Point-Free turns 5

Five years ago, to the day, we launched Point-Free with a pair of episodes (functions and side-effects), and since then have released 220 episodes, 132 hours of video, and have had nearly half a million visitors to the site.

In some ways we are only just getting started. We still haven’t released the 1.0 of the Composable Architecture, we still haven’t talked about one of our favorite subjects (the deep connection between math and programming), and there’s still so much more to say about Swift concurrency.

All of that will come in due time, but in the meantime there’s two things happening this week that people have been asking for a long time: livestreams and a Point-Free Slack community!

Livestreams

We are extremely excited to announce our first ever livestream. Everyone can access this livestream, whether you are a subscriber or not, and it will begin at 9am PST (5pm GMT) this Wednesday, February 1st:

We will be discussing modern SwiftUI techniques, our new Dependencies library, non-exhaustive testing, as well as taking questions from our viewers. Please join us, and bring any questions you might have. In fact, you can already start asking questions and vote on other people’s questions. Just click the “Ask” button at the bottom of chat.

We have plans for a lot more livestreams in the future, especially in tandem with new library releases and new episodic releases. Some will be free for all, and some will be for subscribers only, so consider subscribing today. 😁

Point-Free community slack

We currently field questions and comments from many different places: emails sent to us personally, Twitter messages, discussions on our GitHub repos, the Swift forums, and there’s a popular Slack with an active “#composable-architecture” channel. We really enjoy interacting with the community, but it can be difficult to keep track of conversations in so many places.

That is why we are excited to announce a new Slack just for the Point-Free community:

This is the best place for chat about our open source repos, about our episode content, and anything else Point-Free related. For more long form conversations we recommend opening a discussion on the appropriate GitHub repo (did you know we have one for all of our episode code samples?). While we will casually check the Swift forums and iOS developers Slack, we will not actively monitor them as much as we do our own Slack and repo discussions.

One more thing

We have also added a little easter egg feature that makes it easy for you to resume your most recently watched episode, or start up the next one. Just point your browser to pointfree.co/resume and it will do the rest. We plan on adding more features like this to the site soon.

To 5 more years!

We are eternally grateful to all of our subscribers, who make it possible for us to create our episodes and work on open source projects. We wouldn’t be here without you. Here’s to five more years! 🥳