Finn learned JavaScript as a fun way to build little websites. His programming journey, that started around the age of 12, evolved into programming Arduino projects, as he became fascinated by the idea of controlling physical objects such as LEDs. A few years later, he started learning Swift and alongside academic studies, he started building apps and games for iOS.

But it was only a few years later, when Swift started supporting embedded devices, that he was able to merge all his motivations behind programming, into a new open source project, PlaydateKit: a package that abstracts the complexities of C, and provides a more Swift-like interface to the Playdate SDK.

Another project that Finn has just released is yap: a CLI tool that uses macOS 26’s Speech framework to do on-device speech-to-text transcription. By using Apple’s frameworks and running on Apple Silicon, yap not only runs locally, but it also runs faster than any other transcription tool built on top of OpenAI’s Whisper.

In this episode, Finn tells us about his journey as a programmer, from JavaScript to Arduino, from iOS to embedded devices, and how he’s using Swift to build new tools for the community. We also explore the advantages of building CLIs in Swift, and discuss how Swift is becoming a great tool beyond iOS, with support for Linux, CLI tools, server-side projects, and embedded development.

Links

Social

• Website
• GitHub
• Mastodon

Projects

• PlaydateKit
• yap
• fx-upscale
• Unsqueeze

Additional Links

• Swift.org - Embedded
• Byte-sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate
• Noora