Everything We’ve Built Is Now Free
- Dec 1, 2025
- 5 min read
Everything We've Built Is Now Free
When we first started building 3DaysOfSwift, we spent a lot of time thinking about the same question that every educational platform eventually faces.
What should be free, and what should be paid?
It is a reasonable question. Creating educational content takes time. Writing explanations takes time. Building examples takes time. Designing playgrounds takes time. Maintaining a website takes time. Every hour spent creating resources is an hour that could have been spent elsewhere.
Most educational platforms eventually arrive at a familiar solution. A portion of the content remains free while the most valuable resources are placed behind a paywall. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Many outstanding educators have built successful businesses using that model, and countless developers have benefited from the material they produce.
The more we worked on 3DaysOfSwift, however, the more we found ourselves returning to a different conclusion. The problem we were trying to solve did not feel like a problem that should begin with restrictions.
Our goal was never simply to teach Swift.
Our goal was to help developers protect the Swift expertise they had already spent years building.
Once we became clear about that mission, the decision became much easier.
Everything we have built is now free.
Why We Started 3DaysOfSwift
The idea behind 3DaysOfSwift did not come from a desire to create another Swift course.
There are already excellent Swift courses available. Apple provides exceptional documentation. The Swift community has produced books, tutorials, conference talks, newsletters, and educational websites that have helped developers around the world learn the language.
The problem we kept observing was different.
Many developers were not struggling because they had never learned Swift. They were struggling because they had learned Swift months or years earlier and had not revisited certain concepts since.
Anyone who has prepared for an interview after several years in the industry has probably experienced this. You encounter a question about ARC, protocol composition, generics, actor isolation, or value semantics and immediately recognise the topic. You know you have studied it before. You may even remember using it in production code. Yet explaining it clearly and confidently can feel much harder than expected.
That experience is surprisingly common, particularly among experienced developers.
The issue is rarely intelligence.
The issue is rarely capability.
More often, it is simply a lack of recent exposure.
The Industry Already Solved Learning
One of the ideas that has influenced the direction of 3DaysOfSwift is the belief that the Swift community has largely solved the problem of learning Swift.
A developer entering the ecosystem today has access to remarkable resources. Apple's official Swift language book remains one of the best technical references available. The SwiftUI tutorials published by Apple provide an excellent introduction to modern application development. WWDC sessions offer direct insight from the engineers building the tools and frameworks themselves.
Developers can access these resources here:
The challenge facing many developers today is not a shortage of educational material. If anything, the opposite is true. There is so much information available that it can become difficult to decide what deserves attention.
What remains comparatively underserved is revision.
How do developers efficiently revisit concepts they already learned?
How do they maintain confidence in topics that may not appear regularly in day to day work?
How do they remain interview ready without repeatedly working through entire courses from the beginning?
Those questions became increasingly important as we continued developing the platform.
Why Revision Matters
Software development differs from many academic subjects because knowledge is often highly contextual.
A developer working on networking features may spend months thinking about APIs, authentication, caching, and asynchronous operations. During that same period they may never need to discuss retain cycles or protocol composition. Another developer may spend most of their time building SwiftUI interfaces and rarely encounter generics or actor isolation.
The result is that knowledge naturally drifts toward the areas being used most frequently.
This does not mean forgotten topics have disappeared. More often, they have simply moved further away from immediate recall.
Technical interviews expose this reality very quickly because interviewers frequently ask candidates to discuss concepts that may not have appeared recently in their day to day work. Experienced developers are often surprised by how much knowledge returns after a short period of focused revision.
That observation sits at the heart of 3DaysOfSwift.
Why We Chose Xcode Playgrounds
When developers want to revisit a language feature, they do not necessarily need a complete application.
Suppose somebody wants to refresh their understanding of ARC. Building a full application project introduces user interfaces, navigation, architecture, and countless other concerns that have little to do with memory management itself. The same problem appears when revisiting protocols, generics, property wrappers, or concurrency.
Xcode playgrounds provide a much simpler environment. A developer can open a playground and immediately begin experimenting with the concept being studied. They can modify examples, test assumptions, observe behaviour, and strengthen understanding without the overhead of creating an entire application.
This shorter feedback loop makes playgrounds particularly effective for revision because the focus remains on the language feature itself rather than the surrounding infrastructure.
What Is Available Today
Today, 3DaysOfSwift provides 40 free downloadable Xcode playgrounds covering 29 Swift language features and concepts commonly encountered throughout professional iOS development and technical interviews.
The collection includes topics such as optionals, protocols, extensions, closures, generics, ARC, property wrappers, concurrency, actors, opaque types, existential types, and value versus reference semantics. Each playground has been designed to encourage practical experimentation rather than passive reading.
The objective is not to create another collection of static notes.
The objective is to create opportunities for developers to engage directly with the language, revisit important concepts, and strengthen their understanding through hands on exploration.
You can explore the complete collection here:
Why We Decided To Make Everything Free
As the platform evolved, we found ourselves returning to a simple question.
If the goal is to help developers maintain and strengthen their Swift expertise, does placing barriers in front of those resources actually support that mission?
The answer increasingly felt like no.
The developers who benefit most from revision resources are often preparing for interviews, returning to Swift after a break, transitioning into iOS development, or simply trying to stay technically sharp. Making those resources freely available removes friction and allows the focus to remain on learning, experimentation, and professional growth.
The Swift community has benefited enormously from people who chose to share knowledge openly. Open source software, blog posts, conference talks, technical discussions, and documentation have all contributed to the growth of the ecosystem. We wanted 3DaysOfSwift to contribute to that tradition rather than move away from it.
Final Thoughts
Everything we have built is now free because we believe the most valuable contribution we can make is helping developers strengthen and retain the knowledge they have already worked hard to acquire.
The Swift community already provides exceptional resources for learning the language. Our goal is to complement those resources by making revision simpler, more practical, and more accessible. Through downloadable Xcode playgrounds focused on experimentation and exploration, we hope to provide developers with an efficient way to revisit important concepts whenever they need them.
If that helps somebody perform better in an interview, understand a difficult topic more clearly, or regain confidence in knowledge that had become rusty over time, then the platform is doing exactly what it was created to do.
Good luck.
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