Development - page 2
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Defective Mood
As I age, I am perturbed that my mood is directly tied to what I feel that I am either accomplishing or not accomplishing at work or, rather, in software development. I have recently found that I can be quite foul if I encounter a problem in software that I am writing. I encounter many problems that do not affect me, but I have found that the ones that do affect me tend to have the same earmarks: an unfamiliarity with a framework or an API, a misunderstanding of how a framework or API is intended to function, or, my biggest fear, unexplained behavior of a framework or API. I was recently plagued many hours on an issue at work that I feared fell into the latter category.
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My Environment Setup
I recently purchased a new 13” MacBook Air (which is a truly wonderful machine). Before I booted the machine for the first time, I started to contemplate what was needed for the machine to be setup for my development needs. I have, regrettably, avoided keeping track of what my environment looks like. I decided to change that. I have started tracking my environment setup on a static page on this site. It may not be the ideal setup for everyone, but I have found that it is the bare minimum of what I need (it is a work in progress and I plan to keep it updated as my methods and needs evolve).
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Unintuitive Swift
In case you have been living under a rock, Apple announced a new language at this year’s WWDC: Swift. I have been anxious to work with the new language beyond reading the Apple supplied The Swift Programming Language and the new Playground Xcode feature (which is a new way to experiment with Swift without using it in a project). I have recently been working on a new personal project (I am not ready to talk in great detail at this time, but it is a Mac application) and since the project is still in it’s early stages, I decided to convert the project over and start using Swift in this project. Converting the project went smoothly and developers have the benefit of mixing and matching between Swift and Objective-C. I currently have a couple of classes written in Swift that play along nicely with the rest of my Objective-C code. I was skeptical when this capability was announced, but so far it has been working as Apple advertised.
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Introducing CoreDataMate
A few years ago, I started development on a project that required long term persistence. Up until that point, most all of my persistence was handled on the server. This project required that I persist data locally on the user’s device, in conjunction with persisting data remotely on a server. As this was an iOS project and Apple is “all-in” with Core Data, I decided I had better get “all-in” with Core Data as well.
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Wendy, Let me Explain Something to You
My stepfather was an auto body man. He claims that he found his passion during his high school auto body class. After graduating high school, he spent most of his working life beating the dents out of cars. He spent most of his time working for car dealerships. Car dealerships would routinely purchase wrecked cars and hire auto body men to fix the vehicles so that they could in-turn sell the car for a profit. The dealerships would sometimes be able to make a profit of a few thousand per car.
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You Wanna Hurt Me?
In the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles (Oxford comma be damned), Neal blames his ruined trip home on Del. Is Del trying to ruin Neal’s trip? No. Del is just being himself. He’s loud. He’s boisterous. He’s doing what he believes is right. He’s not out to ruin Neal. But Neal, being the cynic that he is, feels that Del is just a buffoon with intentions of malice. I’ve run into a few Dels during projects. And I’ve unfortunately became Neal in many of these situations. It’s not something that I’m proud of, but something that I’m working toward improving.
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I'm Kind of a Big Deal
Saturday was kind of a special day (as far as software development goes). I opened a pull request for Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a gem for building .ipa files from iOS projects (it even has support for distributing files to TestFlight, HockeyApp, FTP, and S3). While testing the gem, I noticed a few problems with building schemes in workspaces. I cloned the project to my local machine, played around with the source, until I fixed the issue. It was a small fix, but I had a few concerns.
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