I've been writing here since 2010 and have published numerous articles during that time. While they all have value (at least to me), some stand out more than others for various reasons. I thought I'd collate them into a list and share those with you here 😁.
- Keep downloading with a background session
- Noteworthy because it takes an existing concept built using GCD and ports it across to using Swift Concurrency. It proved to be tricky and forced me to rethink my mental model of data management, in a similar way that SwiftUI forces you to rethink how to build UIs.
- Progressive Core Data migrations
- Noteworthy because I always absolutely hated that with each new version of a schema in Core Data, I had to effectively throw away my old migration paths. Coming up with this solution was a real "breathe out" moment and knew that it would prove useful for other people.
- Sneaky date formatters exposing more than you think
- Noteworthy because it was the first time I really understood the dangers of shared mutable state. That understanding drove a lot of further reading on how to be a better developer, beyond the "I can make an app fast with very few bugs" mindset I had had until then. Also, I put a lot of effort into the actual writing of the post to try to make it read better than previous posts.
- SwiftLint eases conflict
- Noteworthy because I had moved to a new team that was an absolute trainwreck for interpersonal conflict between the team members. I used the technique discussed in this post (and many not dicussed) to bridge some of those differences and get the team to do their 🤬ing job of developing a product rather than squabbling all the time. The issues with that team (and the wider company) forced me to improve both as a communicator and manager.
- Ghost typing your way to Hollywood
- Noteworthy because it's just a really fun project to work on.
- Treat interviewing as storytelling
- Noteworthy because I've wasted too much time in really poor interviews that felt more like pop quizzes than a session to get to know me. I wanted to show that it could be better for both parties by just altering the mindset that we (the interviewer) took into the interview.
- Coalescing NSOperations
- Noteworthy because it represented another big growth moment for me as a developer.
- Networking with NSOperation as your wingman
- Noteworthy because it was my first real post that wasn't just a notepad for a little code snippet with some explaining text.
- BVA and EP partnership
- Noteworthy because it was the first post that I wrote, and I can still remember the thrill of pressing "Publish".