Category Archives: Ranting and Reflections

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”

Using Combine – reference content complete!

I’m thrilled to be announcing that an updated version of Using Combine is now available! It has taken me nearly 6 months to draft it all, reverse engineering and writing tests for all the various publishers, operators, and pieces in between – and documenting what I found. The end result is 182 pages (in USContinue reading “Using Combine – reference content complete!”

Combine: throttle and debounce

Updated March 2020 with more thoroughly accurate timing diagrams, after vetting against iOS13.2, iOS 13.3, and iOS13.4 beta. Combine was announced and released this past summer with iOS 13. And with this recent iOS 13 update, it is still definitely settling into place. While writing Using Combine, I wrote a number of tests to verifyContinue reading “Combine: throttle and debounce”

Using Combine (v0.8) update available!

A new version of Using Combine (v0.8) is now available. The live HTML site for Using Combine is updated automatically, and the PDF and ePub versions are now available on Gumroad. This version has a number of additional notes and changes, primarily from reader feedback, and some references to Combine’s changes with the release ofContinue reading “Using Combine (v0.8) update available!”