I recently had my first run-in with the UIAppearance infrastructure that has been built into iOS for, admittedly, a long time. Given my experience with CSS, I brought along some assumptions of how appearance(whenContainedInInstancesOf:) would probably work. Naturally, these assumptions were very wrong. Read more on Understanding UIAppearance Container Hierarchies…
Author: Chris Farber
(Clojure) Spec-ing Data from JSON
I’ve returned to Clojure after some time using other tools, so I’m late to the party regarding learning and experimenting with Spec. The first order of business was to build some specs for data I’m receiving from an external system in JSON format. Given that it was my first real experience with Spec, and I had no control over the shape of the data I was spec-ing, I was uncertain how to proceed. Read more on (Clojure) Spec-ing Data from JSON…
Control Flow in Ruby Blocks
I recently found myself needing to return early from a block passed into a method in Ruby. Although the way to do this is fairly simple and obvious in hindsight, it seemed to surprise some of my Ruby-enthusiast colleagues. I decided to write this post in the hopes that it’s interesting to others. Read more on Control Flow in Ruby Blocks…
Reflecting on Single-Page Applications
Although I was an early adopter of client-side web applications, it’s hard to fully divorce yourself from all the tradeoffs that go into a system you’ve built when analyzing a single aspect. Recently, I’ve been noticing that some of the websites and services that I rely on in my day-to-day life have been rewritten into SPAs, so I’ve taken the opportunity to step back and reflect on the effects that are visible to end users. Read more on Reflecting on Single-Page Applications…
Why I Ditched Spotlight for Spreadsheets
Besides its intended focus of searching your entire computer, did you know that macOS’s Spotlight search makes it really easy to perform simple arithmetic? Over time, this has actually become one of my favorite things about Spotlight. It’s a hugely convenient handicap for my dyscalculia, always ready and only two keystrokes away. Despite this, if I were forced to promulgate something approximating a New Year’s resolution, it would be that I’m not going to use Spotlight for calculations anymore. Read more on Why I Ditched Spotlight for Spreadsheets…
Type Systems Aren’t Magic
There’s a lot of enthusiasm for typed languages these days, now that languages with good type systems are closer to the mainstream. I’ve even seen some people go so far as to suggest that the future of programming involves typed languages, and dynamic languages are on their way out. Read more on Type Systems Aren’t Magic…
How RuboCop Made Me a Fan of Linters
I recently switched to a new project and found myself back in Ruby code. Drew, who set up the project and had been working on it for a few weeks, had taken the time to set up the project’s test suite with something called RuboCop. Read more on How RuboCop Made Me a Fan of Linters…
The Tradeoff of Multiple Repositories
More often than I expect, I come across software projects that consist of multiple source control repositories. The reasons vary. Perhaps it’s thought that the web frontend and backend aren’t tightly coupled and don’t need to be in the same repository. Perhaps there’s code that’s meant to be used throughout an entire organization. Regardless, there are real costs involved in the decision to have a development team work in distinct, yet related, repositories. I believe these costs are always overlooked.
Read more on The Tradeoff of Multiple Repositories…
Are You Smarter Than the Compiler?
So, are you? It’s extremely unlikely, but you probably knew that. I recently questioned whether I could refactor away a branch in some arithmetic code, and I had a fun time rediscovering first-hand that I am not, in fact, smarter.
Read more on Are You Smarter Than the Compiler?…
A Swift Architecture for Managing State: Revised
In my previous blog post, I wrote about an approach for managing state in a Swift app. Following that post, some changes were made to the Swift language that deprecated some convenient syntax my approach relied on. After some thinking, and with a better understanding of Swift’s approach to mutability, I’ve slightly revised this architecture to reduce a lot of friction. Read more on A Swift Architecture for Managing State: Revised…