turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef
I’m working on a number of side projects, indie apps, and open source projects. I want to highlight a few of them here and link to others. If you are looking for a complete cv, you can find that here.
You can find all of my indie iOS and macOS apps at Hexed Bits. When I release new apps, you will find them there. Some of them are distributed through the App Store, which you can find here.
I co-hosted the Swift Unwrapped podcast with my good friend, JP Simard, from February 2017 to June 2021. We welcomed a number of guests to our show, including members of the Swift Core Team. We were even mentioned on the official Swift blog post announcing the Swift 5.1 release. During its lifetime, the podcast was downloaded 850,000 times. You can listen to all 92 episodes here.
I started the Swift Weekly Brief newsletter in December 2015, and was the primary author until January 2018 before handing it off to the community. Since then, other contributors have kindly taken over maintaining the project.
I started this project with the intention of making it a community effort. To my knowledge it was the first newsletter of its kind, to be completely open source, and run by the community, for the community. I’m proud to say it inspired Colin Eberhardt to start his own newsletter, WebAssembly Weekly, which started as a fork of Swift Weekly Brief. Furthermore, I volunteered to help build a newsletter for the Tech Workers Coalition, which is also modeled after Swift Weekly Brief.
In addition to inspiring other similar Swift-focused newsletters, Swift Weekly Brief also inspired the Swift Community Podcast, which is structured in a similar way — a podcast for the Swift community, by the Swift community. You can read more about the newsletter here.
All of my open source projects are on GitHub. The “pinned” projects on my profile are the most active, or most well-known. My iOS and macOS libraries are available via CocoaPods and the Swift Package Manager. I also contribute to open source under Hexed Bits on GitHub.
I keep public, open source notes in my TIL repo on GitHub as I learn new things. You can also view them here. These are ultimately helpful for me, but I enjoy making them public to help others as well.
My most popular library in the iOS community was JSQMessagesViewController, which is now deprecated. I was highly active on this project from 2013 to 2016, and at it’s peak it was installed in over 50,000 apps (according to the now-defunct CocoaPods stats) and reached over 11,000 stars on GitHub. I built a community around this project with great care and intention. Like many in the community, I was sad to see it go. What I’m most proud of however, was that it was used in early versions of Signal for iOS (as well as many other lesser-known iOS apps).
I co-authored IGListKit with Ryan Nystrom while working at Instagram. Of all the work I did at that company, this is what I’m most proud of. It was a successful project and widely adopted in the iOS community. Eventually, Apple released official APIs inspired by IGListKit, diffable data sources for collection views and table views.