Explore the wonderful world of advanced Swift.

Point-Free is a video series exploring advanced topics in the Swift programming language, hosted by industry experts, Brandon and Stephen.

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Episode 330 • Jul 7, 2025

We continue our series on “modern persistence” with an important topic: “callbacks.” Callbacks are little hooks into the lifecycle of your data model so that you can be notified or take action when something changes. We will first explore the “Active Record” pattern of callbacks, popularized by Ruby on Rails, and then see how we can improve upon them.

Free 39 min
Episode 327 • Jun 2, 2025

How does our SQL-based solution for persistence compare with modern SwiftData? We put things to the test by rebuilding our complex @FetchAll query using @Model and the @Query macro!

Free 1 hr 16 min
Episode 315 • Mar 3, 2025

We finish a sneak peek of our upcoming Structured Queries library by showing how queries built with the library can be reused and composed together, and how we can replace all of the raw queries in our application with simpler, safer query builders.

Free 42 min

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Episode 331 • Jul 14, 2025

We build a bunch of triggers in a schema-safe, type-safe way using APIs from the StructuredQueries library, including a callback that ensures the Reminders app always has at least one list, and a callback that helps us support drag–drop positional ordering of lists.

Subscriber-only 28 min
Episode 330 • Jul 7, 2025

We continue our series on “modern persistence” with an important topic: “callbacks.” Callbacks are little hooks into the lifecycle of your data model so that you can be notified or take action when something changes. We will first explore the “Active Record” pattern of callbacks, popularized by Ruby on Rails, and then see how we can improve upon them.

Free 39 min
Episode 329 • Jun 30, 2025

We go live with our viewers to unveil our vision for modern persistence. We show just how easy it is to seamlessly synchronize your app’s data across many devices, including sharing data with other iCloud users, and we answer your questions.

Subscriber-only 1 hr 49 min

What to expect

New content regularly

We dissect some of the most important and interesting topics in Swift programming frequently, and deliver them straight to your inbox.

Wide variety of topics

We cover both abstract ideas and practical concepts you can start using in your code base immediately.

Playground downloads

Download a fully-functioning Swift playground from the episode so you can experiment with the concepts discussed.

Video transcripts

We transcribe each video by hand so you can search and reference easily. Click on a timestamp to jump directly to that point in the video.

Collections

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UIKit

Collection

SwiftUI may be all the rage these days, but that doesn’t mean you won’t occassionally need to dip your toes into the UIKit waters. Whether it be to access some functionality not yet available in SwiftUI, or for performance reasons (UICollectionView 😍), you will eventually find yourself subclassing UIViewController, and then the question becomes: what is the most modern way to do this?

9 episodes 5 hr 28 min

Concurrency

Collection

Swift has many tools for concurrency, including threads, operation queues, dispatch queues, Combine and now first class tools built directly into the language. We start from the beginning to understand what the past tools excelled at and where they faultered in order to see why the new tools are so incredible.

12 episodes 9 hr 3 min

Back to basics

Collection

The Swift language has grown over the years and become more and more powerful. It now boosts a comprehensive static type system (generics, existentials…), a suite of concurrency tools (actors, dynamic isolation…), and most recently even ownership capabilities (consuming, borrowing, non-copyable types…). In “Back to basics” we will focus on just one part of the language in order to uncover the deep theory behind that feature as well as provide concrete advice for writing real-world code.

8 episodes 4 hr 46 min

A better way to create SwiftUI bindings

If you have ever created a binding using the get:set: initializer, you may want to reconsider. Doing so can hurt SwiftUI’s ability to animate your view. Luckily there is a better way. You can leverage @dynamicMemberLookup and subscripts to derive new bindings in a way that allows SwiftUI to propertly track where the binding came from.

Watch 7 min

Why you can't use enums in SwiftData

SwiftData is not capable of filtering and sorting by raw representable enum properties in models. Predicates and sort descriptors will compile just fine when referencing enum properties, but it will crash at runtime.

Watch 1 min

Why you can't use booleans in SwiftData

SwiftData is not capable of sorting by boolean properties in models. And if you try to trick SwiftData to allow it, you will encounter runtime crashes.

Watch 9 min

What people are saying

Mike Abidakun
@mabidakun

Every episode has been amazing on Pointfree, yet somehow, you've managed to make these Parser combinator episodes even better!!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Oscar Alvarez
@iOjCaR

So many concepts presented at #WWDC19 reminded me of @pointfreeco video series. 👏👏 So happy I watched it before coming to San Jose.

Rajiv Jhoomuck
@rajivjhoomuck

@pointfreeco ❤️: Thank you! 🧠: … The brain can’t say anything. It is blown away (🤯)!

Nico Passo
@nicopasso

Please stop releasing one amazing video after the other! I'm still at Episode 15! #pointfreemarathon #androiddevhere

David Piper
@HeyDaveTheDev

Just finished the mini-series on enum properties by @pointfreeco! They pointed out what’s missing from enums in Swift and used SwiftSyntax to generate code to add the missing parts. Thanks for your work @stephencelis and @mbrandonw! #pointfree

Christina Lee
@RunChristinaRun

I listened to the first two episodes of @pointfreeco this weekend and it was the best presentation of FP fundamentals I've seen. Very thoughtful layout and progression of the material and motivations behind each introduced concept. Looking forward to watching the rest!

Dad
@GeekAndDad

Three recent @pointfreeco episodes were so interesting I stayed in the treadmill 3x as long as usual and watched them all in a row! Walking may be challenging later/tomorrow... 😮

Meghan Kane
@meghafon

Really love this episode - thanks @mbrandonw + @stephencelis! Understanding Swift types in terms of algebraic data types is such an elegant way of seeing the # of possible values your Swift types will represent 🤯 #Simplifyallthethings #GoodbyeComplexity

Meghan Kane
@meghafon

tfw you are excited for a 4 hour train ride because you'll have time to watch the new @pointfreeco episode 🤓🏔🚂 #MathInTheAlps #typehype

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