Hi, I’m Chris!

Together with Florian Kugler, I run objc.io, where we write books, create videos and hold workshops about Swift and SwiftUI.

I started my career building websites with PHP, HTML and CSS (actually, CSS wasn’t a big thing yet back then). I moved on to writing lots of Haskell (in uni) and Javascript (although I hardly recognize today’s Javascript). Towards the end of my uni career iOS came out and I started building iOS apps using the very first public SDK.

In 2012, I moved from The Netherlands to Berlin. I was frustrated by the lack of English-speaking iOS conferences I could attend, so together with Matt and Peter we organized UIKonf. This was a big deal for me personally, and seeing the first edition was pure magic. Many friendships (and more!) have started during the two editions of UIKonf that we organized, and I’m really proud to have played a part in that.

After the first edition of UIKonf, Florian, Daniel and me started objc.io. We came up with the idea while sitting outside during the hack day following the conference. At first, we put out a monthly magazine with many amazing contributors.

When Swift was first announced, we figured we were in the perfect position to explain functional programming to the people in the ObjC/Swift ecosystem. Together with Wouter, Florian and me wrote a book called Functional Swift. About a year later I met Ben at a conference, and we started writing Advanced Swift. Another few years later, I met Matt at a conference and we decided to write App Architecture.

In between writing those books, we also started Swift Talk. This is a weekly video series where we build stuff in Swift. We started in 2016 and have been putting out a weekly episode ever since, covering topics such as parsers, SwiftUI, networking, server-side programming, app architecture and much more.

I really enjoy running. I have been running regularly since 2005, but ever since I started running high mileage I made a lot of progress. In 2020 I ran my (unofficial) marathon PB of 2:36, and in 2022 I ran my 10K PB of 32:49. This was purely because I was running a lot . Due to having a family, I doubt I’ll ever make the time again to run so much, so there’s a good chance these are lifetime PRs.

In also enjoy reading, gardening and spending lots of time with my kids. I like building physical things (I’m not very good at it, but I really enjoy woodworking).

I sometimes give talks at conferences. Here’s an annotated version of my talk A Day in the Life of a SwiftUI View.

Here’s a bio for conferences:

Chris is the founder of objc.io. He wrote multiple books about Swift, runs the Swift Talk video series and organizes SwiftUI workshops.