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

#iOSGutAtDroidcon

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.

Finally El Capitan arrived and I couldn’t be more eager to install it on my machine; as soon as I read on Twitter that it was available I jump to the AppStore and started the download process which seemed like a bad idea at the time:

I think downloading «El Capitan» at the same time as the rest of the world was a BAD idea and poor judgement on my part 😂

— Esteban Torres (@esttorhe) September 30, 2015