Available real-time / community resources for new swift programmers?

Are there active online resources that are available to those of us new to the Swift language where we can ask questions and get help in an interactive fashion? The IRC channel seems to be pretty popular but I'm wondering whether there are others, and whether there's a list anywhere.

I'd love the opportunity to chat in real time about the language and get advice on minor things without having to bug the forum (which I think is better suited for deeper questions in any case). Other languages with which I'm familiar have official Slack or Gitter channels full of folks who want to chat / help newcomers.

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What are these? I have never heard of the 2 services.

Slack and Gitter ? They're chat platforms that are geared towards technical communities. Lots of language / open source projects are using them to collaborate.

I'm part of a Swift discord server -- it's fairly small at the moment, but it has a few beginners and some more experienced devs, and we're happy to help people out!

Discord is pretty good for these types of things, because it doesn't require an account; so there's a little barrier for joining and asking for help, among other advantages. It'd be cool if there were an official swift discord, especially seeing with how great Vapor's community is getting along with switching to discord as opposed to slack.

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IBM hosts a Slack instance (which the OP eventually found) which you can join by heading to http://swift-at-ibm-slack.mybluemix.net/ . It has channels for discussing some of IBM's projects like Kitura, but it also has a "#general" channel for general Swift discussion.

For non-Kitura discussion, though, I generally prefer the IRC channel (#swift-lang on Freenode). There's some smart folks over there. Part of my preference admittedly has to do with my general hatred of Electron apps, though.

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I know this is an older thread but figured I'd offer a nice resource that I belong to. It's the iOS Developers Slack channel which you can sign up for here: iOS Developers, it boasts over 20,000 members and I see a few Swift book authors pop in to answer questions. Easily one of the strongest and most active communities I've found.