How Did I Learn iOS Development and Machine Learning?

Hello everybody, long time no see!

It's been a while since I posted a blog post about "Don’t You Ever Limit Yourself (The Engineer’s Dilemma)" in 2021. But today, I want to share about my "Comeback to Tech" journey.

If you read my previous blog posts or knowledge sharing videos, you'd probably know that I'm interested in a lot of things -- starting from music, sports, photography, videography, UX, audio and music technology, etc. However, I realized that I only have 24-hours a day and 7-days a week. So, I need to pick 1 or 2 fields that I would like to prioritize in 2022. And this year, I decided to focus on learning about iOS Development and Machine Learning (ML) for Audio.

Why iOS & Machine Learning? Here is Why.

When I was in undergrad, I joined a research lab called Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for 3.5 years and I found an Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Music community called the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) during my final year. I always find it fascinating if we can combine art/music with technology. But I realize that it's a very niche field and it's not easily applicable to a real-world product (e.g., websites, mobile apps, etc.). So, I couldn't find some friends in Indonesia who have the same interest as I am. Well, if you're interested in my ISMIR story, check out this blog post.

One day, I decided to watch all of The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2021 (WWDC21) videos. And I was surprised that they could make AI/ML practical and easy to use when the software developers wanted to develop an AI/ML based apps. Some of the sessions that I really like from WWDC21 were:

Create Custom Audio Experiences with ShazamKit
Discover Built-in Sound Classification in SoundAnalysis
Build Dynamic iOS Apps with the Create ML Framework
Tune Your Core ML Models

That's why I decided to focus on learning about iOS Development and Machine Learning in 2022.

So, How Did I Learn?

Since the world needs to face the Pandemic, most academic institutions need to make an online-learning or post their knowledge on the Internet. Although the Pandemic caused negative consequences (e.g., health issues, layoffs, etc.), I couldn't neglect that they also gave positive outcomes, such as accessible information to everyone who's searching for it. If you're interested in me talking more about this topic, you can read my previous blog post here.

Swift is a programming language created by Apple and SwiftUI is a modern way to declare user interfaces for any Apple platform. I learned a lot from their website, and in my opinion, they have the most comprehensive tutorials and documentations ever. However, I was still struggling to centralized my learning resources that I found on the Internet. So, if I want study a certain topic, I need to get some extra time to search some of the links that I found previously.