turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef

Writing by tag: open-source

Using DocC on GitHub Pages

Pros and Cons 22 April 2022
Updated: 25 April 2022

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.

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Quick 5.0 released

17 April 2022

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.

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Deprecating PresenterKit

06 November 2021

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.

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Simple, private, and open source analytics with GoatCounter

08 May 2020

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.

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Setting up default community health files on GitHub and crafting a thorough Contributing Guide for any open-source project

24 January 2020

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.

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Swift's new calling convention

From callee-owned to guaranteed 05 July 2018

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?

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Why optional closures in Swift are escaping

10 June 2018

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.

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Ending the Swift Weekly Brief

Taking an indefinite hiatus from writing the newsletter, and looking for a new owner 28 December 2017
Updated: 08 February 2018

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.

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Customizing git-log

Creating a 'smartlog' alias in git 08 August 2017

Git is sometimes rough around the edges, but fortunately it’s not too difficult to customize and make more user-friendly. The other day I spent some time experimenting with git log and crafting a new git smartlog alias.

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A story about Swift source compatibility

How to add your projects to the swift-source-compat-suite and why you should 17 July 2017

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.

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Officially deprecating JSQMessagesViewController

No longer maintaining or supporting this project 16 July 2017
Updated: 18 July 2017

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.

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Pushing the limits of protocol-oriented programming

Talk at Swift Summit in San Francisco 23 January 2017

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!

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Shipping Swift 3.0

An update on my open source libraries 01 October 2016

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.

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Speaking at FrenchKit

Paris, France 30 September 2016

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.

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Swift 3 sherlocked my library

Many of our "Swifty" wrappers are no longer necessary 03 July 2016

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.

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Open source everything

Getting meaningful contributions to move your projects forward 22 May 2016

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.

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Swift documentation

Writing, generating, and publishing great docs in Swift 20 May 2016
Updated: 18 April 2018

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.

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Call for contributors

Join the JSQMessagesViewController team! 06 February 2016

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!

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The new weekly brief

The Swift Weekly Brief gets a new home 14 January 2016

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.

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Open source Swift: weekly brief #4

What's been happening on Swift.org? 07 January 2016

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!

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Open source Swift: weekly brief #3

What's been happening on Swift.org? 24 December 2015

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!

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Open source Swift: weekly brief #2

What's been happening on Swift.org? 17 December 2015

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!

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Open source Swift: weekly brief

What's been happening during the first full week on Swift.org? 10 December 2015

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!

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Swift open source

Let the revolution begin 06 December 2015

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.

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Building type-safe, composable data sources in Swift

A modern approach to collection views and table views 25 October 2015

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.

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Introducing JSQMessagesVC 6.0

A brief history and celebration of the popular messages UI library for iOS 08 December 2014

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.

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Rosetta Stone contributes

Rosetta Stone officially joins the open-source community 05 December 2014

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.

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Built with open-source

The beginnings of this blog 09 June 2014

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.

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