Season 4 Episode 1

What's up, everybody welcome to a new episode. So it's been a little while since I released an episode, a couple of reasons for that one, it always takes time to get back into the swing of things after the holidays and lots of catching up to do, not only for me but for all of you as the listeners. And so we had a little bit of a break there.

The other reason is something fantastic. And that is the community live stream, as I'm calling it now. The CompileSwift Livestream. This year, we have been working on something new, and it's turning out to be great. And I want to talk about it for a few minutes and share it with you all. You're all invited to be part of it.

If you've been keeping up with the streams, on Sundays, I do a live stream that you can see on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook. You can go to [CompileSwift.live] and find it there. The Sunday stream, I usually do apps that run on macOS, watchOS, iOS, etc.

Then, mid-week on Wednesday evenings, 9 pm central time. I have what I've been calling the SpriteKit stream, where I've been learning and exploring SpriteKit game creation, all of that kind of stuff.

Well, it's got a bit of a following now, and we've got some regular folks in there and what's happened is lovely because it's a proof of concept for what I was hoping would happen. We have active participants in the chat watching the stream, and they are now contributing.

It started. They were contributing to the chat with code. Some folks were teaching me what they knew about SpriteKit, and we would implement those changes, take a look at them and evolve this idea of the game over time to explore SpriteKit.

It got to the point where everybody was so involved, and it was fantastic that it wasn't working to share in the stream chat. So what we did, we came together, we spoke about it, and I've put out a repository.

It's a private repository. It's not available to everybody, but I decided that since some great folks were regularly contributing to the code base and ideas for the game. I’m making it available to anybody who comes along to the stream and actively participates in the chat, and contributes to the game’s development.

That could mean many different things, but those are the qualifiers, right. The reason for this approach? All the fantastic hard work that everybody is putting in, and we're having a great time with this, but we didn't want to make it available for just anybody to come along. Take it, turn it into a game and release it. That's not the idea here.

The idea is that we're a community working on it. Therefore it's really for the folks in that community to benefit. If you come to the stream, actively participate in the chat and development of the game. That could be anything from documentation, code ideas, basically participating in the result.

You get access to the GitHub repository, and you can do commits, pulls, and everything else, plus you can use it for whatever you want. Just the same as everybody else.

It's under a GPL 3 license, so you can use it for whatever you want to use it for, but you've got to push back your changes; that’s part of the license.

This is working out very well, and this has always proven what I believe, that the swift community is just fantastic and wants to share things.

Learning together and expanding each other's knowledge is a crucial goal I had for CompileSwift. This is precisely what I was hoping would happen with the live stream. We would have an interactive community and come together instead of being separate developers operating in a silo.

You can all become part of this if you want. Like I say. I'm going to be, looking at this and seeing if we need to adapt over time. But if I find that folks come along to the stream and then disappear, you're probably going to lose access to the repo.

Because this is an ongoing project, I will be very mindful of those that drop-in, meet the requirements, and then drop out again. That's not the way this is supposed to work. It's a community effort.

I'd love to see you drop by, say hello, be part of this, say that “Hey, I heard it on the podcast.” That would tell me that these are the kinds of things on the podcast you're interested in.

I have some ideas to have community members come on the podcast and discuss the project and other development topics. So you may see those come up over time, as well as we try to work out the details on those, it's turned into something fantastic.

And we have a lot of fun. It's a great stress relief for those who write professional apps during the day just to come and have fun with this game creation.

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