Since I didn’t get anything written down for weeks six and seven I decided to throw them together here. Both weeks had a strange feeling to me as it marked the halfway point through The Iron Yard program. It was surreal that it was already halfway and then when week seven rolled around I was wondering where week six went. It felt like a blur.

We continued our deep dive into Swift with enums, structs, calculated properties, and optionals oh my. At first I was just throwing question marks and exclamation marks around like they were Halloween candy. After a few more discussions I started to wrangle in my usage of optionals and it started to click why and when to use question marks over exclamation marks. I still goof up on forgetting to unpack the values at times and that always end with a slap on the forehead and a deep sigh.

Enums and structs are still a work in progress. Of course I think that’s pretty much true for everything I’m learning right now. The basics are pretty straightforward for defining and using them but there are some power features that I can see being handy down the road.

Calculated properties are something that are intriguing to me. Being able to set the value of other properties based on the value being set on one can be very useful. While the syntax for calculated properties isn’t that difficult to pick up it never fails that I end up plugging something in wrong. I’m pretty sure that this is due to me trying to jump in on something new and misusing it. That’s how we learn though right?

We are starting to think about final projects and I’ll be honest that I’m starting to sweat it a little bit. Mainly because I struggle with coming up with ideas. We’ll see how it turns out though.