Welcome to issue #42 of the iOS Coffee Break Newsletter 📬!

This week, I decided to take a break from my series on how to build a newsletter app — can you believe we are already 5 episodes in? 😲

Instead, I kicked things off by trying out Antoine's tip to share my newsletter on LinkedIn, and honestly, I wish I had done it sooner! With just a few small tweaks, I was able to convert the content to fit LinkedIn's format, and the results spoke for themselves.

It might not seem like a lot, but simply resharing the content helped me grow nearly 250 new subscribers. It is a great reminder of how powerful marketing can be. You might have an amazing product, but it won't go far if people don't know about it.

Leverage your social platforms, grow your online presence — and if you are doing it right, the rest will follow naturally! 🙂

CURATED FROM THE COMMUNITY

🦉 Unit test your iOS app without Fastlane

Noam took a break on his Fastlane series to share a new post on running unit tests in your iOS app using Xcode's command-line tools and Bash.

Bash offers a ton of flexibility, and xcodebuild isn't just for testing — it can handle building, archiving, exporting, and much more. This approach is perfect if you are working in a CI environment where Ruby isn't available, can't install Fastlane, or simply want to understand how to do it all manually, without relying on third-party tools.

🕵️ How I'm using AI to improve my software engineering productivity (and why it will not steal your job)

If you are anything like Bruno, AI has become a key tool in your everyday workflow as a software engineer.

That is exactly why he decided to put together a post explaining how he is been using it in his day-to-day. He also shares his thoughts on the growing number of articles claiming AI is coming for software engineering roles.

🤖 Creating MCP Servers in Swift

New LLMs seem to pop up almost every week lately — and now there is a fresh addition to the AI automation scene: Model Context Protocol (MCP). If you have been following the AI space, chances are you have heard this acronym a few times recently.

This week, Artem took a closer look at MCP and even built a lightweight MCP server in Swift that simply returns the current Swift version installed on your machine!

🚔 React to network status updates in SwiftUI

In his latest post, Matthaus from Nil Coalescing shows how to use the NWPathMonitor as an async sequence to stream real-time network status updates directly into your SwiftUI views.

Speaking of NWPathMonitor, I created a Swift Package some time ago that also uses this API to monitor network changes - this time by leveraging the NotificationCenter to broadcast the changes. The examples I included were based on UIKit, but they are easy to tweak for use with SwiftUI too.

🍶 Sake: Swift-powered Command Management - Part I

Discover Sake – a Swift-based alternative to Makefiles. Created by Vasiliy Kotov, it lets you define your build and automation tasks using Swift code rather than traditional shell scripts.

In this practical guide, Natan from SwiftToolkit walks you through how to use Sake to streamline tasks like linting, formatting, and more – all in pure Swift.

🤔 When to choose GitHub-Hosted runners or self-hosted runners with GitHub Actions

GitHub just dropped a post on self-hosted vs GitHub-hosted runners.

With GitHub Actions, you can build out your CI/CD pipeline and automate various workflows both within and outside of GitHub. This post breaks down the key differences, benefits, and trade-offs of each option to help your team make an informed choice when it comes to scaling and securing your automation infrastructure.