Category Archives: Ranting and Reflections

Exploring MultipeerConnectivity

A few weeks ago, I got curious about the MultipeerConnectivity framework available across Apple’s platforms. It’s a neat framework, and there are community-based libraries that layer over it to make it easier to use for some use cases: MultipeerKit (src) being the one that stood out to me. The promise of what this framework doesContinue reading “Exploring MultipeerConnectivity”

Continuous Integration with Github Actions for macOS and iOS projects

GitHub Actions released in August 2019 – I’ve been trying them out for nearly a full year, using beta access available the adventurous before it was generally available. It was a long time in coming, and I saw this feature as GitHub’s missing piece. Some great companies stepped into that early gap and provide excellentContinue reading “Continuous Integration with Github Actions for macOS and iOS projects”

How to make a SwiftUI component that draws a Shape with light

While I was experimenting with SwiftUI, one of the effects I wanted to re-create was taking a shape and making “stroke effects” on it. The goal was to create a SwiftUI component that could take an arbitrary path, apply this effect to the shape, and render it within the context of a larger SwiftUI view.Continue reading “How to make a SwiftUI component that draws a Shape with light”

Introducing and explaining the PreviewBackground package

While learning and experimenting with SwiftUI, I use the canvas assistant editor to preview SwiftUI views extensively. It is an amazing feature of Xcode 11 and I love it. There is a quirk that gets difficult for me though – the default behavior of the preview provider uses a gray background. I frequently use multipleContinue reading “Introducing and explaining the PreviewBackground package”

Using Combine v1.1 is available

After getting the major edits for the existing content done, I called the result the first release. As with any creative product, I wasn’t happy with some of the corners that still had rough edges. Over the past two weeks I fleshed those in, wrote a bunch of unit tests, figured out some of theContinue reading “Using Combine v1.1 is available”

Using Combine – first edition available

I just finished my first edit pass of the content of Using Combine, and am incredibly pleased. Sufficiently pleased, in fact, that I am going to call this version the “first edition”. It is certainly not perfect, nor even as complete as I would like, but a significant enough improvement that I wanted to putContinue reading “Using Combine – first edition available”

SwiftUI and Combine – Binding, State, and notification of changes

When I started the project that became Using Combine, it was right after WWDC; I watched streamed WWDC sessions online, captivated like so many others about SwiftUI. I picked up this idea that SwiftUI was “built using the new framework: Combine”. In my head, I thought that meant Combine managed all the data – notificationsContinue reading “SwiftUI and Combine – Binding, State, and notification of changes”

programming tools – start with sketching and build to fully specified

A couple of years ago I was managing a very distributed team – or really set of teams: Shanghai, Minneapolis, Seattle, Santa Clara, and Boston. Everyone worked for the same company, but culturally the teams were hugely divergent. In one region, the developers in the team preferred things to be as loosely defined as possible.Continue reading “programming tools – start with sketching and build to fully specified”

CRDTs and lockless data structures

A good five or so years ago Shevek, a friend I met while building cloud-generating appliances at the (now defunct) Nebula, spent an afternoon and evening describing the benefits of lock-free data structures to me. He went deep into the theoretical aspects of it, summarizing a lot of the research thinking at the time. WhileContinue reading “CRDTs and lockless data structures”