Some time ago I decided to drink Apple’s Kool-Aid and jumped over Safari as my default browser. Once that Apple granted access to the internals of Safari for third parties to provide blocking mechanisms the experience was great and I did not regret it (ok; I’m lying… I was missing a few things… but nothing major). Due to work I had to switch over to a Chrome based browser and opted for Brave and that was the end of it… but NOW that we also have translations natively in Safari I decided I would leverage both browsers since I never left Safari on Mobile.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m happy with Safari for the most part… except that I do have multiple email accounts with the same provider (because of reasons) and when typing mail on my search bar and getting a few hittings; hitting the downwards arrow to get to the one I wanted and seeing the selection jump last minute to the top started to get on my nerves…

Sudden realisation Early last year (2019) I came to the realisation that I needed a change… I’ve been coding for a long time, doing iOS for the biggest part of my career, and at some point (even though I don’t consider myself an “expert”) it started to becomed a bit dull. This was not for a lack of challenges, as there was always something new, e.g.:SwiftUI, Combine, Marzipan, iPadOS, you name it; but at one point or the other it lost some of the spark ✨

Since quite some time now I’ve been working on Xcode projects that are pretty big; big enough to take up a considerable amount of time to finish compiling, even worst if you are running the tests and it needs to build EVERYTHING and then run ALL the tests.

I also like to multi-task and do some other stuff while I’m compiling…

Checking Twitter the other day I stumble this tweets from Sash Zats addressing some heuristics for enabling/disabling intensive animations in iOS apps:

[1/4] When performing intensive animations or other auxiliary work consider creating a helper checking following (in no particular order):

— Sash Zats (@zats) September 19, 2017

#iOSGuyAtDroidcon

Last week fellow speaker and good friend Jorge Ortiz-Fuentes¹ wrote me on Twitter to tell me he had an extra ticket for droidcon Berlin² since he’ll be speaking (Now, as you might know I do iOS and know close to NOTHING about Android development) and since I have always been curious about Android development I said YES and embarked on what would be my first ever droidCon.

I’ve been away for quite some time now and a lot of things have changed since I last had the time to blog.

I’ll try to detail everything that has happened in my life in the past few months and also prepare for my yearly wrap-up post.

This last WWDC Apple announced that they will be providing us developers with «official» and «legal» ways to create Xcode plugins.

There are many posts covering this and I won’t center in the «how to» but rather in one single tip that prevented me from going crazy while developing Localizer.

This is quite a small post and probably not worth writing it but I know that this will come in handy in the future and will totally forget about it. The other day I was trying to figure out an Autolayout crash on the app I was working on and trying to make head of tails from the console log with stuff like this: <NSAutoresizingMaskLayoutConstraint:0x175086220 h=-&- v=-&- UIView:0x147533250.height == UIView:0x14760b4a0.height> Imagine that but with many interacting UIViews at play; most of the time you can actually figure what’s going on based on the constant value or if you are well versed you can see the Matrix from source code a la Neo; but let’s be honest; more times than none you are left wondering which view is which…

Last year I made a list of resolutions and also blogged about it; overall it was a great year; completed almost all my resolutions and had the chance to grow A LOT professionally (or so I think).

A small round down of my previous year:

• Got turned down by Slack: Basically applied to Slack and everything went OK but I suck at interviews; I think I don’t know how to sell myself properly and was turned down. No hard feelings though, they felt I wasn’t a good fit for the team and they got to do what’s best for the team.