Saying Goodbye to Triangle Cocoa

Organizing Triangle Cocoa—CocoaHeads and NSCoder Nights—changed my life. My career was mostly focused on .NET programming for AutoCAD and I dabbled with Mac programming on the side. When the iPhone SDK was released I fell in love with it. I started learning as soon as it was possible—I went from dabbling to “taking it seriously”. There was a lot struggle in learning alone, none of my coworkers knew anything about Apple platforms and there wasn’t as much content out there as there is today.

Eleven years later–my career has changed, I’m a better engineer, and I’ve found a network of friends and mentors. Not to mention I’ve been a speaker at several conferences and even other meetups. After all this time, I’ve decided to move on as the organizer and find someone else to guide the group’s future.

Relaunching CocoaHeads.TV

In 2012 I launched CocoaHeads.TV as a site that could aggregate CocoaHeads videos from around the world. We had some really great success and people from Australia, China, France, Germany, and many groups in the US started submitting videos. Unfortunately, I didn’t build it to make it easy to submit and I became the bottle neck to adding new videos. No more! I’ve relaunched CocoaHeads.TV with a redesign and I’ll be asking for CocoaHeads organizers to join the site and post their videos.

Social Network for Coders

Github is interesting to me because I think it’s a social network. It’s a social network for coders and we don’t really use it for that. One could argue that the comments and community that grows around an open source repository is people using it as a social network. I tend to agree with that. There are still a lot of cases where it’s treated like a replacement for a centralized source control system and that’s where it ends.

CocoaHeads March 2016

For CocoaHeads March I was inspired by one of our member’s other meetup groups, Triangle Open Source Open Mic, and decided to have ⚡️lightning talks ⚡️. We actually did this once before in December of 2013 and I’ve been wanting to do it again since then. Considering I only gave the community a one week heads up, I think this we had a great selection of talks.

Coding Weekend

This weekend I spent some time at the Ticketmaster DevJam in Durham. They are working on a public API with events, venues, and more that they’d like to get developers using. For me, it was a day long event with food and building a weird app with some friends.

360|iDev 2015

This week I was a speaker and attendee at 360|iDev in Denver. It was my third time at a 360|iDev (fourth if you count last year’s Mini in Greenville, SC) and I think this was probably the best one I’ve been to yet. Now, I’m not saying the previous visits to this conference were bad or anything, I just enjoyed it a lot this year. Here I’ll review the week and my session.

Videos for iOS and Mac Developers

I haven’t been very disciplined in updating CocoaHeads.tv this year. One of my goals for CocoaHeads in 2015 is to improve the quality of videos I record and find ways to improve CocoaHeads.tv. I’ve been really inspired by some of the videos out there in the community. 360|iDev and 360|iDev Min The folks at 360 have been pretty good about providing the videos from sessions at their conference. Currently there are videos from the last two years of 360|iDev and this years 360|iDev Min.

Fall 2013 Conferences

2013 went by really quick. It seems like I just made my resolution to blog more (that didn’t turn out well). One easy blog post I normally like to do is a recap of any conference I attend. This fall I attended iOSDevCampDC, 360iDev, and CocoaConf Atlanta. Here is a quick review of each. iOSDevCampDC 2013 This was my second time going to iOSDevCampDC. This time the event was a little smaller but no less fun.

Objective-C Hackathon and JNJProgressButton

A few weeks ago I saw a tweet talking about how Objective-C lost it’s 10th place on the GitHub top language list. A bunch of developers thought this was a shame and started “Back on the Map” as a hackathon to get a bunch of developers committing some Objective-C to GitHub. I thought is was a cool idea and it is always fun to hack on an open source project, so I played along and made JNJProgressButton.

UIAppearance for fun and profit

Over at Two Toasters we’ve started a blog to discuss technical topics around iOS (and Android) development called Toastmo. Lately I’ve been pushing everyone to use UIAppearance in their work and custom views. Today we posted an article I wrote about it that covers all the basics and gives a few examples of implementing the protocol to help your own views. UPDATE: This post is no longer online. Sorry.