Mikaela Caron learned how to code after studying mechanical and electrical engineering in college. When SwiftUI was first released, she preferred to learn UIKit as it was a more mature framework, and later returned to SwiftUI a few years later.

When a coworker introduced Mikaela to Vapor and Server-Side Swift, she became interested in the topic and created several video tutorials about it. At the SwiftServer Conference, Mikaela gave two interesting talks, in 2022 and 2024.

After working as an iOS developer at Lickability, she decided to become independent, dividing her time between freelancing work, her own indie apps, and her YouTube channel, where she shares her knowledge about UIKit, SwiftUI, and Vapor.

In this episode, Mikaela shares her journey as a software developer, from learning how to program for iOS in Swift to making the leap to backend development with Vapor, and the lessons she learned along the way. She also tells us how working as a freelancer allows her to keep learning new things and how that contributes to her own apps, which she builds in public.

Social

• Website
• GitHub
• YouTube Channel
• Swift Over Coffee
• Other Social Links

Talks

• SwiftServerConf 2024: Just Save a File, It’s Easy, Right?!
• SwiftServerConf 2022: How to Make Vapor Fly | Deploying Vapor on Fly.io

Additional Links Mentioned in the Show

• Deploying an Email System with SwiftCloud
• Swift Open Source Slack
• Vapor Discord
• Hummingbird Discord