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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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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Swift, you’ve changed so much

During the crazy week of WWDC 2014—right after the announcement of Swift—I decided to spend a little time trying to implement a quick weather app using the new language. I managed to wrap it up in a few hours (and spent way too much time trying to figure out how to parse JSON with a generically-typed dictionary) and open sourced it. There it sat for all these months while several versions of Swift were released.

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