A weekly habit that outgrew a job
Every week, somewhere in Gdansk, a Swift article ships. It has a rule attached: no post takes more than three or four hours to write. The constraint is not a compromise, it is the whole point. A four-hour ceiling forces a single idea per article, which is easier to read and easier to finish. John Sundell has been keeping that promise to himself, and to readers in more than 177 countries, since the beginning of 2017.
Today he describes himself plainly: a freelance Swift and Rust software developer who builds apps, games and developer tools. The plain description hides the scale. Swift by Sundell is not just a blog. It is articles, tips, a podcast, videos, and a sprawling shelf of open-source libraries, all run by one person who decided that teaching and building did not have to be separate careers.
The Spotify years
Before the indie life, there was a green logo. Sundell joined Spotify on the first of May, 2013, and spent three and a half years there, eventually leading iOS development. He shipped product features and internal frameworks, including the company's Hub Framework, the kind of plumbing that powers the screens millions of people scroll through without ever seeing the code beneath.
By his own account it was an amazing stretch: an exciting product, brilliant colleagues, a lot learned. And then a familiar itch. To keep growing, he wanted to work with more people in more contexts than any single employer could offer. So he left.
Going indie, then going public
The exit was not a leap into nothing. He moved from Sweden to Poland, first to Krakow, later to Gdansk, and split his time between games, open source, and remote iOS work for the Norwegian digital agency Hyper. Somewhere in there he tried blogging again, and this time he gave himself the weekly challenge that would define everything after.
What started as a personal discipline turned into a publication people relied on. The Swift by Sundell podcast followed, in-depth conversations about Swift and software development. He co-hosted Stacktrace too. The reach kept widening, and he found the geography of it genuinely thrilling, readers logging on from countries he had never visited.
The tools nobody knew they needed
A teacher who codes tends to leave artifacts. Sundell's are everywhere in the Swift world. Publish is a static site generator written for Swift developers, and his own website runs on it, a quiet flex if there ever was one. Plot lets you write type-safe HTML, XML and RSS in Swift. Ink is a fast Markdown parser. Splash highlights Swift syntax for blogs and tools. Files makes working with the filesystem pleasant. Codextended hands Swift's Codable API a dose of type inference.
None of these are toys. They carry thousands of stars and power real projects, and they exist because someone needed them and decided to share rather than hoard. That instinct, build it once, give it away, runs through his entire output.
How the work actually happens
The routine is almost suspiciously human. The day often starts around eight in the morning when his dog decides it is walk time. He works in two to three hour blocks with fifteen-minute breaks between them, a rhythm he guards carefully. He is productivity-obsessed and balance-obsessed in equal measure, allergic to office politics and rigid process, drawn to the freedom of working from anywhere.
His advice to other freelancers is the same creed he runs on: under-promise, over-deliver, go the extra mile. It is not glamorous. It has also reached millions.
Still shipping
Swift by Sundell went quiet for a while. In 2025 it came back, with new articles and videos, and a wider technical palette that now includes Rust alongside Swift. The format is the same as it ever was: free to everyone, everywhere, focused enough to read on a coffee break, deep enough to change how you write code. He is still catching the same idea he started with, that sharing what you learn is its own kind of building.