The Brit who gave Swift away for free - and built an empire doing it.
The Profile
Ask any iOS developer where they learned Swift and a significant number will say the same three words: Hacking with Swift. Paul Hudson built that. Not with a VC check, not with a marketing team, and not with a freemium bait-and-switch. He built it by writing tutorials - clear, free, and relentlessly practical - until hackingwithswift.com became the most-visited Swift resource on the planet.
Based in Bath, England, Hudson runs an operation that most publishing companies would envy: 700,000 unique visitors a month, five million page views, a newsletter approaching 40,000 readers, a YouTube channel, a podcast, a paid subscription tier, 20+ books, and a library of open-source tools with tens of thousands of GitHub stars. He does most of this as a one-person editorial operation. His secret? He just never stopped publishing.
The self-deprecating dog comment captures something real about Hudson. He is genuinely funny, deliberately unpretentious, and completely allergic to the kind of personal branding that turns developers into thought-leader caricatures. He calls himself a "herder of my kids" on GitHub. He lists Rubik's cube enthusiasm alongside iOS development in his bio. His handle across every platform - Twitter/X, GitHub, Instagram, Mastodon, Bluesky - is twostraws, a name so cryptically banal it invites curiosity and delivers nothing. Perfect.
He did not start in Swift. He did not even start in iOS. Hudson's career began in journalism - writing for Mac Format, Linux Format, PC Format, PC Plus, and PC Answers at Future Publishing, one of the UK's biggest magazine houses. He became Deputy Editor, then Editor of Linux Format. He wrote PHP books for O'Reilly. He built open-source graphics libraries. When Apple released Swift in 2014, he was ready - technically sharp, writing-fluent, and completely unintimidated by the blank page. He launched hackingwithswift.com the same year Swift launched.
The career pivot from journalist to educator was not quite as dramatic as it looks on paper. Hudson had always been doing both. At Future Publishing he invented FutureFolio, the digital publishing system that powered the company's dominance of Apple Newsstand in the early iPad era - putting Future "way above its weight" on tablet publishing. He was already building things, teaching things, writing things. Hacking with Swift was just the version of that work that found its moment.
By the Numbers
Deep Dive
Hudson's story starts in British tech journalism. Future Publishing is one of Europe's largest specialist magazine publishers - the kind of operation that produces thirty niche titles simultaneously. Hudson wrote for multiple magazines there, then rose to edit Linux Format. He was not just covering technology; he was building it on the side, releasing an open-source graphics library called Gloss and a game called Brain Party under his early Hudzilla Games label.
One of his most underrated achievements from this era is FutureFolio. He personally invented and implemented this digital publishing system, which became the engine behind Future Publishing's dominance of Apple Newsstand when the iPad launched. For a company with Future's portfolio, being first and best on a brand-new Apple platform was genuinely significant. Hudson built that. Then he quietly moved on to the next thing.
Apple announced Swift at WWDC 2014. By the end of that year, hackingwithswift.com existed. Hudson understood something a lot of developers missed: Swift was not just a new programming language. It was a land-grab opportunity. Apple's developer ecosystem was enormous. Most existing iOS content was in Objective-C. A good teacher who got in early would have years of runway before the market caught up.
He also understood that free beats paid when you are trying to build an audience. Almost everything on Hacking with Swift is free to read. The business model runs on books, courses, and a paid subscription tier called Hacking with Swift+. The free content builds trust; the premium content converts readers who want to go deeper. It is an elegant structure, and he built it before "content marketing" became a buzzword.
The 100 Days courses - first 100 Days of Swift, then 100 Days of SwiftUI - represent Hudson's most ambitious educational bet. Structured day-by-day curricula have a bad reputation online: most people start, few finish. Hudson designed his versions around the same approach he uses for everything: make the next step feel achievable, reward progress visibly, and trust the learner to show up.
It worked. Both courses became among the most-followed iOS learning paths on the internet. The Swift community rallied around them. Developers post their progress publicly under #100DaysOfSwiftUI. New cohorts start constantly. For many iOS developers working today, 100 Days of SwiftUI is how they learned to build their first real app.
Chris Lattner created Swift. He is, to put it plainly, the person whose opinion on Swift resources carries the most weight of anyone alive. Lattner has publicly endorsed Hacking with Swift as a top resource for learning the language. Hudson also interviewed Lattner in a multi-part series hosted on his site - the kind of access that signals community standing, not just traffic numbers.
The Swift for Good anthology drives this point home further. Hudson organized 20 authors to contribute to a charity book, got Lattner to write the foreword, and raised over $40,000 for Black Girls Code from pre-orders alone - before the book was even available. The entire revenue went to charity. That is not marketing. That is genuine standing within a community.
Hudson's GitHub at twostraws holds 85+ repositories and 9,600+ followers. His pinned projects are not throwaway demos. ControlRoom - a macOS app to control the Xcode Simulator - has cleared 6,000 stars. Ignite, a static site generator for Swift developers, has over 2,200. Inferno (Metal shaders for SwiftUI) and Vortex (particle effects for SwiftUI) are both widely used in the community. Unwrap, his free iPhone app for learning Swift interactively, has 2,300+ stars and sits in the App Store as a standalone product.
These are not side projects maintained with half attention. They are maintained, documented, and updated regularly - the same standard Hudson applies to his writing. The pattern is consistent: build something that solves a real problem, give it away free, let the community take it from there.
Hudson has been running a monthly newsletter for years. It is personal - more personal than his tutorials. He has written openly about mistakes he made in his career. One such reflection generated so much reader response that he turned it into a public article. This kind of honesty is rarer than it looks in tech publishing, where the default mode is to project relentless competence.
His latest project, Hacktivate, launched in late 2025 and expands his territory into cybersecurity education. It is a capture-the-flag game for iPhone, iPad, and Mac - 240 missions covering SQL injection, steganography, digital forensics, and more. Aimed at learners from grade 6 up. It fits the pattern: a new audience, an approachable format, free-to-start, built by someone who actually knows the material.
In April 2026 he is posting about AGENTS.md files for Swift/SwiftUI projects - a practical resource for AI coding agents working in Swift codebases. He is not resisting the AI wave. He is documenting how to work with it, the same way he documented how to work with every Apple framework before it.
Career Timeline
Open Source
Hudson's GitHub at github.com/twostraws is not a graveyard of abandoned side projects. His pinned repositories are maintained, used in real apps, and collectively hold tens of thousands of stars.
Writing
Paul Hudson has a bibliography that crosses a decade and several technology generations. Most are Swift and iOS. A few reveal the man before the brand.
Plus watchOS, tvOS, Objective-C for Swift Developers, React, and more. The Latin language books are real. No, we don't know either.
The Person
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