Nick’s journey into programming started early, though he didn’t follow a traditional computer science path: he studied electronic engineering at university before transitioning into web development. In 2009, the company he worked for wanted to get into iPhone app development, and this is when he took the opportunity to dive into a new field: iOS development.

This led him to become involved in iOS development, where one of his open source projects became very popular: iCarousel. It allowed displaying a cover flow interface, similar to the UI present in the iPod app. This helped establish his name in the iOS community, along with a book he wrote on Core Animation.

One day, after Swift was released, Nick decided to create a tool to solve code formatting issues, to allow himself, and his team, to focus on what matters in Pull Requests: the functionality and the architecture, not the amount of whitespaces or the position of the brackets. Nowadays, SwiftFormat is by far his most popular project, solving code formatting issues for hundreds - if not thousands - of developers.

In this episode, Nick shares his journey from web development to becoming a key contributor to the Swift ecosystem. He discusses the evolution of SwiftFormat, its technical implementation details, and how it compares to Apple’s official swift-format. He also shares insights about maintaining motivation in programming and his thoughts on the future of Swift development.

Social

• Website
• GitHub
• Mastodon

Talks

• try! Swift Tokyo 2025 - SwiftSyntax: for good and evil
• SwiftServerConf: So You Think You Know Swift?

Open Source

• SwiftFormat
• iCarousel
• Expression