This weekend I traveled up to Washington D.C. to attend iOSDevCampDC - a one day, single track, conference for iOS developers. I was also able to meet a few people in the D.C. Cocoa community. I had a great time and came away with a few notes to highlight. The Conference The organizers did a great job putting the conference together, supplying food, and even swag. The conference shirt might even be one of my new favorite shirts.
Continue Reading »Last year I wrote a post about how I was going to work without a clock. This was completely inspired by Cocoa developer Zach Waugh who wrote about the same topic. As part of this post, he also talked about his small Mac app called Clock.app which is an open source project. Since you sometimes need to know the time, the app provides a quick way to get the time using Alfred or Quicksilver to launch this simple app.
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Episode 61 of iDeveloper podcast has guest star Danny Greg from Github. Aside from reavealing he didn’t know who James Earl Jones was, he discussed how Github gets work done.
He mentioned that their whole environment is built on being asynchronous. Meaning that everything is driven off of web-based communications and no meetings. They also have no deadlines, and focus on shipping. They ship like crazy. The Mac app is shipped several times a week and the web app is deployed much much more.
My take away was that I really want to get our continuous integration server up and running. Maybe even attempt to use hubot like Github does. Being able to say hubot deploy [project] seems pretty awesome. I don’t know how to implement an async environment when doing client work, so I think focusing on automating as much as possible is a good start.
This is a new reusable metal filter. Supposedly lets more of the tasty coffee oils through. Looks really cool, I’ve already backed it.
I’m really excited about getting this filter. I don’t think I can taste the paper, but I really do like the aspect of not having to keep replacing paper filters.
I’m still really happy with the Aeropress. If you haven’t gotten one yet, one of the kickstarter backing plans will send you a new Aeropress with the metal filter.
This month at Triangle CocoaHeads in Durham, I stepped away from being just the organizer and did a talk on automated acceptance testing with Calabash. This is a topic I’m really excited to learn more about and am constantly trying to become a better tester. I first learned about Calabash when seeing a video of one of the blitz talks from NSConference about it. I started using it on one project and it seemed to do a nice job.
Continue Reading »This week at NSCoder Night, another developer was trying to statically link the MySQL library. He had initially linked it as a dynamic library and couldn’t seem to get it working with Xcode. After working with it for a little while I figured out what needed to happen; and it wasn’t clear. Here I’ll discuss what process I went through to track down the problem and what tools I used.
Continue Reading »This weekend I was a speaker and attendee at CocoaConf; a 2-day conference series for Mac and iOS developers. It was a small conference that left time for people to actually meet each other and had many great sessions from great developers. Here I’ll review the conference, a selection of my favorite sessions, and a post-mortem of my sessions. The Conference After having been to Autodesk University a couple years and then WWDC this year, it is refreshing to go to a conference where you can actually talk to every attendee.
Continue Reading »It’s that time of year again. That time, late in the year, where I start wishing I blogged more often. It actually started earlier this year when I rewrote this whole blog1 back in March. So what got me back here in a text editor writing a blog post? Really it came down to that weekly feeling at the end of the weekend that I’ve finished very little. I guess if I can finish at least one small blog post, I can start feeling like I’ve finished something.
Continue Reading »Even when you’ve been working in an environment for years, you still find things you never knew. I liken it to learning about a famous actor you had never heard of, but has starred in all your favorite movies. I found two things that I wish I had known or seen, but for whatever reason, I missed. First up, convenience functions for converting a CGRect to a NSString or a NSString to a CGRect.
Continue Reading »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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