There’s been a lot of motion in the last four months of the evolution of the Swift programming language that I’ve been wanting, waiting, and hoping for. The language maintainers are tackling concurrency as a first-class construct in the language. I’m following along with the language evolution proposals in the forums, and so far haveContinue reading “The evolution of “safe” and “unsafe” in the Swift programming language”
Category Archives: Ranting and Reflections
M1 arm64 native OpenSSL with vcpkg
This article isn’t a how-to so much as a debugging/dev diary entry for future-me, and any other soul who stumbles into the same (or similar) issues. Let me provide the backdrop for this story: I’m working on a private C++ language based project, previously written to be cross platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac). It hasContinue reading “M1 arm64 native OpenSSL with vcpkg”
Priming and Pedagogy
A new year’s wander through a machine learning research paper led me down a really interesting rabbit role. Somewhere down the hole, I found a reference and have since been reading Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. The book was referenced by several AI/ML researchers, which is what got me started there. Chapter 4,Continue reading “Priming and Pedagogy”
Apple’s M1 Chip Changes… Lots of Things
The new Apple Macs with an M1 chip in them is finishing a job that started a few years ago: changing my assumption that commodity hardware would always win. Having worked in the technology/computing field for over 30 years, you’d think I know better by now not to make such a broad assumption, even internally.Continue reading “Apple’s M1 Chip Changes… Lots of Things”
Thanksgiving 2020
This has been a right 🤬 of a year, and that probably applies to most anyone else on this globe. In the US, the stress of this presidential election was extreme, and acerbated by COVID pandemic that we pretty much failed to get any sort of handle on. I’ve managed to stay tucked down andContinue reading “Thanksgiving 2020”
Combine and Swift Concurrency
Just before last weekend, the folks on the Swift Core Team provided what I took to be a truly wonderful gift: a roadmap and series of proposals that outline a future of embedding concurrency primitives deeper into the swift language itself. If you’re interested in the details of programming language concurrency, it’s a good read.Continue reading “Combine and Swift Concurrency”
The range operator and SwiftUI’s layout engine
This post is specific to Swift the programming language and SwiftUI, Apple’s newest multi-platform UI framework. If you’re not interested in both, probably best to skip past this… I was working on visualization code that leverages SwiftUI to see how that might work, and ran into a few interesting tidbits: playgrounds with SwiftUI works brilliantly,Continue reading “The range operator and SwiftUI’s layout engine”
NaNoWriMo Beat Sheet Scrivener Template
I participated in NaNoWriMo once before, in 2016 – having watched my partner get more deeply involved in previous years. I haven’t really been back, but this year with all the … yeah, I decided to give it a shot again. I’ve got my profile set up, at least the basics, and now I’m stumblingContinue reading “NaNoWriMo Beat Sheet Scrivener Template”
Open apps with SwiftUI
Earlier this week, James Dempsey asked on twitter about who else was actively trying to build macOS apps using SwiftUI. I’m super interested in SwiftUI. A year ago, it spawned my own side-project into writing my own reference docs on Combine. Originally I had a vision of writing about Combine as well as SwiftUI. CombineContinue reading “Open apps with SwiftUI”
Learning to Write, Writing to Learn
Writing, while I love it, doesn’t come naturally to me. I suspect it doesn’t come naturally to any writer. The process of getting something written, really tightly focused and right on target, is a heroic act of understanding, simplification and embracing constraints. It’s a skill for which I don’t have a good analogue in theContinue reading “Learning to Write, Writing to Learn”
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