turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef
I mostly write about Swift, Objective-C, iOS, open source, and other software development topics. Sometimes I write about the ethics of tech, labor, and politics. I also write satire pieces, personal essays, and notes on what I'm currently reading.
Over the past few years, Apple seems increasingly willing to cooperate with authoritarian governments, uninterested in protecting its own users, and unwilling to actually standup for human rights in broad terms, as often portrayed by its marketing department or direct statements from CEO Tim Cook.
If you have attempted to adopt Swift Concurrency in your codebase, you have certainly needed to address dozens — likely, hundreds — of warnings and errors. Sometimes the issues can be resolved by addressing them directly. That is, your code was incorrect and you simply have to fix it to make it correct. In other scenarios, the resolution is not so straightforward. In particular, it is difficult to satisfy the compiler when working with APIs that you do not own that have not been updated for concurrency. Or, you may have found yourself in a situation where you know your code is correct, but the compiler is unable to verify its correctness — either because of a few remaining bugs in Swift Concurrency, or because you are using @preconcurrency APIs.
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.
Last week I wrote about setting up a new MacBook Pro — my first Apple Silicon Mac, and thus my first MacBook with a notch. I lamented how poorly macOS interacts with the notch, specifically how menu bar apps and icons simply get hidden if you have too many to display. Lots of folks on Mastodon offered various solutions, and some readers emailed me with options as well. I figured it was worth making a separate post about this specific issue to list all of the workarounds and alternatives. It is clear that this is a widespread problem that users are having.
At last year’s WWDC, Apple introduced privacy manifests. They recently sent out a reminder that the deadline for complying with these new requirements is May 1. Privacy manifests expand on the previously introduced privacy “nutrition labels” that are self-reported by developers and displayed on the App Store. Developers must start including a privacy manifest in their apps by the aforementioned deadline, but what’s more interesting is that Apple is, for the first time, imposing these new privacy rules on third-party SDKs as well. Even more interesting is the list of SDKs that Apple has published, which, upon inspection is quite bizarre.
I recently discovered, while setting up my first Apple Silicon Mac, that Xcode does not have access to your shell environment. But there’s one caveat to that. (Thanks to Boris for confirming!) This post will hopefully be a reminder to my future self when I encounter this issue again.
Welcome to the third part of my going indie series! In the previous post, I discussed building a foundation, getting started, and finding clients. In this post, I am going to discuss many of the decidedly un-fun administrative aspects of being freelance and contracting like saving for retirement and — everyone’s favorite — taxes. Most folks consider these topics to be boring and tedious, but understanding them is critical to your success. The best approach is one of curiosity. As a software developer, you might find the task of optimizing (and minimizing!) your tax burden to be an interesting problem to solve — I definitely do!
UserDefaults is probably one of the most popular APIs on Apple Platforms. It is a highly-optimized key-value persisted store that is backed by a property list, and it is most commonly used for saving small pieces of data like user preferences. Despite its ease-of-use, there is one common anti-pattern I see developers use often.
Xcode has a great UI for setting and editing breakpoints. I use breakpoints all the time while working and debugging, but I want to share another, unconventional way that I use them.
Epsilon. ε. The fifth letter of the Greek alphabet. In calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity. In formal language theory, the empty string. In the theory of computation, the empty transition of an automaton. In the ISO C Standard, 1.19e-07 for single precision and 2.22e-16 for double precision.
The other day I was attempting to use FLT_EPSILON (which I later learned was laughably incorrect) when the Swift 4 compiler emitted a warning saying that FLT_EPSILON is deprecated and to use .ulpOfOne instead. What the hell is ulpOfOne? I read the documentation and then everything made sense — ha, just kidding. The FloatingPoint.ulpOfOne docs generously describe the static variable as the unit in the last place of 1.0 — whatever that means. Let’s find out.
When I wrote about joining Mastodon, I said I would stay on Twitter for the moment and see what happens. Well, unsurprisingly, the service has continued to erode. It really is a shame, because I’ve found the software developer community there very helpful over the years. I met a lot of friends on Twitter, and later met them for the very first time in person at WWDC.
Speaking of drunk software and not being in service to our possessions, Screen Time on iOS and macOS has been shockingly buggy for me lately. It reports that I spent over 22 hours on my devices in a single day last week, and nearly 10 hours on another day this week. In both instances, a significant portion of the usage is supposedly occurring after midnight.
iMessage is in the news again recently with a revival of years-old stories about “green bubbles” versus “blue bubbles” — and the social dynamics among teens who prefer blue bubbles while ostracizing their peers with green bubbles. There’s a lot to like and dislike about iMessage, but one thing that amazes me is that there is still no way to easily report abuse and the process for blocking spam is needlessly difficult.
I discovered earlier this week that my website is no longer being indexed by Bing and DuckDuckGo. In fact, it appears that it has been deliberately removed from their search indexes. On Bing, rather than display a “no results” message, it displays a “Some results have been removed” message, which is very concerning. Notably, however, Google search is working fine.
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.
My website is still missing from DuckDuckGo’s and Bing’s search indexes. And now other sites are reporting similar issues.
This post continues from my earlier post on label-based GitHub Actions workflows. A common and tedious task in a typical pull request workflow is updating your branch with changes from the default branch of your repo. In many scenarios, you may want to rebase your pull request on the main branch or merge the main branch into your pull request.
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.
My current team has started using GitHub Actions to automate some tedious tasks for pull requests. In particular, we use labels on GitHub to categorize pull requests or highlight important metadata about them. Most of the time, a machine can figure out which labels are appropriate to add or remove. This is a great use case for GitHub Actions.
I previously wrote about writing a custom shell command to quickly switch between Xcodes. But recently, I needed to determine the version of Swift that is bundled with Xcode — specifically the version of Swift that is shipping with the current Xcode 13.3 beta. I was pretty sure that it is Swift 5.6, but I wanted to know for certain.
In JavaScript, this pattern is called an Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE) or a Self-Executing Anonymous Function. Swift doesn’t have an “official” name for this, but IIFE works as well as “immediately executed anonymous closure” or “self-executing anonymous closure”. (Thanks to folks on Twitter for helping with this.)
Unfortunately, iCloud does not have a good reputation for being reliable, especially during beta releases of iOS and macOS. Yet a lot people still use it, often without any problems. I still use it, despite a few bad experiences in the past, because the best alternatives are questionable for other reasons. I’ve had good luck with iCloud Drive for the past few years, but I am terrified and paranoid of getting caught in the middle of an iCloud clusterfuck, so I backup what I have in iCloud periodically using rsync.
I have been experiencing bizarre kernel panics with my Mac lately. I have a 2020 Intel MacBook Pro, the last Intel model before the M1 debuted. It has generally been working fine. Despite poor software quality and numerous bugs lurking around in macOS, I rarely see kernel panics anymore. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a kernel panic before this issue. There have been no major changes on my machine and I’m on the latest version of Monterey.
Well, it appears my saga of obscure errors with Time Machine continues. The first issue I had was in 2020 with macOS Catalina and “error 45”. That error was fixed (for me) in Big Sur in 2021. As of this week, the error is back, though this time on macOS Monterey.
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.
I came across a situation today where I needed to run an iOS test suite for a Swift Package. Previously, this required you to have an Xcode project but it no longer does.
The mayor of San Francisco called out feces on the sidewalks as a core problem to address in the city and wants homeless folks to “at least have respect” and “clean up after themselves”. It’s an unfortunate response, but I’m sure a lot of folks agree with the sentiment. No one relishes walking through the dirty streets in this city and it certainly is a concern, but this kind of rhetoric is actively harmful. It deliberately shifts responsibility for the problem onto the victims and away from the system that produced it. Homeless folks are among the most vulnerable in our society. In addition to their lack of housing, persistent precarity, mental health issues, and emotional struggles, the city is now going to ask them for respect and cleanliness?
Ever so often an iOS developer asks me how to get started with making their own blog or portfolio website. Or, I’ll see a software developer from another community on Twitter ask the same thing. Often they are earlier in their career, or unfamiliar with web development, or unsure whether to build from scratch or use a platform, or all of the above. I find myself consistently making the same recommendations to folks. For this post, I want to share what I think is a great approach to get started, and how you can dive deeper once you master the basics.