A few weeks back I got accepted into the mobile academy iOS provided by the Etnetera. They started organizing this a year ago when I also applied but unfortunately for me, I didn't get accepted. This year I was luckier and I must say it was the best experience as far as the academies or workshops are concerned.
It started with an opening party where we had a chance to meet other students and mentors, and got to play an ice-breaker game so we get to know each other. It was fun, although I didn't had a chance to talk to every one of them but overall they were really friendly.
The content to the academy for us was unknown and at the end of each workshop we got to know the topic for the next one. Every week there were assignments in the coding form and it consisted of using the knowledge we learned from the workshop to improve our application which we built from the scratch. You can look at the application in this video. However this wasn't in the finished form since I had to return the Mac which belonged to the firm, and I didn't manage to take any screenshots nor videos.
I learned a lot about basics of the Swift and developing in iOS to such an extent that I'm confident that I'll be able to write simplistic applications for it, so don't expect any mumbo jumbo games as fortnite etc.
The Swift language in my opinion is very similar to Kotlin. It is strong dynamically typed language and at first I didn't like it that much but after 6-7 weeks of coding in it, I started to actually like this language. Primarly as a Java developer, I will miss the enum with the dynamic parameters the most. A few days back I even wanted to use something similar for my task but had to use another approach.
Next, I'd like to mention how the mentors were friendly. They were super helpful and I'm very thankful for them putting their free time in mentoring us and doing code reviews for us. The atmosphere at every workshop were super cool and I was excited for each of them. Unfortunately for me, I was in Lisabon for a week to attend Web Summit so I didn't manage to attend two of them.
There was even one workshop where we split into two groups and one group played on VR and the other was attending the course and after some times, we switched. At that moment, I heard about a week or two beforehand about Oculus Quest and wanted to buy it but wasn't sure how much precise it is since I couldn't believe it was a stand-alone VR headset without needing an external power such as PC or consoles. After trying it at Etnetera, that day I headed straight to the Alza and bought one and I don't regret this decision.
Well, to summarize this experience, I really recommend this academy to anyone who wants to learn how to code in Swift and how to develop for iOS. The only drawback is waking up early to be at 7:30 am at the Holešovice.
