Swift Pills

Jorge sitting at his desk in front of his MacBook with the Apple logo, taking a pill from a large bottle labeled Swift Pills with the Swift logo, while through the window runners can be seen in a park with trees and blue sky.

Table of contents

My Problem đŸ€”

Keeping up with Swift is one of those things I always have on the list and almost never manage to cross off. Every WWDC brings new stuff, the language evolves, the community publishes non-stop, and meanwhile I’m with the project, with the meetings, with life. The information exists — the problem is finding the gap to get into it.

And almost all the technical content comes in big formats: fifty-minute videos, entire WWDC sessions, mile-long articles, books. All of that demands time and focus, and in my day-to-day I don’t always have either of the two. What ends up happening is that I keep saving links “for when I have a moment” — and that moment never comes.

My Solution đŸ§©

Arturo Rivas’s blog changes the way you consume content about Swift. What he publishes are knowledge pills: short articles, around five minutes of reading, where he tells you one specific thing and then leaves. No detours, no filler, no “before we begin, allow me to set the context”.

And what’s hooked me the most is that most of the time they’re pills about things you hadn’t even stopped to consider. Language details, subtle behaviors, APIs that had been there for versions and you’d never crossed paths with. Things that when you read them you think “huh, didn’t know that” — and from that point on you don’t forget them.

Five minutes change the equation

That they’re five-minute pills isn’t a minor detail — it’s what makes it work. I don’t need to reserve a slot, I don’t need to switch into study mode, I don’t even need to be at the computer. I read them between tasks, while waiting for a build, with the morning coffee. Learning stops competing with work and slips into the margins of the day.

And since each pill goes to a single thing, retention is brutal. When an article is long I need to process it in depth, sit down to study it and go over it several times so it sticks. When I read a pill about, for example, how @discardableResult works or some detail of Sendable I hadn’t seen, that concept goes in directly. It was the only focus during those five minutes, and my head treats it as such.

Things you hadn’t even considered

This for me is the most valuable thing about the blog. Arturo doesn’t write about “what is Swift” nor about things that are already in any tutorial. He writes about corners of the language, about behaviors that have their reason but that normally you don’t stop to investigate, about APIs that get covered up by each year’s big announcements.

It’s the kind of knowledge you don’t actively look for because you don’t even know it exists — but once you have it, it changes the way you read and write code. You realize there’s a better pattern, a tool that had been available for a while, a detail that explains why something behaves the way it does.

It fits into my flow without asking for permission

I started treating the pills as a natural part of the day, not as a separate task. Five minutes before getting down to business, another five between two meetings, while Xcode compiles something heavy. Without the feeling of “now I have to learn” — just letting them in when there’s a gap.

The contrast with long formats is brutal. For a WWDC video I need to plan it, sit down, have full attention. For a pill, I just open it when the chance appears. And it turns out the chances are far more frequent than I thought.

This connects with something I already covered in Apple Coding Speed: comprehension speed isn’t trained only in long courses. It’s also trained through constant exposure to well-explained concepts — and the pills are exactly that, continuous training that happens between more structured sessions.

My Result 🎯

If you work with Swift and your “for when I have a moment” links are piling up, the problem probably isn’t the amount of content — it’s the format. Drop by blog.arturorivas.com and try the pill model for a week.

What I’ve taken away:

  • I learn things I wasn’t even looking for — most of the pills touch on details I wouldn’t have searched for on my own, and they’re the ones that have given me the most
  • Knowledge enters effortlessly — five minutes fit into any gap, so learning stops depending on planning
  • What I read sticks — a single concept per pill makes retention much higher than with long articles
  • I recognize patterns faster — when I come across an API or a pattern I saw in a pill, I identify it without having to search for it
  • No more “I have to read this” debt — low-threshold content gets consumed in the moment, it doesn’t get postponed

If you want medicine of the new kind, you have it in knowledge pills here. Five minutes, one idea, one thing you probably hadn’t considered. You’ll hardly find a better ratio between time invested and learning that sticks.

Keep coding, keep running đŸƒâ€â™‚ïž