My story

Hi, my name is Albert Alex, and I write code for a living.

My journey to tech started when my father gifted me a Nokia 5233 mobile phone in 2013. If you were into tech at that time, you might know how popular this mobile phone was. Right after unboxing, I started installing games, sharing jokes, and figuring out more and more about the device. 

It was pure bliss.

After a few weeks, I was going through my Facebook newsfeed, where I noticed some Facebook pages having millions of likes, and their posts were getting thousands of likes in minutes. The likes and comments on the posts got me excited. That was the time when everyone craved for more engagement on Facebook, and opportunities for social media networking were expanding.

This got me curious, and I realized I wanted to do this too. I decided to create pages inspired by other big pages. After some research, I created multiple Facebook pages for popular celebrities and athletes.

I started posting images and life updates of the celebrities and athletes on the pages regularly and shared the content in popular and related Facebook groups. Likes and comments started flowing in, which kept me motivated, and I started figuring out more about ways to monetize them. Cut to 2015, after high school, with my excitement and passion for tech and the internet, I decided to build a career around computers and hence, went on to pursue a BCA (Bachelor of Computer Applications) degree.

At the time of admission, I didn’t know anything about programming. I had just joined the course for the motivation of having a career in computers. The first semester was great, I made a lot of friends, bunked college and travelled a lot. But reality hit when exam dates were declared. Our whole group got scared because we just attended lectures for the sake of attendance, and studies were not the last thing we attended to. Still, most of the subjects came easily to me, except for the nightmarish “Programming with C.”

The concepts of arrays, objects, and pointers were way too complex to understand all by myself. Somehow, I managed to learn enough to clear my exams.

But in the second semester, I got subjects such as Data structures and system design, which were trickier than ever.

To avoid the stress, I took things seriously and started showing up in the lectures with focus. I took help from seniors and teachers to get a deep understanding of codes and algorithms. Soon after, I started understanding the code and made basic programs in the computer labs, such as finding natural numbers, prime numbers, etc, by capturing the user’s input.

Seeing my interest in programming, one of my seniors recommended I join a web development course. After some discussion with teachers and family members, I decided to follow his advice. I bought my first-ever Windows laptop and joined a web development course nearby. In the course, I started learning HTML, CSS, jQuery, JavaScript, PHP and WordPress.

Fast forward to my final semester, I was already making dynamic websites, adding features in WordPress themes and plugins, and had become fluent and cleaner with my code. After college, I got an internship in a tech company and secured a full-time position in the same company after six months.

It was a service-based company based in Texas, so I had to move out of my hometown.

Again, the first year in the company was amazing. Learning new things every day, chilling with colleagues in the evening after work, exploring Texas and much more.

Most of my colleagues were working on different technologies such as Magento, openCart, Handlebars.js, Android/iOS mobile apps, etc.

I used to spend some time with them while they were working. I loved to notice their workflows, problem-solving approaches, and how they wrote code. During my time period with this company, I worked on most of these technologies, but the most interesting ones were JavaScript frameworks and libraries such as React, Angular, Next.js, Node.js, etc. So, I upskilled myself and became a MEAN/MERN stack developer. I also started developing Android and iOS mobile apps in react native. In May 2019, one of our clients requested us to migrate their iOS app from react native to Swift.

FYI, react native is a framework by Meta Platforms used to build apps for Android and iOS, whereas Swift is a programming language developed by Apple for building Apple’s ecosystem apps. So, Matt, our Swift developer, started working on it. Being a cross-platform app developer myself, I got curious to learn the native iOS app development too.

I reached out to Matt for guidance. He shared a brief understanding of Swift/Swift UI with me and told me to install XCode IDE to work with it. While trying to install XCode on Windows, I found that XCode was not officially available for Windows, and at that time, I was hesitant to spend on another laptop, since I had recently gotten my powerful Windows PC built.

So, I started searching for ways to set up Xcode on my Windows computer. In my college days, I had heard of methods such as Hackintosh, but the reviews for them were always fishy, and that kept me off of them.

After an intensive research and trying multiple methods, I found a method through which I was able to safely install Xcode on my Windows laptop and started my native iOS app development journey.

Now, I am a full-stack developer who works on web/mobile apps, including native iOS app development as a freelancer. Recently, a friend reached out to me to guide his nephew in getting started with coding. I had a discussion with him. He wanted to learn native iOS development, but being a Windows user, he was not able to start his journey, saying, “I have tried many methods, but nothing worked.”

Hearing him, I thought if he isn’t able to find a method, then there might be thousands of students globally facing similar problems- and to my amazement, I was right! This one thought gave birth to this website.

Here, I talk about Xcode challenges, methods, solutions, and lots of other interesting stuff to make your development journey “Swifter”, yes, the pun is intended. Also, since I have helped a few colleagues and relatives figure out how to use Xcode on their PCs, I am happy to help you do so, too.

Yes, it’s only science and technology- we use VirtualBox to set up a virtual macOS on your Windows computer, and this allows you to install and use Apple-exclusive applications, including Xcode on PC.