this money. We want to make apps for this and had this plan. Can we make 10 apps in the next three to four months? And they said, Okay, we need to find someone who can do that. And I have to be there. They drafted me in. And we made a big, big stack of pretty big apps in a very tiny amount of time. And it was an absolute blast. I loved it. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah. But there was the time that you could throw anything into the App Store, and you could have some amount of success. And if you had a good app, you actually had great success then. Paul Hudson: Yeah, but I mean, like one of the apps I worked on for them was recycled cycling news, which is the world's biggest cycling website. And I made an app for them to do cycling is on the phone. So it wasn't like, Hey, is a throwaway app for fun. This is a huge app we made you do a huge community. And it was just great fun, because a company, they want results. They want success, but they didn't know what it looked like. And so we're given a lot of free will to look around, try things explore, and just explore and see what happens and get results that way. So it's quite exploratory, but I really enjoyed it. I mean, criteria was, it was old Objective C code fight with a monkey, that's called version fine. That was That wasn't very powerful. IOS device is fine. But we still did a heck of a lot with what we had. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, spending a day on getting good scroll performance and stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So um, so you were still working at the magazine then? Yeah. And and so they basically as a magazine, they got into iOS or app development really? Paul Hudson: Well, the magazines irrelevant magazine was point was still Linux, okay. was done with apps at all, as all this freelance work. That's okay. Listen for your input through this, we'll pay you extra to do these apps. Fine. I'll happily take your money. As I built, I built like, say 11 or so apps for them. And then they said, Okay, this is what really well, we want to make an app team inside the company. Yeah. And at this point, I'd made stacks of apps for them, including some some very important ones. I got lots of my own personal apps at this time we're talking you know, I think there's at least 50 or so at this point, personal apps. They obviously only had really one choice. They brought me on As the app developer role, to start a new team to hire a team to make up the thing at the company, and our target, then was iOS five, yeah, because I was five introduced newsstand, which, of course, would be a huge release for the magazine industry. And so we're working on a gigantic, gigantic app launch, I really want to push back to iOS five, the companies that don't make it forward iOS 4.3 At the time, so we work in is huge. I think the biggest app ever worked on being pushed through quickly in time for 4.3 ish, approximately. And then everything else, all our other titles, were to land on iOS five. So I was brought on to build a team. So I was hiring folks interviewing galore, training them up, getting things moving, building a code base, and promoting as fast as we can get things actually moving in time for iOS five, and you stand. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so. So you were working there were working hard to by the sound of it. And at what point? Did hacking with Swift become an idea in your mind that you were thinking like, Okay, I want to, I want to do something on my own, really, because, to my knowledge, hacking with Swift is your brand. It's, it's, it's your brainchild, actually. And so how did that happen? Actually, Paul Hudson: I came way later. Yeah, I had a lot of fun building apps running a team, we ended up with 2223, I forget how many people on the team doing apps for the company. And we made a silly amount of money, the company made millions and millions and millions and millions, we licensed it out to fender, to pig to UBS to some massive companies who wanted to use our software, which is great. So the company, what I mean, that's at the time, the company was often losing money over the year, never mind making money, they might be like, Hey, we made 2 million pounds. And the app we built, brought in, I think $25 million, at least until I left the company in 2016. So that's for a company that was vast amounts of money out of nowhere. So they were very happy with that. But at some point that the apps kind of done, you know, we've got our magazines on there, people are happier subscribing, the renewing the to do, it worked very well. And when swift launched, I could see the landscape changing very, very quickly. Our code base was and I'm sure still is extremely dated code, because it had been from a young age hacked together and brought together and evolved it. No one's sitting there saying, hey, let's spending money refactoring it making it modern isn't gonna happen. So swift changes a new world, I start thinking, hey, I could get into this. I started writing about this. And so I left the company. At the time I was senior in the company, I was a director of the company. And they said, Listen, you can leave fine crack on. But you've got a six month notice period, oops, six months. Yeah. And that was fine. I didn't mind that. Because they said, Okay, take it as gardening, leave, just go home, and stay at home and do nothing for six months to avoid, you know, telling competitors, whatever, right. And so I was extraordinarily lucky. And I want to make this really, really clear. I was extraordinarily lucky to be paid to sit at home for six months, I had six months of guaranteed income. Yeah, when I could do whatever I wanted. I wrote during that time books, knowing that at some point, my money will run out, you know, that's I get a new job. Will these books work? We'll have to do more app developer will have to go to London, or who knows what I thought I'll give apps a good shot. And it worked out brilliantly. I tried other things as well. But that was the biggest financial success Jeroen Leenarts: summit the in this six month periods that you were writing books and stuff? Did you actually publish those in within those six months or at the end of the I publish them Paul Hudson: straightaway? So like, okay, April 2016, was the first one that came out. And I had hacking swift itself beforehand, the original iOS book beforehand. But the new books I published pretty quickly, I was doing other work. So I launched this company, what year was I don't know what year it was. Okay, hazy as a while ago now. I launched his company entirely around iBeacons. Yeah. So you could, you could use my app for Mac OS to craft an app for iOS drag and drop sort of Apple thing for iBeacons. And it was it did extraordinarily well. It didn't make me any money. Not much. They made maybe a few 1000, right. But the app itself was very, very popular. Autodesk used it for reason, used it DJI used it, and unnameable fruit company used it in all sorts of ways. I didn't get much money from it, but it was very, very, very popular. And I thought, hey, this could work as a business and actually I realized books were a more fun, safer bet. me. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so, so you wrote the book hacking with Swift and then you thought, Okay, let's let's build a website out of this, or how did that Paul Hudson: happen? There was a site too, but it was like, basically a sales vehicle for Jeroen Leenarts: the book. Yeah. So a landing page to actually, yeah, correct people enthusiastic about the book can actually, yeah, to Paul Hudson: the exact timelines are fuzzy in my head. But I had this idea where I made a website, and folks would buy the book, and that'd be it. But no one heard of me, no one had any idea they liked my writing or not, there was no free sample online or anything, but ended up giving the whole book away for free. I said, just just take it take the whole book, I don't care at all the free must be in 2015. Approximate approximately. But you know, Swift was 2014. So it must be in 2015, the book was just free, online and to download as well, because get it for free for free. And then 2016, I think approximately, I did this full time, I thought, Okay, I can't continue giving away everything for free. I start charging for the book down, and immediately folk side paying, because they liked the book online, they wanted to put my work their side paying for it. But now there's a lot of free stuff online, I kept all the free pages online. So I started expanding that and building off that and seeing where it took me and it grew very, very quickly. Jeroen Leenarts: So actually, you're saying you had to book available online for free, but people were willing to get the same content packaged as a PDF file, which is Paul Hudson: still the same today. Today, you can read all of the hackery of iOS book UI kit, and now swift UI edition plus the videos plus the challenges plus the milestone guidance, and dah dah, dah, dah, there's a heck of a lot of free stuff online. Yeah, I think it's possibly one of the largest be largest suicide in the entire world. And as a result, folks go, Hey, this, this, this guy here is actually helping me out, didn't have to give stuff away for free. So choose to buy my stuff, or subscribe to packets of plus or whatever. And that's just amazing. I am very thankful for that. Jeroen Leenarts: So you mentioned that about 35% of your content is available for free online. So it with hacking with Swift, it's always been a big part of your formula to have like this, this free stuff online. So that to actually get people familiar with your formats, get people enticed to want more, really. So Paul Hudson: I wouldn't say that. No, my goal is I don't put stuff for free online to try and make a sale. You know, folks who wants to put my work will support my work regardless. Yeah, that's cool. I want to put free online, which is amazing. And I'm so thankful for that. I do it because so many folks want to get into iOS. They know nothing right now, but not CS background, they don't code, they want to make apps, and they haven't got the money to spend 50 6070 bucks on a course or more, put online for free, give them the chance to get ahead, make a start start realizing their goals with Swift. And then they like it finally might come back. But you go through my swift UI course. And it's like 2425 hours a video, plus the UI Kit course another 30 hours of video plus challengers plus way, way, way more. It's a huge, huge site at this point. You don't have to pay me a penny. And I tell folks that don't spend any money, don't give me your money, go and read the online that fine. If you want to give me money afterwards. By book, you don't have to learn to free, you do amazing things for free. Jeroen Leenarts: providing the service to people is actually an enabler for your own success, really, because it really builds your brand online being like, you know, Paul Hudson hacking with Swift. Every iOS developer that I talked to has heard about your content and heard has heard your name. I'm trying to see what what is your motivation to actually keep going. And you mentioned already that you want to entice people to actually get into software development to discover swift really as a as a tool that they can use for for their own success. Paul Hudson: I think you have to understand that the fundamental difference between me and some other people, not everyone, by a long way, but some other folks is. I'm aware, very, very clearly what it takes for me and my family to exist, right. As you imagine, X amount of money pays for my house pays for the kids food, clothes, car, whatever, right? That's we need to survive plus a buffer amount. We have some savings or a pension or who knows what, right. We aren't going to go pop in six months time things go wrong. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, just go for your financial security reading right. Paul Hudson: After that. I don't need the money. After that, earning more money makes no difference to my life. I'm not gonna go and stay in a five star hotel in London. That's just not who I am. And so I can afford to give away vast amounts of content to do lots and lots of workshops are free to buy conference tickets for folks who need them to sponsor news letters like iOS dev weekly, or Swift weekly brief, to hand out donations to folks who need the money more than me. And that's a great position to be in. And you can see that in, in, in my work, you know, this year, and last year, I ran hacking with Swift Live, we raised $30,000, I think, both times, if not more, for charity, I wrote the book, or edited the book, I quote, get everyone involved in the book and the edits all the stuff and design the cover. And today for swift for good. Again, for charity, I did some workshops that try Swift, I didn't take a penny for that I use all my income to buy diversity tickets, everybody needed it. I sponsored Iris def camp DC, again, buying tickets for women who couldn't afford to attend. This is how I think my money ought to be spent. Jeroen Leenarts: You want to make a positive impact on as many people as you can. Exactly. It sounds. Paul Hudson: I've got 46,000 followers urine. Yeah, if I'm not going to use what little platform, I have to make a difference, what the hell am I doing it for? Through, I can sit here and charge, I mean, some people will charge twice, three times what I'm charging for my courses, I refuse to do that. I have the only book on microwaves, the only book on like, watch us, no one else makes this stuff, I could charge what I like, I don't want to do that. I want to help everyone reach their goals with app development. And that means keeping the price as low as I can afford, I want to make more than I have getting rid of as much as I can towards good causes. And that is that's my entire ethos, I know what I actually need to get by plus a buffer, everything else I can do better with by handing it to somebody else. Jeroen Leenarts: It's It's amazing in a way, that's just actually the part of your success is really the the the altruistic nature of the way that you provide the content, it's there is no benefit. Other than the benefit the reader of your content, or the consumer of content actually gets it sounds like that. And it's amazing actually to to see people that are able to like think beyond their own little box that they live in and just see what impact they can have outside of their little box, so to speak. Paul Hudson: Honestly, I met someone in Toronto last year, who was following my 100 days of Swift course. And she come from a non coding background during the course. And she got the day 50. And she was offered a job doing app development. I met her cute, she couldn't even speak to me, she was so happy to meet me. And that's an amazing privilege. That's why I do ultimately, I get to meet these folks whose life I've helped. Obviously, I wrote the words and made the videos. That's the easy part. They've come along, and they've put in the determination, the willpower, the fight, to make it sink in and learn and stick to it. And that's really, really hard. So I'm doing the easy part here. But I still have to go to these events, and meet folks whose life I have helped give a nudge along the way to make a difference. And that is an incredible, incredible privilege. And I love doing it. And that's that's the real payoff. Yes. Some folks buy books. Yes, some folks subscribe. And I'm obviously very, very thankful for that. But I try and focus on the people who haven't got the money to that vast amounts of the people who are supporting me do so knowing there's nothing in return. They know they don't get anything back for their money. They know I'm using this money to fund my server or fund conference talks or fund who knows what, that I can then teach everyone else and help everyone else. So that these folks themselves do the same thing as me. They know they're lucky enough to have a good paying iOS job. They want support other folks to be in that role, who wouldn't otherwise have that chance. Jeroen Leenarts: Do you have any idea about how many people's lives you have impacted? Thus far? Paul Hudson: I used to the site has zero analytics on it. No, Google Analytics, no trackers? Nothing. There's only I think two cookies. One is from Cloudflare. Because they do the performance balancing via the the would you call it the cloud? Can they do? Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, it's part of the protection that you provide with the service? Paul Hudson: Exactly. Yes, that's in there by default. And the other one is, folks who login to post the forums, or if they are hacking with Swift plus subscribers, they have to log into that. So as a GitHub token there as well. So that's it. That's all the tracking on my site. I cannot tell what people are reading. I can't say how popular things are. What I can say is we had 10s of 1000s of people complete the 100 days of Swift and the Swift UI code was on track to exceed that before I removed any tracking, so it was doing very, very well. And you know, even today yesterday, I mean, folks CC me on all the time I get old sweets was by and I you know if someone actually has a legitimate question, Twitter is the wrong place to ask me cuz I can't track things add towards the flood of you're always constantly which Jeroen Leenarts: is a never ending stream of messages. Paul Hudson: Yeah which is which is great but want to talk to me it's fantastic but they asked me questions like, Hey Paul, I read your tutorial X, how do I make it work with y? I'd like I have no doubt about that why you asked me that. But no, I did. Anyway, so they asked me stuff and build poster certificates, because they really proudly finish. And I think today or yesterday, so on, you know, got a distinction certificate from passing a swift UI course, which requires a 95% pass correct rate in the final exam, which is really hard to do. And I see these all the time. I love it. People are just so excited. In fact, if you if you go to Twitter and search for hundreds 50 Why as a hashtag and go to latest, I go there regularly, certainly once twice a week, just to reply to folks that posting on that hashtag, I want to say, hey, well done. Good job. I love that you did that design, whether it is a little encouragement. That's such a big, big difference. And again, these folks that are paying your penny, they're on my site for free watch, the videos are free that I want to be there, to cheerlead to say, Good job well done. And that's again, it's a really easy job. I've made the tutorials, I've written the projects and the source code, but the videos and cheerleading, these are all easy parts compared to the actual grit and determination of getting in there and fighting to learn it. Jeroen Leenarts: But is it also a big part of what motivates you to keep on doing what you're doing? Just seeing the results people are getting due to your content? Partly? Yeah, Paul Hudson: it's a very similar job to working in journalism. I really, really enjoy my job. And what is my job? Right, I spent all day noodling around with Swift. Yeah, trying things, building software, throwing away, trying something else, building that throwing that away. And eventually I find something I like AI is the best solution I've found so far. I'll write it up, polish it and move on to the next thing. And when I think back to what I was doing before, when I was, you know, running this, this team of people, I wasn't doing that much coding. Jeroen Leenarts: No, no, no, I Paul Hudson: was a manager with managers below me doing other stuff. I was doing some coding. I obviously, I remember a few times in a real crunch, coding jobs I was doing. But I was doing vast amounts of JIRA vast amounts of stand ups and meetings and emails and organizing. And once a once things that are really important. I love doing one to ones they're amazing. Yeah, but they're not programming. So and now, literally all my time is towing and having fun and exploring and pushing and breaking and learning about Swift and swift UI, and combine and whatever. Jeroen Leenarts: And when there's when there's not a worldwide pandemic going on, travel the world and talk about the stuff that you did really, Paul Hudson: right. But that alone is a massive privilege. Yeah, you know, I 2018 I spoke, I forgot how to 1215 conferences, and again, 2019, many, many conferences. And it's a huge privilege to fly to somewhere. I know New York or somewhere or Singapore, and deliver a talk a great event is amazing, despite itself. But I get to then listen to 10 or 20 other speakers saying hey, here's what's cool in Swift, right. Now, here's what's cool. And again, again, again, and then folks say, Hey, Paul, I love your videos, check it out. And they'll show me their laptop with some code on and they'll say, How do I sell this or whatever. And they show me their stuff, and what's cool and what they're working on. And so I've got this constant flood of ideas coming in things I'm trying to work on, refine on, throwing away trying throw away trying to do buttoned up by world class speakers talking to me teaching me what they're working on, backed up by literally 1000s of folks say, Hey, Paul, check this out. He gave me the code or grant and conference and so forth. So I've got this huge list of ideas coming in constantly. And that is remarkable. I am so fortunate to be where I am. Obviously, it's a lot of work repairing a lot of conference talks. I don't repeat talks, as I've been asked to repeat the talk. So I'll do 12 or 13, or 14 or 15 New talks in a year. Yeah. But it's a massive payoff. So much. So many ideas just being thrown at me. I'm like, Oh, that's cool. That's cool. That's really cool. And just trying them out. Jeroen Leenarts: So just to get a little bit of a feel for how big the hacking with Swift site really is. That Do you have any indication of the direct cost of running the website so that just your hosting costs for to run stuff? Paul Hudson: So I switched to CloudFlare, which really helped before it was I think 200 and something dollars a month, just just to run the server? Yeah. Nevermind, all the jazz around, you know, domain names or Jeroen Leenarts: just literally just the capacity to actually respond to all the requests. Paul Hudson: Yes, correct. And that serve up from memory about 5 million pageviews. I forget how many individual users that ends up being? Jeroen Leenarts: Well, they're reasonable, reasonable numbers. So it's been a Paul Hudson: while. Because folks come back regularly, which is amazing. I want to see I want I don't want to see, you know, a million pageviews per million visitors. That's just the coming back to the site once or just futures, like, you know, you go to some sites like, like a lyrics website. You want a song? Check it off. Taylor Swift. You want the lyrics, right, go to their website. Every lyrics website ever has the most hideous design imaginable. They're all hideous, they're all full of adverts. Because no one goes to lyric sites, practically no one chooses to go there. They go there, just some Google searches, click through and see it. And so they'll see a lot of pageviews matching up one to one with visitors. Because no one goes back there. Again, you go there once you're a very high bounce rate. Yeah, exactly. First come to hacking with Swift, repeatedly. And it keeps for 5689 10 times a month, they want more information. They know it's trustworthy, up to date, they know it's cared for, and useful and free to use. They'll go there and trust it, which is what I want. I don't want folks got to, you know, Stack Overflow, it's a pretty negative site to go to where there's code from Swift to or C code or just flat out wrong code. And I'd rather took it from me, put me through. Jeroen Leenarts: So if you look at your regular week, so to speak, a week or seven days, do you start to a Monday to Friday, or I always coding? Paul Hudson: No, I work really strange hours. I mean, really, really strange hours. And some folks have spotted that. Partly because big CERT is not that you hide the clock anymore. You got to have a clock always there. My number one priority no matter how much I love coding. My number one priority is not sweat. And I've got I've got two kids, right? Yeah, once 10 One, seven, that's way more important than any kind of sift coding I can do. Yeah. And so I work really strange hours, I want to make sure that when they are home, we are doing homework, or watching TV or playing games or having dinner or something together that we're doing. And when they're in bed around nine o'clock in the evening, that's when I can start work again. So I work very odd hours, sometimes around the family stuff, because that's just a priority. And that might mean very often looking weekends. Again, once the kids are in bed, you know, I'm not doing it to nap near possible. I'm doing it. late evening, once you're in bed, I'd rather do that, then sacrifice my weeknights. And, you know, have family time last? Yeah. So I work I work really strange hours. Jeroen Leenarts: So how old are your kids right now? Paul Hudson: The oldest one is 10. And she's done two talks already. By the way. She talked at ns, Spain 10 days ago. And you I can't find me. And the little one is seven. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, yeah, I got a a two year old and a five year old at home. And it's true if if they're busy. If they need attention, then nothing else matters. Paul Hudson: Yeah, I very clearly remember having this horrible moment when the older one who was small at a time said, Did you play with me? And I was like, No, I'm working right now. And like, wow, did I really say that? That I really just say no, I don't wanna play with my small child, I want to sit and do work instead. Obviously, I've got to earn the money to do what well, whatever. But it didn't sit well with me. So I try hard and always succeed. Today around dub dub. It's a real write off my family, they know that we plan around that same for hacking stuff live. That's a four day series of live workshops. And that's a lot of work for me to repair and that and of course, all the money with the charities and getting the pennies from that. But it made a difference. So it was good. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah. So and and How's your wife? Which you working the strange hours and all these kinds of things and just doing something like for very dedicated for a couple of days, because yeah, there's no other options. And so how does she handle that? Paul Hudson: So dub dub UPS is a bit of a fire. In fact, so it was, you know, we had June was dub dub end of June and then 10 days later, approximately, was my conference. Speaking about dub dub, and it was four days. We were both very, very tired. She'd been on full childcare duty for the entire time. I've been working flat out to do the charity conference. It was intense. We then had a massive family holiday was like I was taking the next two and a half weeks, we're going up to the middle of nowhere in Scotland, doing nothing was walking around some hills, walked around, climbed some hills, walk around some more maximum sheet and that was about it. Jeroen Leenarts: But after an intense week, that can probably be one of the best things that you can actually do with a family. Paul Hudson: Yeah, exactly. Just pure nature. no work at all. It was really nice. And then at the start of September, once the hotels had reopened, I think it was mostly then. Maybe August I forget. Anyway, she had a whole week away. You just go to a hotel. yourself, do nothing. Because you can do is go there. I'll have the kids for a whole week as a recompense for WBC horrors. Jeroen Leenarts: You haven't? It's that's sounds like a fair trade, right? Paul Hudson: Yeah, sort of, you know, it's like when I go to a conference, obviously enjoy it, it's good. But it's not the kind of glamorous thing you might expect. You know, it's kind of hard going to a conference, if I'm going to. I went to one. It was swift and fika, a lovely event in Stockholm and 2018. And it was like, you know, I've got to get the 5am bus to the airport for a 6am flight to whatever you know, is it was proper crack of dawn stuff pitch black outside freezing cold dragging a suitcase around, working on a plane preparing my slides. Working while I'm there, meeting folks chatting and then doing work in the evening, pray my slides again. You know, it's a lot of work going to event really enjoy it. It's not the the happy lucky break, you might imagine is hey, is going to San Jose, going into Singapore. It's a Jeroen Leenarts: long day. So I can imagine. So is there anything else that you wanted to mention? Or that you think like, Okay, we should definitely mention this on your episode. Paul Hudson: Just generally, yeah. Wow. Well, if I can say anything at all, as particular I'd like to speak about which is, every night for the last three months or so be two and a half months, I've been watching a TV show with my kids called Shira on Netflix. And I started as a kid, the old sheriff in the 80s, right? It's nothing like that it's remade by Netflix to a new TV show. And it was absolutely brilliant would watch one episode every night for the entire time we got through it all. Absolutely brilliant show because not only is it full of very, very strong, powerful, exciting, interesting, heroic female characters. But it also does a really amazing job of representing diversity in the world as shown in the cartoon, the original shear off in the 80s, everyone was sort of like a middle height, skinny white woman, because they were designed to be toys, they're designed to be sold as toys, and making every character the same height, shape, size, color, they're cheap to make as toys, you make a million of the same thing rather than, you know, 100,000 of each. This new one was not designed that way. And so is a variety of skin colors, a variety of sizes, you know, skinny or larger, and so forth. A variety of heights, they have all sorts, including amazing non binary character they had and the wonderful thing was this person that called Double Trouble, use a pronoun they, and everyone on the TV show including the arch enemy, the worst possible person respected that pronoun. Yeah, they're like your they. That's, that says so much about even the most evil person on the planet, says they, it wouldn't misgendered them. And so saying this body positivity, gender positivity was amazing, for sure, which is also full of laughs and action other things, too. But I really enjoyed that. And I encourage folks, if you have kids, or quite frankly, if you don't check out sheara on Netflix, I think you'll enjoy it. Jeroen Leenarts: You know, because that first tee is important, right? Paul Hudson: Yeah, it is important. I think that's like a starting point. Acknowledging that, but it's one of those things again, I think we have to actively fight for Yeah, you know, take a stand for and make a difference on because we're so bad right now. One more, we're really bad right now. Jeroen Leenarts: So just because I know it's a it's a topic that has a big mind share with you. Me as a software developer, what is the advice that you would give to have a positive impact on this topic on the topic of diversity and the the bad things that are happening? Even now, nowadays? Paul Hudson: I think the most important thing anyone can do, and this absolutely applies to me, too, is to raise your own awareness significantly beyond what you think is normal. And I've been trying this for years, I've been trying super hard to listen to women, to people of color from around the world, just listening to their stories. Tell me what your life is like reading the tweets following people interact with them as much as they can, listening carefully. Not talking to listening. And even today, I read things I'm like, wow, wow, wow, that surely cannot be the case. Even though I know it's true. I find it hard to believe I know it's true. And I've been trying so hard for a long time now. And that's the nature of the privilege I have. That happened to be a middle aged white dude from a rich western country. I have no concept of what it means to be a poor, black, Franz Portuguese. Someone, right? I've no idea. Yeah. And I have to listen very, very hard to even come close to that. And so folks have to understand. And I have to understand too. We are all massively biased in one direction. And we can try as hard as we'd like to come closer to where we need to be. Britt a lifelong mission, a lifelong piece of work to understand for me, and I think for everyone, and it's hard. It's really, really hard because you can think about Yeah, I'm woke. I totally get it. I understand it. Now. I'm, I think women are great. Yeah. That doesn't get you anywhere, unless you're actively fighting for change actively. Because anyone can throw money at this, Hey, I'll give you some money. Just just okay. You get money. How about you sit down and mentor someone? You sponsor someone, just just in the last few days. I was asked to speak at a conference next year in January. Lovely conference love very much. I said, Hey, that's my check. You've got a good diverse speaker lineup. I'm sorry. We have managed to find no women speak at the event and like, no women in 2021 There's Jeroen Leenarts: no women. There's like 50% out there. Come on. Paul Hudson: Yeah, yeah, I will not speak. Yes, that changes. And so I said, Listen, I will talk to some women I know and trust, say that up speaking, I found two who'd love to speak, put them forward at an incident and hey, I hope that's going to happen. But that's what it means. You know, anyone could just say, hey, I'll sponsor you his his 10 pounds, 20 pound, whatever. 50 euro for your thing that's good at Health makes a difference. But your time, give your actual time and your words and actions doing something is way more important. And I hope that one day and far, far future whenever I die, my tombstone says he lies Paul Hudson, he tried to do something. That's why I actually care about making an actual difference to someone. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. And I think that's actually a great point in our interview to actually wrap things up. Paul Hudson: But me dying. Yeah. Jeroen Leenarts: Not that not that part. No, but I think we have a very concise history and how he actually became hacking with Swift. And I think it's, it's, it's very admirable, the way you conceptualize different things and how you actually produce content and what your motivations are behind actually giving this content and creating the content. And I thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed our conversation. And I hope people will actually appreciate the points of view that you shared with us and enjoy your history. Paul Hudson: Well, if it was on, follow me on Twitter as the magic of internet, you know, I think I'm pretty. I'm pretty shameless. I make my views very, very clear on Twitter highkey about stuff. I'm giving folks every opportunity to follow someone else's stuff. So yeah. Thank you, Paul. Thank you very much.