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).

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

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

• Website
• GitHub
• Mastodon

The first time I spoke with Andrew was in the first half of 2024, while I was checking out his Swift runtime for Vercel Functions. What I didn’t know then, was the fact he is the developer behind Swift Cloud. It initially launched as a hosted platform, but Andrew just announced and released a new vision for Swift Cloud: an open source framework to deploy Swift server applications, that is agnostic to the cloud provider and the application type (Vapor, Hummingbird, Lambda). The great thing about it is the infrastructure code abstracts lower level concepts and technologies (such as Dockerfiles), enabling the developer to describe in Swift the server infrastructure.

I messaged Andrew around a month ago, before his Swift Cloud announcement, asking to interview him for this series. Not only he right away agreed, but he was kind enough to help reviewing the hands on article covering Swift Cloud, and constantly listening feedback about its API.

Today he joins us for the first recorded episode Dev Conversations. Here we talk about his career, from an intern on the early days of WhatsApp in 2012, until his current position at Vercel and his work and future vision for Swift Cloud.