turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef
Welcome to the next post in my series about ReactiveCollectionsKit. Today I want to discuss diffing. Understanding diffing requires understanding two core concepts: identity and equality. These are two ideas that are also relevant and applicable to programming in general, and can often be confusing for newcomers.
I recently released a new open source project called ReactiveCollectionsKit. It is a modern, fast, and flexible library for building data-driven, declarative, reactive, and diffable collections and lists for iOS. This library is the culmination of everything I learned from building and maintaining IGListKit, ReactiveLists, and JSQDataSourcesKit. The 4th time’s a charm! 😅 🍀 I truly hope this is the last UICollectionView library I ever write and maintain. I think it will be. You can find the documentation here.
I’m happy to share that Nimble 10.0 has been released. It includes a number of fixes, improvements, and new features. It joins the latest release of Quick. For both of these libraries, these are the first releases in almost a year.
When I first wrote about DocC, I lamented the fact that it was incompatible with static hosting on GitHub Pages. Much has changed since my last post, so let’s take a fresh look. While there have been many welcome improvements to the tool, there are a few remaining issues that prevent me from adopting it for my open source projects.
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.
If you develop for Apple platforms and use a third-party testing framework, you are very likely using Quick and Nimble. Otherwise, you have probably at least heard of them. I don’t use any third-party testing frameworks in my personal projects, but I have worked on teams that do. And I currently work on a team that uses Quick and Nimble, which is why it was important for me to get a recent critical bug fixed in Quick.
As many of you know, this site is open source. Most of the time, this does not cause any trouble. But occasionally, it does.
I’ve decided to deprecate one of my open source libraries, PresenterKit. The library has been in a sort of “maintenance mode” for awhile now. It never really became what I hoped and anticipated. I think it implemented some neat ideas and helped removed some boilerplate from UIKit, but I don’t think what it provided necessarily justified a library anymore — at least not given the lack of activity around the project.
I was very excited at this year’s WWDC when Apple announced DocC, their new “Documentation Compiler” tool that generates documentation from comments in your source code. Unfortunately, it’s not going to work for the majority of open source authors.
UserDefaults is one of the most misused APIs on Apple platforms. Specifically, most developers do not handle default values correctly. In fact, I have never worked on a single production codebase at a company where this was done accurately. Most libraries get it wrong, too.
I removed Google Analytics on this site over two years ago. It was doing more harm than good. I did not want to jeopardize readers’ privacy. I did not want to be part of the bullshit web. I did not want to contribute to Google’s massive data collection and its take over of the open web. I did not want to be Google’s product. (Because fuck Google.)
I rarely even looked at those analytics back then. However, since going independent last year, I have more interest in knowing and understanding the traffic on this site. I found a fantastic solution for analytics that is simple, private, and open source called GoatCounter.
I am happy to share that I was just approved for GitHub sponsors. You can now support my open source work and GitHub will match contributions for the first year.
Today I am deprecating my open source library, JSQDataSourcesKit. I have already marked the CocoaPod as deprecated and archived the repo on GitHub. I will not be taking additional contributions.
I have started using GitHub Actions for CI for my newer open source projects. I recently setup Danger for the first time on GitHub Actions and it was quite easy. Here is how to do it.
I’ve been working on two small libraries for building menu bar Mac apps and now they are both open source with initial 1.0 releases.
Every open-source author, maintainer, and contributor knows the importance of fostering a positive environment for collaboration and providing adequate resources for folks to seek help and contribute in a meaningful way. These resources include providing a Code of Conduct, a Contributing Guide, issue templates, and more. GitHub refers to this collection of documents as community health files, and they have been slowly improving their support for them. I recently spent some time creating defaults for these files, including crafting a completely new Contributing Guide for all of my projects.
One of the major changes in Swift 4.2 is a change to the calling convention. But what exactly does that mean? Why is it important and why would you want to change it?
Swift Unwrapped recorded two episodes in the Podcast studio at WWDC this year. We had Greg Heo on to talk about our reactions to the announcements from the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union. Then we discussed Swift 4.2 and beyond with Ted Kremenek.
In a recent episode of the podcast, JP and I discussed the implicit escaping of closures in Swift. As Swift has matured and evolved, the default behavior of closure parameters in functions has changed. Prior to Swift 3, closures parameters were escaping by default. After SE-103, the default was changed to non-escaping.
Next week’s issue of Swift Weekly Brief will be its 100th and final issue. I started this newsletter a little over two years ago, covering the initial open sourcing of Swift, the 3.0 release, the 4.0 release, and many significant milestones in-between for the language and the community. With few exceptions, there was a new issue every week thanks to the other amazing writers and contributors. The newsletter quickly became an important resource for the Swift community. Because of this, I’m sure many of you will be saddened to hear that the 100th issue will be the last. At least, Issue #100 will be the last issue for me, for now — but if someone from the community is willing to take over this project, it can continue.
The Swift community has been through some rough migrations. It is frustrating when your project no longer compiles because of API and syntax changes, but it is an entirely different story when your project seg faults the compiler. When that happens, you cannot simply run a migration tool or apply fix-its — your project is broken and there’s little you can do until a fix is released. This is why the swift-source-compat-suite project was created.
Beginning immediately, JSQMessagesViewController is no longer officially supported or maintained. In fact, you may have noticed that it has been neglected for the past year. The most recent release was published almost exactly one year ago today. This is an incredibly difficult post for me to write and I have not made this decision carelessly. This open source project had a great run. There was (and still is) a great community around it, and I’m sorry for bringing this to an end.
There has been a ton of debate on the swift-evolution mailing lists about access control in Swift. A couple of days ago, the proposal SE-0159: Fix Private Access Levels was rejected. I want to share my thoughts on this, as well as thoughts on the larger story for access control in general. But first, let’s begin with a brief history of access control in Swift.
Let me list the ways that burnout happens in this industry, and especially in open source. No, I don’t need to. Because you know them already. I’m not burnt out, I promise. I’m reprioritizing, just letting you know.
A few months ago, I spoke at Swift Summit in San Francisco. The conference has a reputation for providing high-quality talks, and this year was no different. Fortunately, I was able to see nearly all of the talks and not a single one disappointed me. It was such a great conference. The video and full transcript of my talk are now available. The videos of the other talks will be coming online over the next few weeks. I would recommend watching all of them!
I previously wrote about writing great documentation in Swift. If you haven’t read that post, head there now to catch up. This post is a follow-up with updates for GitHub’s new way to publish docs. This is how I’ve setup all of my Swift open source projects.
As you may know, I spoke at FrenchKit a couple of months ago. The organizers have been working hard to get all of the videos edited and uploaded, and my talk is now available here. 😄
You may have noticed that I did not write the last few issues of the Swift Weekly Brief. I took some much needed time off, and I was able to unplug and relax thanks to the wonderful JP Simard and Brian Gesiak. They took over for those weeks and I can’t thank them enough! Bas Broek also made regular contributions, which was super helpful.
I recently spoke at the FrenchKit conference about Swift Evolution. The talk, 140 proposals in 30 minutes, was originally intended to be an overview of the process and each of the proposals. However, as I was writing the talk, it evolved into something much more interesting. I ended up writing some code to analyze the proposals instead.
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.
Last week I attended and gave a talk at FrenchKit in Paris, France. As expected, it was an amazing conference — especially considering it was the first FrenchKit ever. I think the organizers are already thinking about FrenchKit 2017, so keep an eye out and definitely go if you can. I know I will.
What’s my favorite thing about Swift 3? Not maintaining third-party libraries that make Cocoa more “Swifty”. Swift 3 sherlocked my libraries, and I couldn’t be happier.
I recently had an incredible experience with one of my open source projects that I’d like to share. It’s a story of openness and collaboration that I hope other open source project maintainers will find valuable. This post continues the theme of “building successful open source projects” from my previous article on documentation.
The Swift community is ecstatic about Swift. There are so many new libraries being released each week that some have created package indexes — even IBM. But of course, a library is only as great as its documentation.
Earlier this month I had the incredible opportunity to speak at the try! Swift conference in Tokyo, Japan. 🇯🇵 It was such a fun and rewarding experience. A video of the talk is now online over at Realm’s blog, where it is synced with my slides. If you have not already seen it, go check it out!
A few weeks ago, I spoke at Realm in San Francisco at the Swift Language User Group (#SLUG) meetup. A video of the talk is now online over at Realm’s blog, where it is synced with my slides. If you haven’t already seen it, go check it out!
Do you love writing code? Are you passionate about open source? Do you want to get more involved, but have yet to find a project to which you want contribute? Are you interested in contributing to a widely used, impactful project? Then I have a proposition for you! I am looking for dedicated core contributors to help maintain JSQMessagesViewController!
In case you are late to the party, I finally found some time to give the Swift Weekly Brief a proper home. Starting this newsletter kind of happened by accident when I first wrote about the Swift open source announcement. Since then, it was kind of bootstrapped here on my personal blog and started to feel awkward. I hacked together the new site in a couple of nights and moved all the previous posts over. Today’s issue #5 is the first one to be originally published at swiftweekly.github.io. However, there is more here than just organization and a nice separation of concerns.
Now that the holidays are over, things have started to pick up again on Swift.org. If you are following any of the repos on GitHub, you have probably noticed. I’m not sure how I missed this before, but this week I just discovered SwiftExperimental.swift. For now, it defines a bunch of custom unicode operators for Set. It’s really cool. I would love to see more APIs like this in the standard library. Anyway, here’s the weekly brief!
As expected with the holiday season, things are slowing down for a bit on Swift.org. I have been traveling for the holidays as well, so this issue will be shorter than usual. If you haven’t already, be sure you take some time away from coding to enjoy the holidays and avoid burnout. Now, the weekly brief!
The Swift.org community is finishing up its second full week of open source development. If you were hoping for a quiet week, you will definitely be disappointed. There is still a ton of activity with no signs of slowing down. The Swift team continues to work openly and to be encouraging to contributors. This week brought more crash fixes and more Swift Evolution proposals. Let’s get to it — the weekly brief!
It looks many developers in the community enjoyed my previous post detailing my thoughts and observations on the activity around the Swift open source project. So, I’m going to try to do this weekly — every Thursday, since the open source announcement was on a Thursday. Each week I’ll provide a high-level summary of what’s been happening, updates on interesting statistics, and links to interesting content. If you have any suggestions, please let me know! And now, the weekly brief!
It has only been a few days since the announcement of Swift going open source and the activity around the project has been incredible. When Apple revealed that Swift would be open source at WWDC earlier this year, I do not think anyone anticipated a release like this.
In iOS development, the core of nearly every app rests on the foundations provided by UICollectionView and UITableView. These APIs make it simple to build interfaces that display the data in our app, and allow us to easily interact with those data. Because they are so frequently used, it makes sense to optimize and refine how we use them — to reduce the boilerplate involved in setting them up, to make them testable, and more. With Swift, we have new ways with which we can approach these APIs and reimagine how we use them to build apps.
A few weeks ago I published the sixth major release of my our messages UI library for iOS. This release closes the door on a major milestone for this project, so I wanted to take the time to highlight its significance, discuss its new features, and examine its design. Of course, this would not have been possible without our amazing open-source community and the contributors to this project.
I’m incredibly happy and incredibly proud to share that Rosetta Stone is an open-source software contributor. Since I started working at Rosetta Stone a little more than a year ago, I’ve been encouraging and advocating for the company to get involved in open-source. Today, we did just that. Today is a big day for Rosetta Stone.
XKCD’s posts on saving time and automation are precisely how this blog came to be. Until now, I never had the time or motivation to write on a regular basis, though I considered it often. I’ve been developing for iOS for a few years now and I’ve become increasingly involved in the Objective-C open-source community via GitHub and CocoaPods, and was lucky enough to attend (my first!) WWDC this year on its 25th anniversary. It was an awesome experience. With that said, I can’t think of a better time or better reason to begin writing about my experiences with iOS and Objective-C (and now Swift), as well as my involvement in open-source. I hope to share worthwhile and interesting things here.