Category Archives: Ranting and Reflections

Swift challenge mode – Dynamic Data

This isn’t something I’ve solved, more of something I’m working on, but I thought there were some interesting things to share with anyone else “walking this path”. The Swift programming language is a static, strongly-defined language with a huge emphasis on leveraging types to help provide programmatic safety. It’s not always something I remember, asContinue reading “Swift challenge mode – Dynamic Data”

Creating an XCFramework

In the past couple of years, I’ve had the occasion to want to make an XCFramework – a bundle that’s used by Apple platforms to encapsulate binary frameworks or libraries – a couple of times. In both cases, the reason wasn’t that I didn’t want to ship the source, but because the source was fromContinue reading “Creating an XCFramework”

Large language models and Search

Microsoft’s made an aggressive and delightful splash in the search market by deeply integrating the guts of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT with Bing Search. There’s an impressive interview by Joanna Stern on the topic (hat tip to Daring Fireball for the link). There’s a potential there that’s amazing, and others that are truly frightening.Continue reading “Large language models and Search”

Native support for USD tools on an M1 Mac

I saw USD release 22.08 drop a few weeks ago, and notably within its release notes is the sentence: “Added support for native builds on Apple Silicon.” I struggled quite bit with getting USD both installed and operational because, as it turns out, there’s a bit of quirk to Python that made things more difficult.Continue reading “Native support for USD tools on an M1 Mac”

I wish contextual SwiftUI was more predictable

I’m not certain how to phrase this. It’s either that I wish I was better at predicting what a SwiftUI view would look like, or that I wish SwiftUI was more predictable at how views render in different contexts. I recently built a multi-platform SwiftUI utility app, and was struck by how often I ranContinue reading “I wish contextual SwiftUI was more predictable”

What Apple might do with distributed computing

I’m excited to see not only async-await making it thoroughly into the language (in Swift 5.6), but also the extensions that enable actors and distributed actors with this general sweep of the Swift language embracing concurrency. It’s been several years in the making, and the past year has been building much of these base piecesContinue reading “What Apple might do with distributed computing”

What being an Open Source Developer means to me

I’ve periodically described myself as an “open source developer” in those pithy biography blocks that you sometimes get (or have) to create. Developing and providing open source software means something specific to me, and I’d like to share how I think about it. At it’s core, it’s only a little about solving problems with codeContinue reading “What being an Open Source Developer means to me”