More and more Apple Platform developers are migrating away from CocoaPods in favor the Swift Package Manager, which is Apple’s first-party tool for managing and integrating dependencies. While it is still not quite a complete replacement for CocoaPods, it is getting closer. Unfortunately, SwiftPM’s integration with Xcode still has a number of shortcomings, even though it was introduced with Xcode 11 — 4 years ago. The worst bug is that Xcode frequently and randomly deletes the Package.resolved, which in turn produces dozens or hundreds of 'missing package product' errors. Here’s how I’ve worked around this bug on a team I work on.

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According to various reports ([1], [2], [3], [4]), GitHub is suspending accounts of Russian developers and organizations linked to or associated with organizations sanctioned by the US government over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it appears that GitHub did not think this through entirely, because these account suspensions are fucking up my projects.

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My previous post sparked some questions and discussion around release branch strategies. There are two main strategies that I know about that I’ve used on different teams and projects. I think it’s worth elaborating on the differences between the two, especially when considering different types of automation for managing releases, which was the topic of my previous post.

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Using git aliases came up at work the other day. It’s been awhile since I’ve written about git, so I thought it might be a good time to share all the aliases I’ve built up over the years.

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I have started using GitHub Actions for CI on a new project as a replacement for my usual setup on Travis CI. It generally seems to be much faster and more reliable so far. It also has an equivalent feature set, as far as I can tell. But one issue that I have run into is selecting a specific Xcode version, which is a bit cumbersome and not fully documented.

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This site used to be hosted via GitHub Pages, but I decided to move to a dedicated host to have more control over how I develop and deploy the site, and how it’s configured. A number of limitations and quirks eventually drove me to migrate away from GitHub pages to my excellent and inexpensive bare-bones host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I was also interested in learning to do all of this on my own, rather than relying on GitHub Pages “magic”. If you’re looking to setup your own Jekyll-powered site, or if you’re looking to migrate off of GitHub Pages, hopefully this is helpful.

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Git is sometimes rough around the edges, but fortunately it’s not too difficult to customize and make more user-friendly. The other day I spent some time experimenting with git log and crafting a new git smartlog alias.

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I’m happy to share that all of my open source Swift libraries have (finally) been updated for Swift 3. If you’ve been waiting for any of these final releases, you can now run pod update or carthage update and relax — sorry it took so long! I wrote about migrating to Swift 3 a few months ago and this post shares the final results of the process that I outlined in there.

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I spent most of my free time last weekend and a few days of last week on migrating my Swift code to Swift 3.0 — I migrated my open source projects as well as my private side projects. Overall, I would say my experience was “OK”. It definitely could have been better, but I think the largest problem was overcoming the cognitive hurdle of seeing all the changes and errors from Xcode’s migration tool at once. The best thing to do is wipe away the tears, put your headphones on, and start hacking. 🤓

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