A Swift Time Capsule

A while back I got into an argument with a friend about the lifetime of code “now days”. He argued that code written in C and C++ was much more likely to continue working forever, needing fewer updates, and being generally more of an asset. My response was generally “code is a liability, not an asset”. We should strive to create good code, but too much changes in the industry year to year and you’ll eventually need to replace it with new tools and environments—at least for most consumer facing apps.

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Patterns with Swift Concurrency in new APIs

I’ve watched a lot of this year’s WWDC sessions—like over 30 this weekend. This year just seemed to be really interesting and I’ve really enjoyed many of the videos. Also, I’m super excited about DocC and can’t wait to start building better documentation! One thing has been bugging me. After watching Meet async/await in Swift, Meet MusicKit for Swift and Meet StoreKit 2 sessions I started noticing an interesting difference in patterns in use with Swift Concurrency.

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→ Guide to Functional Reactive Programming

Realm, which posts amazing videos regularly, has just posted a Guide to Functional Reactive Programming. They discuss the why, the what, the how, and the who all while linking to some great videos. Definitely a nice resource if you haven’t looked into this. I’ve read a lot about it but I don’t think I’ve fully internalized this yet. This will definitely help.

Learning German with AVSpeechUtterance

For the last couple of months I’ve been studying German with my wife. We both have always wanted to become polyglots so we decided to stop waiting around an just start learning. We both have some ancestors from Germany and would love to visit, so that was a great place to start. One thing I’ve been struggling with is numbers in German. I can count well, but hearing a number in conversation requires a lot of thought. The problem is it is backwards from English, Twenty-One in German would be One-and-Twenty (einundzwanzig). So what’s an iOS Developer to do? I made an app for me to practice.

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Over the Air Beta Testing for iOS Apps

As an enterprise iOS developer, I’ve had the wonders of over-the-air installation for my apps since iOS 4 dropped. I’ve enjoyed it so much so that I’ve pushed to make sure all our users have moved to iOS 4 (not the only reason, of course). So instead of sending a user an IPA file, they simply browse to your site from the device itself. A few months ago, Hockey was announced that brought a similar workflow to beta testers of non-enterprise apps.

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