#14: Antoine van Der Lee
Description
Antoine van Der Lee is the creator behind SwiftLee, one of the most popular Swift development blogs, and RocketSim, a powerful iOS development tool. With over 7 years at WeTransfer and now as an indie developer, Antoine has built a significant following in the Swift community through consistent weekly content and innovative developer tools.
He started his programming journey with ActionScript and Flash, eventually finding his way to iOS development, at an agency. Later on, his transition from agency work to WeTransfer, a high-scale environment, taught him valuable lessons about code quality and collaboration. There, he also contributed to several open-source projects while building the company’s iOS apps from the ground up.
Since 2017, Antoine has maintained SwiftLee with weekly articles, building an audience that eventually enabled him to go indie in 2024. RocketSim, which started as a simple deep link testing tool, has evolved into a comprehensive iOS development suite with over 30 utilities, including unique features like camera simulation and network speed control.
In this episode, Antoine shares his journey from Flash developer to indie success, the technical challenges behind RocketSim’s unique features, his approach to consistent content creation and audience building, and some tips for a successful migration to Swift 6’s strict concurrency.