workshop

• 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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  13 Jun 2021

• 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.

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  3 May 2020

• Another System for Productivity

  It‘s been at least two years since I last wrote about TODO lists and I‘ve tried several different options from going back to the Bullet Journal, trying OmniFocus again, to using Agenda for notes and todos. Through all this I still wasn’t feeling like I found a great system and easily could convince myself to ignore a todo or have to do weird things like moving tasks when I couldn’t get to them in a day.

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  29 Sep 2019

• Cross Platform Thoughts

  Cross Platform development for most mobile apps is just simply not worth it. Sure, there are great open source options like React Native and just plain C++ but you end up spending the same time trying to be clever and “share code” when you could have just built your product with all the platform has to offer. There seems to be a lot of realizations this year with Dropbox dropping their C++ components and last year Airbnb sunsetting React Native components.

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  18 Aug 2019

• On Hiring at Highrise (external link)

  Late last year at Highrise we were working on hiring a new server engineer for our team. We weren’t really clear what we were looking for and different parts of the team had different ideas about the ideal candidate. I worked with the team to overhaul our system to create a better process for choosing candidates. Last week Gusto published an article about our system which is a really great write-up about our system.

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  31 Mar 2018

• Debugging with Sound

  Debugging is hard. You have to remember what you or someone else was trying to do while understanding what’s actually going on. I don’t remember where I heard it, but there is a saying that goes something like “Don’t write code at the peak of your understanding because debugging it requires 2 times the understanding…”. Sometimes it’s not that it’s hard it’s that there is just too much going on. For these cases, I’ve been using sound.

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  8 Feb 2018

• Calling Kotlin from C++

  At Highrise we’ve been building the future of our platform in a way that supports Android. We’ve put together a stack that is pretty challenging but really fun to build. It’s based on a C++ core and platform specific projects in Swift (for iOS) and Kotlin (for Android) that uses that core. On Swift you need to have an Objective-C++ wrapper for Swift to call functionality in the C++ core, but it’s pretty straightforward and things like wrapping a block in an std::function works pretty well.

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  5 Feb 2018

• On using Things 3 (external link)

  I really enjoyed this post about using Things 3. I’ve been using it off and on since last year but this post has already changed how I structure my projects. The funny thing is I now have more areas and projects but I don’t feel as overloaded as when I had a more dense hierarchy. I previously had projects children of companies or bigger contexts. Now projects have their own area.

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  5 Feb 2018

• Static Blog Automation

  As I’ve written about in the past this blog is powered by Hugo—a static site generator. That’s great and all but it really limits when I can write posts. Something running Hugo needs to build the site and that output needs to be published somewhere. I’ve done a few things to make this process a more automatic. Writing Posts on my MacBook Pro First of all I needed to make it much easier to create a new post.

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  19 Jan 2018

• Confidence

  This summer we went to the US Open. We’ve been watching tennis for the last several years but I’ve never really thought about why I enjoyed watching it so much. It’s easy to just accept that they are amazing athletes—they are—but that never seemed to explain why I would watch it like I would my favorite movie. This summer it hit me; it’s the waves of confidence they have to manage during a match.

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  7 Nov 2017