Dave Verwer, creator of iOS Dev Weekly, Swift Package Index, iOS Dev Jobs, iOS Dev Directory and more...

Jeroen Leenarts: Hi, and welcome to another special episode of my podcast. I'm sitting here with somebody who I follow myself intensely. And that's de fer where he is most known about his weekly newsletter. And you might also know him from the package index that he's creating for swift packages. I don't want to take too much time introducing Dave, I'll just want to give him the floor and see what his backstory and origin is. So Dave, how are you doing today? Dave Verwer: Hey, drone. Yes, it's, it's nice to meet you. And it's good to be here. Jeroen Leenarts: Most people know you from your newsletter, right? Dave Verwer: I guess so. Yeah. Jeroen Leenarts: How did the newsletter happen? Because it's something that you've been doing for quite some time already. And you're quite successful at it as well, by the looks of things. So how did it happen? Dave Verwer: Yeah, it's coming up on 10 years, very soon, actually, the that I've been publishing the newsletter. So it started in August of 2011. And so yeah, almost 10 years. I guess the reason I started it was because really, I wanted to read a newsletter like that. I quite enjoyed that style of newsletter of, you know, here are, let's say 10 things from the week that you might have missed, but you might find interesting. And I subscribe to a couple of those style newsletters on other subjects. And I thought, well, well, actually, the first thing I did was I looked for one to see if there was one about iOS. And there wasn't at the time. And so I thought, Well, I wonder if I could be the person to do that. And here I am. 10 years later, yeah, Jeroen Leenarts: because 10 years, you can already call it a decade. Almost I know. But with a newsletter, running it for 10 years, what have been the biggest challenges on creating the content and hosting the content for you. Dave Verwer: By far, the biggest challenge is regularity. There has not been a single week in those 10 years when I haven't pushed the send button if I intended to push the send button. So I take I take a week off around the holidays. So around Christmas, I take one week off then and I just I decided to do that from the very beginning. So that was my one week off a year. But apart from that, there has been an issue every single Friday since August 2011. So by far the biggest challenge is making that happen. Because that means when you're on vacation, you're still doing it. When you're sick, you're still doing it. I mean, obviously Touchwood I haven't been so sick that I that I could never do it. But of course I have I have I have colds and you know, minor illnesses that that have made it challenging sometimes, but But yeah, just that regularity is is is really difficult. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. And and on the technical? And is there any specific setup or the service that you use to run the newsletter? Dave Verwer: Well, there's an interesting story there. So when I first started it, I created a MailChimp account. And I I just kind of started writing into, into well, it was a markdown file, and then I generated some HTML from that and pasted that into MailChimp. And off we went. But actually, over the years, yes, there is a tool that I use, because I built myself a tool. And so after a couple of years of running it, it was to the point where it was generating a little bit of income from sponsorship. Yeah. And so I thought, well, maybe I should use some of that money and make my life a little easier by building myself a tool. And so I ran a small company at the time that we had a few employees. And so I kind of moved the company to, to start making this tool for me. And so we, we created this, this kind of tool, and it was definitely a tool created for me, and nobody else. But at the same time, I did wonder whether it might be something that other people would wouldn't enjoy using or would find useful. So once I was up and running on that platform myself, we decided, yeah, okay, let's turn this into a product. And that product became what's called curated, which is curated.co. And I ran that as a company for several years. And then eventually that company was acquired, and the product still exists today. It's just that I don't run it anymore. Jeroen Leenarts: So and you use the product yourself still or I do. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because I think because I knew about the curator thoughtco. Company. And but I do think that a lot of people that have read more recently started following your contents are unaware of this side note on the on the newsletter itself, which immediately brings us to the real topic that we want to discuss. And that's a bit on your backstory. How long have you been in software development already? Dave Verwer: A long time. So I graduated university in 1996. And really went straight into software development. So I, I got a junior developer position. At a company that wasn't too far away from where I grew up, it was maybe 30 miles away from where I grew up. And I moved to that city. And started working for as a as a junior developer. And that was, that was back on my foot that Job was was writing down Delphi. Pascal, basically. So I was a Delphi developer for many years. And then I was actually with that company for 10 years. And so I kind of, I saw that company grow from what I joined, it was six or seven people. And when I left, it was 60 years. So I, I saw that company grow fairly significantly. And then I started my own company with somebody else who also worked for the company I was at. And we originally started doing kind of web development with Rails. That was, that was the first thing we kind of set out to do. But that was in 2006. And so that was one year before the iPhone was announced. And I'd actually as as part of starting that company, I made the switch to a Mac at that point, that was the first Mac that I'd had. And that was the first time I'd really use one in any significant way. And so I started kind of dabbling with Objective C and starting to learn a little bit of cocoa, and ended up actually writing a Mac app. And then the iPhone came along, and I thought, well, this seems significant. And the rest of history, yeah, Jeroen Leenarts: I can imagine. Because we all know what happens after that one once the iPhone became available. Just to go back a little bit further, before your education's When did you get your hands on a computer for the first time? Dave Verwer: Well, that is all thanks to my dad. He is a well, he's retired these days, but he was a lecturer for many years at a local university. And when I was, you know, as young as I can possibly remember, he was either bringing home computers or bringing home bits of electronics or buying, you know, various home computers. I think my very first computer was a a Sinclair is that x 80, which was I think, the famous one was that that x 81. Yeah, the Zed x 80. Was I do remember a couple of things about it. It had no permanent storage. So every time you switched it on, it was a fresh that. Jeroen Leenarts: Yep. Was it the one with the with the robbery keys, or? Dave Verwer: That was the spectrum? That was the Sinclair Spectrum. Yeah. I had one of those too. So we had a lot of those Sinclair machines they were, they were fabulous machines really great. Jeroen Leenarts: I know the set expectrum intimately because that's the first computer I got my hands on. Also to my dad, and I really remember the robbery keys. They were so tiny and so delicate. And then at some point, my dad upgraded the thing by doing all kinds of weird stuff with a soldering iron. And it was a big black box with real keys so to speak. Dave Verwer: Do you remember that the the robbery keys had programming keywords on them? So yeah, the P key had the word print underneath it. Yeah, that saves you a lot of typing. It certainly did. And, I mean, that was really my first exposure to development, but not in any kind of way that I understood. stood. So at the time, and I know we're going back into kind of ancient history here. But at the time, what you could you could get was magazines on the spectrum. And you would you would they would come with printouts of games and little programs that you could read, basically read type in. And I saw, I typed in a lot of those listings. And there was always that moment of truth of like, Have I made a mistake? And if it ran, then you hadn't made a mistake? And if it didn't, then, yeah, you had to kind of go back and compare what you'd written with, with what was in the magazine. And I didn't understand what I was doing at the time. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, it was I guess I was able to in that code. Dave Verwer: Certainly was. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, because I remember those days. And we also had this tape deck, and you could record programs from the from broadcast radio, and they were always in at least in the Netherlands, where I lived. They had these midnights programs where they were broadcasting the the the code for the machine that you were working on. Was that available in the I think you live in the UK? Right. Dave Verwer: UK? Yeah. I don't remember radio programs. No. That might have been, I mean, they may have existed, I just may not have been aware of them. I yeah, I don't remember that. Jeroen Leenarts: And so yeah, you got your hands on, on Spectrum computer, Sinclair computers, I must say, and that involves mindless copying of basic code. But at what point did you get some grasp of what's happening with a computer. Dave Verwer: So my first kind of real experience with trying to understand the computer, it was with a computer called the BBC. And so that was it was a computer that was marketed by the BBC. But it was made by a company called acorn. And acorn eventually became arm, which is, you know, we still use ARM computers today. But yeah, acorn was was, was the company that produced this, BBC, and we got one of these, and they had a fantastic, they were really good computers. And they had a great basic. And they actually had a great assembler as well. And so I started with basic. And, again, kind of started by typing programs in but this was the first one where I started also to create some stuff of my own. I remember my favorite trick, because I was still fairly young at this point. I remember my favorite trick was, I'd always start off by writing, like, whatever program that I was going to write, the first thing I'd write was the menu system. And every option on the menu would just say, not yet finished. And I lost count of the amount of programs that I wrote that were just menu systems. So obviously, I really enjoyed creating. Jeroen Leenarts: Everybody has their own exam, what shall we call this? Boys? So uh, but at what point did you decide for yourself that tech and computers was something that you wanted to pursue as a career because you already mentioned that you did a formal education in the field of software or computers? So at what point did you make that decision? Dave Verwer: It was a teacher, actually, who was actually not my computing teacher, I did do an AAS level in computing, which is, like half an A level, you could split one a level into two into two subjects into half each, as I didn't as leveling computing. And that was okay. But I also didn't as level in electronics, and my electronics teacher was a wonderful man who really touched my life. And I guess my career. He was so encouraging. And we used to, there was a group of us that would kind of stay back after class and talk with him and kind of experiment with stuff and he gets to do like little things outside of school and he was so good at encouraging us. And he had an interest in computing and programming himself. And so even though I was doing a computing course, it was actually my electronics teacher who really kind of shaped me. And we had a whole load of BBC machines at the school. And it was myself and a friend who we actually started with a little bit of history here. One of the things that the BBC had was it had a programmable kind of hardware chip on it. So you could flash instructions into this chip, and then effectively add commands to the system in there, the only the only language you could do that in was assembler. And so that the desire of that got me to start to learn some assembly language. And with this friend of mine, we ended up creating. So all these BBC machines were hooked up via a very primitive network, not external network, but internal network, just all the machines were networked together. And there was zero encryption on that network. And every byte that went around the network checked in at every machine on a network, token ring network. Absolutely, yeah. So we wrote kind of a ROM in assembler that would send messages across the network. But then we realized quite quickly that every byte was coming through completely unencrypted. And so we started writing stuff that watch the network. Jeroen Leenarts: All that goes to Nevar, at 10. Dave Verwer: So very quickly, we could have the, the teacher's password, yes. Jeroen Leenarts: So, um, so But you mentioned this, this teacher and so that's, that's one person that's very influential. Were there others during your career that were like in a mentorship role to you that were very instrumental in your own personal development and growth? Dave Verwer: I mean, yeah, huge number of people both, you know, as, as I, as I started to actually do this professionally, then, obviously, there were people inside the company that I worked for, that I looked up to, and who kind of guided me because, you know, back then, there wasn't, I mean, the internet did exist. But it was a very different place to, to what it is these days, still connecting kind of per minute, and that kind of thing. So the Internet didn't really offer the opportunities that it does today to communicate with people, you could definitely communicate with people. But it was much slower. There weren't any social networks, there was email, there was bulletin boards, and that kind of stuff. So back then, most of your most of my learning came from the other people who I knew in real life. And so some of those were from kind of school and university. Some of them were people who I was working with in the company, and yeah. Jeroen Leenarts: So yeah, it's always, it's always great to hear that. For instance, if I compare it to my career, there's like three people that I would say that that were like, either life or career altering. And it's always amazing. How much impact one individual can can have on your choices during your work and life. So that's always why I find it very interesting if it's mentioned in the interview with somebody, because I also had a teacher that was like, Well, I would say amazing. So but just to shift gears a little bit, you worked at your first employer for 10 years. And you started the company with with a colleague, as you as you said, So what made you decide that after 10 years at the company to jump ship, and and venture out on your own would appear? Of course? Dave Verwer: Well, it was actually with my boss. So I worked for that company, and the person who owned that company, sold it at the point where I left. And so at that point, I was the Technical Director of that company. And so I kind of knew that about everyone knew that the sale was happening. And that wasn't, I didn't really want to go and work for the bigger company is I've been, I've been thinking about striking out and doing something on my own Anyway, but would I have ever done it? Without that event? I'm not sure. That event certainly crystallize the idea in my mind. And in talking with Andrew, his name was Andrew, the person who owned that company, we decided how we could actually potentially do something together. And it was that it was that impulsive, the sale of that company was the trigger that made me jump. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. And so we're at 2006. Now, when you started this company with Andrew, we're now in 2021. So we still have some years left to fill in some gaps, so to speak. And one of the companies that you mentioned was already curated.co. And can you quickly give an overview of the 2006 timeline to now so basically, what you did, and what were big things that that occurred during those years? Yeah, of course. Dave Verwer: So like I said, like we, we started that company to, to write a piece of software that, ironically, has a lot in common with what I do today, still. So this idea of watching what people are publishing and finding the best things that people are publishing, our original idea, our startup idea that we that we started this company to create was a feed aggregator, so an RSS feed aggregator, you could put in a whole load of RSS feeds, you could put filters on those feeds to monitor them for keywords, either in titles or in the body text or something like that. And then it would aggregate those feeds together, and output a super feed that contained all of the things that you were interested in. I mean, back in 2006, RSS was pretty hot. I mean, some would say today, RSS is pretty hard, I would be one of those people to say that I still love and use RSS every single day. Jeroen Leenarts: It's one of those technologies that's that's like ever present. And to the average consumer, it's not something that is well known because it's in the background. But it's so important to broadcast information, and basically references to material that are published. Dave Verwer: And the beauty of it. And the thing that a lot of people miss underestimate about RSS is how you think about social networks on Twitter and Instagram and whatever. If you're not there looking at Twitter, and somebody publishes something important. It will fly by and it'll be lost in the, in the end the noise and the noise. Yeah, absolutely. And so, but with RSS, I can subscribe to somebody's blog, they can not publish anything for three years, and then decide one day to write a blog post and I'll see it. And I know I'll see it because because it doesn't try and apply an algorithm to what you see. It just shows you everything that gets published from the feeds that you subscribe to. And I know I'm just describing RSS here. But it's so powerful. And I was in love with it background and I'm still today. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, that's the that's the open web principle that you're talking about. And it's it's one of the things that it's it's also risky, because it's an it's an unfiltered and and it is a biased feed that you're looking at, because it's your own bias that you're looking at, but at least there's not an algorithm deciding what is actually being presented to you. So yeah, let's just to get off this side note a little bit. So you were creating an hour. So Dave Verwer: firstly, yeah. And problem was, the problem was, we created something and it worked. I mean, it had some problems. But it did fundamentally work. We just had, we just had zero business model. And I mean, it wasn't like we just went into it without a business model. We just didn't have a practical business model. 2006 was a different time. And I think it was it well, I was naive, definitely. Going into it. And so we we kind of, we built this thing and it did, shipped and people used it, but we we never managed to actually make any money out of it. And, and it was around about that time that The iPhone well that I started getting into Mac development. And so we kind of switched gears a little bit, wrote a little Mac app, released that and that sold some properties. And then, of course, the iPhone came out in the SDK. And I, I jumped into that with both feet. I started writing apps for myself, I started writing apps for other people. And so having, I had a reasonably good success with with one of my first apps actually, it was app called balloons. And it was effectively a little kind of game really where I don't know whether you're ever member as a, as a child, did you ever do, like balloon releases in the physical world, where you'd get a whole load of helium balloons, and you'd write your name and address on a ticket and attach it to a helium balloon. And you'd send the balloon up into the air and it would float around terrible for the environment, absolutely. Appalling environment. But we, again, it was a different time. And whenever it landed somewhere, somewhere, somebody would find this ticket, and it would say on it, if found, please return to. And they would post it back to you. And you kind of see how far your balloon went, right? Yeah, Jeroen Leenarts: I remember that. Yeah. Dave Verwer: Yeah. So I thought well, better for the environment would be to do that without the actual physical balloons. And so we wrote this app where you would launch a balloon, and you'd attach a little ticket and you could put a photograph on the ticket. And you could put your name on there. And you could put your, like a little message on there. And other people could then catch that balloon. And they could add a ticket. So it wasn't like they'd return it to you, they would add their own ticket on it and send it back up. And these balloons would kind of bounce around the world meeting different people. And you could check in on where your balloon had got to. Jeroen Leenarts: So that's that's sort of like, like a sort of, it's not a social network that you're creating. But it's, it's it's sort of like a chain, never really, Dave Verwer: it actually became a little bit like a social network. So enjoyed some great success. And for maybe a year, it was quite popular. And it it did very well. People loved it. It came with all sorts of problems that we could never have. We could have imagined if we'd have thought about it for five minutes. But again, we weren't great at thinking at that point. So the moderation problem was significant. Jeroen Leenarts: I can imagine that. Dave Verwer: Yes. And we will leave it at that. But it was you're effectively allowing people to put text and images into an app. Jeroen Leenarts: I don't even want to think about this to logging really, because it's the internet. And then it's it's a victim of its own success, most likely. Yep. And Dave Verwer: we had so we had a we had to suddenly had a very big moderation problems have shown. And that made me honestly, that made me very cautious to ever put a free text field in an app ever again. So, so there was that. But then, as the popularity started to fall off, yeah, it was a core group of people who loved that app so much that they didn't want to stop using it. And so happened, there was probably two or 300 people that use it for years after it was effectively dead. And they all knew each other. And they knew that if they caught enough balloons, they would eventually catch a balloon from their friends. And they did use it to send messages to each other that was actually really bad. Jeroen Leenarts: So and so that what's what year are we at right now? Because Dave Verwer: we are at so that was released in 2008, the first year of the iPhone, the SDK at least. And we created and carried on creating apps for the phone for ourselves and for other people for many years after that, but the the next significant change was the transition into teaching and training actually. So I got a call from somebody who I knew from a kind of a community group. There was a local iPhone developer group that well actually I've started it and I've met several people through that group. And one of them rang me up one day and she said She ran a training center that did, you know, the kind of Adobe training and the ad there was actually Apple certified, certified, training going on there and that kind of stuff. And she said, would I be interested in running an iPhone development costs? And my gut instinct was to say no, because I'd never done that before. i Who was I to think that I could teach people how to do it. And I also didn't have any training materials. And I didn't have any experience in doing that. And so I actually on the call, I said, Yeah, it's probably not, it's probably not for me to do this. And then I kind of mulled it over for a few days, and thought about it a bit more. And. And I thought, Well, I wonder if anyone sells training materials, or licenses them. And so I did a quick search. And sure enough, I found a company that was licensing out Objective C, training materials. And so I got back on the phone with, with Linda, and said, you know, what, alright, let's, let's do it. And so I spent a few weeks learning those training materials and learning how to teach them. And she went out and sold a whole load of faces on a course. And suddenly, I was standing in front of a classroom full of people pretending to teach them Objective C. Jeroen Leenarts: That's a that's a significant shift in what you're doing day to day, really? How did? How did it work out? How did it work out for you the teaching and training, Dave Verwer: I fell in love with it. I really found something that I really enjoyed doing, I got a lot out of it. The training materials that we licensed were, well, it's like anything like you can, they got me up and running. But quite quickly, I wanted to start tweaking them and changing it to the way that I wanted to teach something, and ended up creating my own set of training materials, which, again, that's that's like a fairly, it took a long time that because we run this as a five day course, in person. And so filling five days full of training materials takes Jeroen Leenarts: a lot of content. Dave Verwer: It's a lot of Yeah, it was a big slide back. And so, but over time, that became that got to the point where I was happy with that training material. And, and then actually, ironically, I started licensing that training material out to other people who would train from it. So that came full circle in the end. Jeroen Leenarts: But it's always good to, to pick an existing idea and improve upon it and then execute on it yourself. Are you still doing these trainings? Or what's the status of it? Dave Verwer: No. So that was, that was what I did up until curated. So I was trying to run, curated, and also do training. And we had, like I say, we had a couple of employees at that point. So I had some other trainers who were going out and, and doing training, and I was still going out and doing training too. And it got to the point where we had to make a decision which wins between curated and the training and curated one. And I did I mean, I loved the training so much. But ultimately, what drives me is creating products. I love to create products. And so I did love the training. And it was a difficult decision. Well, actually, there were two there were two things. Part of it is I love that curated products still do. And that was definitely like creating products was what I wanted to do. But at the same time, this was 2014. So swift had just come out. And I was faced with rewriting all of the training materials, at the same time was trying to run this curated company. And that was actually the straw that that kind of there was too much to do. Yeah, that we had to make a decision. Jeroen Leenarts: He has I've heard similar stories of other people and for instance, Daniel Steinberg, I talked to him as well, and he didn't take the approach of pretty much reinventing his his entire prior curriculum and all his books and just rewriting a lot of content, and he did a great job actually doing that. But again, I can perfectly understand that if you have such a choice to make either between a big product or rewriting everything that you have in store at the moment, let's, yeah, it's a difficult decision. But but looks at things you made one that worked out for you quite well. Because curate that decision? Yeah. Because curated was, from me as an outsider, it looked like it was, was a big success as a company. And at some point, you, you were done with the creative products you got out of the business. And so can you tell us a little bit about how that happened? So you create a curated was created specifically for your workflow? Yeah. And it was productize, so to speak, then there became from what I understood, successful, and then you stepped out of this company at some point? Dave Verwer: Well, kind of I, when the acquisition happened, I went with the company and worked on it in that company for a while, but then at some point, I. And it wasn't like I woke up one day and thought, What am I doing, but suddenly, I did find myself suddenly, in the email world, and not in the iOS developer world. And I was still writing a newsletter as an iOS developer. But the reality was, I had been running an email company for several years. And obviously, I kept my attention on the iOS world, but there was definitely a balance. That was that was difficult, too. Difficult to kind of, well difficult to balance between running that email company, either on my own or under the umbrella of a larger company. And I ended up working on different things in that email company. And so you know, I was, I was doing product management work for email software, which I loved, I really enjoyed it. But if there's one technology, or one significant thing that has, that has really grabbed me over a very long time, probably the longest in my entire career. It is the iPhone as a platform, iOS development as a, as a technology. And I felt a desire to come back to that family, you know. And so that was the time at which it was right to come back, you know? Jeroen Leenarts: So would you say that, because you were still writing the newsletter every week, and you were working at this curated email company. And then, at some point, you had to rely more on the opinions of others on the topic of iOS development instead of on your own. And that that was one of the things that made you move towards wanting to do more iOS development again, or, Dave Verwer: well, actually, at the time, I ended up hiring some people to help me write the newsletter. So I was trying to do a full time job for somebody else. Like, I was trying to do a full time job for myself, when, when I was still creating, curated, and also writing the newsletter at the same time. But when you're working for yourself, you can kind of you can say to yourself, Okay, it's a busy week, let's spend instead of doing the newsletter in the evening, let's spend Thursday doing the newsletter. And I could give myself that break when I'm, when I'm working for somebody else. Can't really do that. And so I found myself burning out a little bit on trying to keep the newsletter going, and trying to keep it fresh, and trying to keep it informative, and accurate, and all the rest of it. And so, I opened up looking for some other writers, and ended up hiring two people as contractors to write issues of iOS dev weekly, and those issues are all there in the back. The Archives if people care to, to go back and find them. And so that went from me writing every issue of the newsletter to writing one in three because we would, we would rotate round, I'd write one. And then the other two people would write one. And then it was me again. And that allowed it to continue. And those people did a great job. But that means less like, like, this feels very personal to me. And yeah, I think it felt very personal to the people who are reading it too. And at the point where I was deciding, alright, what am I going to do here? To go back independent. And to go back to the iOS world, I kind of wanted to take the newsletter back to being just me again. And so I don't remember exactly how long they were helping me write for, but it was maybe a year something like that. Of the three of us writing it together. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah. So it really was that you wanted the newsletter to have your voice only, and not in the sense that you didn't appreciate the work that the others were doing. But it's cool, because it's such a personal thing for you and newsletter, that you want to grab back the voice of the newsletter, again, to be your voice only. I can really understand that because indeed a newsletter is, for a lot of people are very personal thing, I think when they're writing it. And so you got out of curated So you started writing the newsletter again, on your own. So what happened then? Because we're now in what year? Ish? Dave Verwer: 2021? Yeah. Jeroen Leenarts: Yes, that's, that's today. But when you were like getting out of curators and getting into the Dave Verwer: so yeah, we were this. When was this? This was 2017. Maybe? Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, we're getting closer. Dave Verwer: Yeah. Okay, we're nearly there. This was I think, maybe 2017 or early 18? Maybe? Yeah. round about them. Yeah, what have I done since then? Lots of stuff. I. So at that point, I started up my own business, not with a business partner, just me. And the newsletter came with me, and I, you know, maintain that newsletter throughout working for the other company to of course, and so that was, that was part of what I did. And then I've also taken contract work since then, of course, and that kept me going, in many ways. But they also started creating other things. And I kind of settled in on, you know, a few ideas that were successful, and some ideas that were less than successful. And you follow the ones that work, and you let the ones that don't work, drift a little bit. And I've ended up with a kind of little portfolio of sites. iOS dev weekly, of course, yeah, the iOS dev jobs site, which I've run for several years now. But that started after I came out of curated. And then things like the iOS dev directory. So that was a, an initiative that I wanted to make sure that I was capturing all the voices in the iOS development community. And I've been maintaining my own set of RSS feeds for years. But I wanted to kind of crowdsource it a little bit. So I created a site that anybody can add their blog to, as long as their blog is, at least partially related to iOS development. I will add that blog into the site. And then I subscribe to every single one of those RSS feeds. And so I kind of outsourced my reading list basically. Jeroen Leenarts: That's a lot of feeds. Dave Verwer: It's yeah, it's several 100, maybe seven 800. Now, something like that. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah. Because I occasionally I update my RSS feeds from the iOS development blocks on the iOS dev directory. Right. And that's like the Indy 500. I think it is. And it's a lot of articles that you see during the week but it's good to update at Occasionally, because also with the missing content. Dave Verwer: Absolutely. And you know, if there's one thing that I've got good at over the last 10 years, it's, it's reading RSS quickly, I can, I can do a skim through my RSS feeds and pretty successfully hone in on the type of thing that I'm going to capture my attention. And so I'm hitting the J key a lot when I, when I read through my RSS, because Jeroen Leenarts: what is your, what is your RSS reader actually. Dave Verwer: So my RSS reader is a is a complicated beast. So the IRS DEP directory outputs, RSS, sorry, not RSS, outputs, OPML files, correct. And you can import an OPML file into any RSS reader almost, that's almost a universal feature. But what I didn't want to have to do was constantly import my OPML file from that site into my RSS reader. So I found an RSS reader. And as far as I'm aware, there's only one that does this, which will subscribe to an OPML file. And so every time a new feed gets added to the OPML, my RSS feed automatically picks it up. And if I ever remove one from that OPML file, it will also unsubscribe me from that feed. And so that RSS feed reader is called no reader, I N O reader. And so that feed reader subscribes to all the OPML files on that site. But in a reader itself is a web app. And it's not a particularly attractive looking web app, it's functional, but I wouldn't really want to read my RSS in it. And so the tool reader, R E, B, E R, that, that will subscribe to, or that will interact within a reader accounts. And I read I do my reading through reader, but it's talking through, you know, reader to the directory in the backend. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. Yeah, because I'm using a Feedly based workflow. Because that's, that's because when Feedly got started, right, when the Google Reader was like being discontinued, they had like a Kickstarter, and they had one tear, that was like a lifetime subscription thing. So I basically forked over, I think it was $250, when I got started, and I've been using it ever since for free. So that's, I think, I think I had a pretty good deal there. And so So yeah, you got into like reading a lot of RSS feeds for the newsletter over the years. And you also mentioned that you became a sole proprietor of your own company. And so So what does the company do? You also already mentioned that it has several web presences. And you do some consulting on the side is training or is that also involved in what you do? Dave Verwer: No, it's It's more traditional consulting for large companies doing iOS work. Jeroen Leenarts: And so let's see. So we're pretty much approaching I think, 2021 in the timeline that we've been discussing. Something that you didn't mention yet is the package index, Dave Verwer: package index. Yeah. Which is actually what I spend most of my time these days doing. That's an interesting story behind the development of that as well. If we have time for it. I don't know how long we've been going. But it feels like we've been going a reasonable amount of time. I guess it's because I'm so old. Jeroen Leenarts: i Oh, yes. Oh, this you feel right. Dave Verwer: Yes. So like I said, I ended up creating various different web properties, but all of them were focused on iOS developers. And one of the ideas that I had was to create a package search engine. I saw the package manager at the time when I was when I was thinking about creating a package search engine. It didn't support iOS projects yet, but because it's developed in the open and you can kind of you could kind of see at the time that it was moving towards being able to support iOS projects. And so I thought, well, that is interesting. And I wonder if, because CocoaPods has and still has a package search engine built into CocoaPods. That all in fact, it's the, it's the first thing you see on the hacker CocoaPods website. But I, and while a lot of CocoaPods, also support packages, the fact that that search engine was on the CocoaPods website, meant that it's very much seen as a cocoa pod search engine and not a generic library search engine, the package manager is distributed and not centralized. And so I thought, I wonder if there's an opportunity here to create something to let people find packages for that date, when the package manager might be in a place where it's popular enough to be the primary dependency manager, which it may still become, I think it probably will, just by the fact that it's best buy Apple. And also, part of it was me thinking, Well, I'm alright, with keeping up with blogs, I'm pretty good at keeping up with blogs. But what I'm really not very good at is keeping up with releases of libraries, for the newsletter. And so part of me at the same time was thinking, I wonder if if I make a package search engine, maybe I'll get a better handle on what's happening in the package ecosystem. So I started creating that site. And I started it as a closed source project, it was actually written in Ruby on Rails, that version. And I got that to the point where I launched it. And so that was launched in 2019. And it was me it worked, it did the job. It still has the fundamental same kind of process of the Swift package index today, which is that in the background, it went and fetched data from a JSON file full of packages. And then went and pull all of the package that swift files from those, and it used the dump package command to extract a JSON representation of the package. And it passed that and stored in a database. So it would analyze constantly for watching for package changes, and watching for new versions and that kind of thing. And then the front end looked at the database and presented the results. Jeroen Leenarts: So you're saying that the scraping aspect of the package indexing is actually based on the Swift package manager itself. So it's being fed? The the locations of the Swift packages that are being indexed? Pretty much? Yes, I like it. Dave Verwer: The package index has come on a long way, like, I'm not what I'm not trying to say is that I developed it all for that first version. Because that first version, the best way to think of that first version, compared to what we have today, is that that was a prototype. It did work, you could search for packages, but it was it was a prototype. And then a group of people from the vapor discord reached out to me. And they said, Oh, we've seen what you've made with the at the time it was called the Swift pm library. That was what I originally called it. They said we've we've seen that you've created this thing. There's a group of us here that are thinking of maybe doing something similar but doing it in vapor and written in Swift. And we wondered if you would be interested in collaborating. And that was a difficult decision. Actually, I must admit, I was a little bit thrown by that because I only just launched Swiftian library. And really, the last thing I actually wanted to do was rewrites it. I just finished it. You know, when you when you launch a product, you're in that period where you are actually quite happy with it. And or you were at least happy enough to launch it. And suddenly I'm thinking well, do I really want to rewrite this? But what I was interested in was open sourcing it and I thought that is that is really what I should have done from the beginning. And and then I thought, well, if it's open source, and it's going to get contributions from the Swift community, it's difficult for that to be written in Ruby. And so I started to come around to the idea. And I talked to that group of people. And we set out to kind of RE, to re engineer that site and recreate it. Unfortunately, that was a bit of a challenge. Because the, I was also trying to keep the Swift pm library up and running and maintained and working and all the rest of it. I had never written any vapor before. So I was trying to learn vapor, and it has a relatively steep learning curve vapor. And, yeah, it wasn't really getting anywhere. To be frank, like we had created a project, we had committed some code, but it really wasn't getting anywhere. And then I had an email from somebody called Stan, who we've been emailing back and forth about a couple of things. But I didn't really know, Stan, he emailed me and he that he had been writing a tool called arena, which, if you're not aware of it, it's a it's a little open source package that will, it will create a playground and import a Swift package into it. So you could very easily run this command line tool that generated your playground that checked out, for example, Alamo fire, and now you are in a playground without fire. And he said to me, he said, I've seen your Swift pm library. How about adding a button next to every package that that launches a playground? And I thought, that's a very good idea. And I kind of opened up to him and I said, Look, we're trying to do this reengineering into this open source project in vapor. And he said, Oh, I know vapor. And, and it turned out that I mean, I won't go into the huge detail of those conversations. But it turned out that actually, we were a great fit working together. And we kind of re restarted the re engineering of that project. And spin and I created then the package index, the other people in the the vapor discord, they become pit busy with other things. And it ended up that it was fun. And I that kind of worked on it together to get it to where it is today. And of course, there have been contributions, but it's primarily been me. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, and where can people find the Swift package index? Dave Verwer: Swift package? index.com? Can't miss it. Can't miss it. Jeroen Leenarts: So um, yeah, so yeah, we're coming up on time, actually a little bit. There's probably a ton of things that we didn't talk about that we missed. But is there anything that we really really should not forget? Before we close out the conversation? Dave Verwer: I think I think we've covered all my bits. But I think the thing that I'd like to kind of end on is whenever you're, whatever, I'm working on something. I think I mentioned that a couple of times during the interview. Sometimes you kind of you're drawn towards something that's being successful, or that's working, or something you're excited about, and drawn away from the things that are less exciting. And the package index has been an enormous breath of fresh air into what I've been creating. And partly that has come through finding and working with somebody who also has a very similar vision in what you want to create. And what's amazing about the package index and how we've come to work together is I mean, spin and I have still never met each other. Partly you can thank pandemic for that. Cuz we don't live in the same country. And so that's made it difficult to meet physically, but we kind of it was a random email that came in I didn't notice when random email came in. And I've always been a great believer that you shouldn't ignore the people who are trying to get in touch with you. You know, if you've ever emailed me, it's very, very likely you've got a personal response that was typed by me. I can generally write okay, I generally reply to every email that comes into my inbox from anybody. And that's a great thing to do, because 99% 90% of those emails will come to nothing, they'll just be a nice little conversation that you have with somebody. But some of those emails will end up with you doing a podcast like this. And some of them will lead to you, effectively creating what I think is the probably one of the most significant bits of software that I've created in my career, which is the package index. Yeah. And so reply to your emails. Jeroen Leenarts: That's as good as it can be some work, of course. And so and but with that, what's the best way for people to find you online? Dave Verwer: Best way is, my website has a link to everything that I do. So davor.com, you'll find the link to everything I do from there. I'm also on Twitter as they were, although I, I don't use it as much as I used to do that. These days. So the website is probably the best. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, yeah, we'll make sure to link up everything in in the show notes. And, yeah, with that, Dave, thank you very much for all the all the backstory behind your person and and the history. And, yeah, I hope to be able to talk to you again in the future, and maybe more topical on a specific area, because there's so much that that I can ask you and that we can talk about. And thank you very much for your time. And yeah, it's it. I hope to see you sometime in person in the future because the Netherlands and the UK there. We're not that far apart, I think. Dave Verwer: Yes, that's right. Yeah. So yeah, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's been, I felt like there was an old TV show in the UK called, this is your life, and they would go through chronological people's lives. I feel like I've been on an episode of This Is Your Life. Jeroen Leenarts: I think that's a compliment, right? It is. Okay, Dave, thank you very much for your time and talk to you later. Dave Verwer: Thanks for having me.