Dave Verwer is well known in the iOS developer community, mostly for his iOSDevWeekly.com newsletter, which he’s been publishing for more than a decade. In the recent years, Dave and Sven A. Schmidt have been working on the Swift Package Index - a website that does much more than just listing Swift packages. It shows, for each listed package, a matrix of supported platforms, Swift versions, and also allows launching a playground with a package to try it out!

After listening to some of their podcast episodes, and peeking at the organization repositories on GitHub, I was sure it could yield a great talk about the different pieces they have built when creating the website. The Vapor server, the tools to digest packages, documentation hosting for package, the infrastructure that supports it all…

Sven and Dave both kindly accepted my invite to join another Dev Conversations episode. We chatted about its history, all the pieces behind the scenes, the state of Swift 6’s strict concurrency. Wrapping up, we also discussed how demanding this project became, and how essential is the community support, from GitHub Sponsors to the companies that contribute to it (MacStadium, Microsoft, and since 2023, Apple).

Swift Package Index

• Website and Blog
• Discord
• GitHub
• Podcast
• Ready for Swift 6
• Post: Switching to ephemeral macOS build runners
• Mastodon
• Percy by BrowserStack

Dave Verwer

• Website
• GitHub
• iOSDevWeekly.com
• Talk: How I Accidentally Ended Up Running The Largest Open-Source Vapor Website

Sven A. Schmidt

• Website
• GitHub
• Mastodon