Tag: Software Development
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Book Binder App Update: Variant Chaos!
I’m still working on that comic book collecting app! It’s starting to look and feel like a real app but still has a long journey of test driven development ahead of it! Here’s what it looks like so far… On the left is the Summary View and on the right is the Detail View. The…
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Is It 1998 Again?
Set the Dial to 1998 Let’s power up the time machine and take a quick trip back to the wide world of tech around 1998. Microsoft was the Khaleesi of software and controlled a vast empire through Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer. Microsoft marched its conquering army of apps over the desktop and through the…
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The Voices of Software Development
The other day I was writing up a job description, which I take rather seriously, and I remembered that I needed to include the statement that an engineering manager has the responsibility to function as the “voice of the engineer”. Then I sat back for a moment and thought, Is this true? Why can’t engineers…
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JavaScript, Swift, and Kotlin Oh My!
This blog post now lives on http://blog.viacom.tech/2017/05/31/the-co-evolution-of-javascript-swift-and-kotlin/ (and it’s much shorter and better!)
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Swift Programming: Filtering vs For Loops
The current version 3.1 has come a long way from the Yet-Another-C-Based-Syntax of the 1.0 version of Swift. One of the best features of Swift is how functional programming idioms are integrated into the core of the language. Like JavaScript, you can code in Swift in several methodologies, including procedural, declarative, object-oriented, and functional. I…
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North Star
Successful companies usually have a secret sauce. It could be an algorithm or an insight. But whatever that secret sauce is, it is used to create or disrupt a market. Apple created the PC market when Steve and Steve figured out that affordable pre-built personal computers would be really useful for consumers. IBM disrupted the…
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Telling Time as an Engineer
Time is the most precious resource. It’s in limited supply, once spent we can’t get it back, and you can’t trade it directly. This might sound a little radical but most global, national, business, and personal problems, seem to me, to boil down to problem of time and who’s time is more important than yours.…
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Notes on NSUserPreferences
You can set and get NSUserPreferences from any view controller and the app delegate to they are a great way to pass data around the various parts of your iOS App. Note: NSUserPreferences don’t cross the iOS/watchOS boundry. iOS and watchOS apps each have their own set of NSUserPreferences. In the example below you have…
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On the Naming of Functions
A thoughtful coder once said that “it’s more important to have well organized code than any code at all.” Actually several leading coders have said this. So I’ll append my name to the end of that long linked list. I’m trying to develop my own system for naming functions such that it’s relatively obvious what…
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Code Markup in Xcode
I’m working on a fairly large Swift project. Actually no, that’s not quite true. I’m working on a Swift project with a ViewController file that is getting disorganized and out of control. If this keeps up I might have a large project on my hands but right now it’s just a single file that is…