The irony of soberly banging out code on a company-supplied $3,200 MacBook Pro while listening to rap about living in the hood, high, and trying to make it out via selling drugs

Jiji. I named him after the cat in Kiki’s Delivery Service from Studio Ghibli!

Did you steal my cat?!

All this short-form blogging platform hopping is making me use the good old days of Twitter before it got acquired. We had it so good and didn’t even know it

I’m confused about “FinTech Engineer”. I’m a Software Engineer for a FinTech company… does that count 🤔

At work, I’ve seen Copilot really improve my productivity when it comes to unit tests. I manually write some scaffolding that establishes a very simple testing pattern — then tab my way to victory in VSCode.

For feature work, I find it too frustrating to work with :(

Now that I’m more experienced at my company, I’ve had junior engineers reach out to me for help. It’s an honor, but it has made me realize that I need to improve my explanation and pair programming skills. Particularly getting better at guiding them to answers better, as opposed to doing it for them

Threads didn’t seem to bring a lot of iOS folk together. I’m hoping Bluesky is different!

Weirdest bug I’ve encountered to date:

I was trying to figure out why a UI test of ours didn’t catch a bug it should have. Turns out there seems to be differing behavior in the view’s lifecycle when running the XCUITest vs going through the flow manually.

Has anyone experienced this?

#iosDev

These vibrations are ran through a model that also uses the GPS’s last known location and train schedule to determine where you are underground with a 90% accuracy. This is one of the most impressive features I’ve read about in mobile engineering. Amazing

No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains Bad service in the subway? Our offline motion detection shows where you are between stations, and reminds you when your stop’s up next

So the @transitapp.bsky.social team figured out how to track your underground location using your phone’s vibration.

blog.transitapp.com/go-undergrou...

After increasing performance on some image manipulation I was doing for a macOS app by refactoring from NSImage to CoreImage.. I now have the inspiration to add filtering options through the CoreImage’s filter catalog.

Was it asked of me? Absolutely not. Do I want do it? Sorta

The starter pack thing is a killer idea. Both the people that follow me and that I follow are increasingly related to Apple platform development — I’m patiently waiting for all of the nerdy content to flood my feed 🤓

At an iOS meetup yesterday I was talking to an engineer who worked at a well known camera app company. They mentioned that when a majority of their image processing team left, the company was sorta screwed. People argue of being a generalist vs specialist — but the reality is that both are great.

GitHub - bluesky-social/social-app: The Bluesky Social application for Web, iOS, and Android The Bluesky Social application for Web, iOS, and Android - bluesky-social/social-app

Yeah. They use React Native for web also! I learned this through @pragmaticengineer.com.

It’ll be interesting to see how it grows and if they encounter any pitfalls. But so far so good!

github.com/bluesky-soci...

Low key, this may be the smoothest React Native app I’ve ever used. My hats off to the Bluesky team

Did you turn it on and off?

What was even better was when I had a process that used NSImage for some editing that was slow, and when I asked it to refactor the functions to use CoreImage, it worked like a charm.

Regardless, you typically have to be quite specific in what you ask for. It’s like becoming good at googling again

LLMs are truly a massive time saver.

My brother reached out to make him a macOS app that splits and merges images in a certain sequence. Rather than looking at the docs for NSSavePanel, GPT4o just spits out a function that requires minimal modifications.

Talked to someone at a family function that didn’t know what ChatGPT was 😌

Things that bring me peace. My Notes organization 😌

React Native falls into the 2nd category. It can also target web, meaning that the same code (more or less) can be used for Android, iOS, and a web app.

Each methodology has its pros, cons, nuances, etc.

It’s a SDK (software development kit) to build apps. To build a mobile app, there are two common approaches:

1. Building it “natively”. So using a first party SDK provided by the developer of the OS.

2. Building it “cross-platform”. So using a third party SDK that targets both Android and iOS.

When I first started working with Swift, I found myself unwrapping with if-let and almost avoiding guard-let statements.

Now I live with a completely different mindset and use guard-let so much more. Especially when dealing with functions that return Result enums

It behaves really snappy and nice on my iPhone 14 Pro Max. If I recall correctly, it’s also built with Expo + React Native — which in my experience doesn’t usually have this level of snappiness and polish! Props to them.

@mergesort.me the hero is iOS folks need