Tech Debt and Refactoring

Refactor as necessary to avoid adding tech debt during day-to-day. Add tests and rearchitect during the normal development cycle when adding to a preexisting codebase. Taking the time to do things right makes everything take a little longer than it strictly needs to, but it allows you to avoid unpredictable …

Explicit Programming

Concretely, this post is about a guideline for object-oriented and imperative programming, but the underlying principles and conclusions should be equally applicable to some other paradigms. One example here uses Cocoa Touch and Objective-C pseudocode, but again the principles described apply equally to any framework. It’s very easy to …

↗ Avoiding Singleton Abuse

Avoiding Singleton Abuse · objc.io

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Stephen Poletto

Follow me on Pinboard

Update, April 2023: I’m no longer using Pinboard. I’ve been pretty excited about Pinboard lately. I realized a while ago that its network feature (including RSS), in conjunction with support for tags and notes (including the <blockquote> tag) make it basically a microlinkblogging service. I always …

Quick followup on singletons

Part of the Singletons series. This is a quick followup to my post about singletons in Cocoa apps. Read it first for context. Another developer asked me a few questions about the points I made in my previous post on singletons. I’d like to post my (lightly edited) comments …

Including your Pods directory in source control

On my current project, we made the decision a month or so ago to add our Pods directory to git. The team has seen a number of benefits from this decision. There are certainly some negatives, but in our experience the positives have been huge, immediately tangible, and well worth …

Singletons in Cocoa applications

Part of the Singletons series. The Singleton pattern is a powerful tool in every programmer’s toolbox. But singletons today are widely overused in most codebases. The consequences of misusing such a powerful tool are too far-reaching and long-lived to take lightly. And overuse or misuse of this tool leads …

The Value of ReactiveCocoa

This post is largely in response to Soroush Khanlou, via Jason Brennan. Edited to add, 2014-02-17: Soroush has posted a response, which you shoud also read after this post. It’s undeniably true that ReactiveCocoa can be difficult to wrap your head around. Really understanding it — really making it click …

Objective-C

Context: Soroush Khanlou, via Jason Brennan. And I’m drafting a less-snarky response now. I was reading an article on Objective-C, and I still don’t quite get it. Lifting a simple example from the post, are we really down to say that {% highlight objc %} import <Foundation/Foundation.h& …

Serving from your Dropbox folder with nginx

Long ago, Dropbox provided a Public folder that had some special capabilities. Those capabilities are now better integrated into Dropbox, but I still use my Public folder for things I intend to share. I set up a server to make that folder available over the web. I can now share …

I FOIA'd Myself with the FBI

In August I sent the FBI a FOIA request to see what would come back. The results were boring, which I suppose is a good thing even if it's a little disappointing. 📝Update: in 2016 I did the same thing, with the same result. …

Do programmers use serial commas more often than other people? (No.)

A few weeks ago, I accidentally got into a Twitter discussion of the serial, or Oxford, comma (this happens to me every couple months). A few programmer friends chimed in, and Dylan asked an interesting question: are programmers generally biased toward the Oxford comma? 18 minutes later, this survey happened. …

ArborWX

Introducing a new hyperlocal weather blog for Ann Arbor: ArborWX.

CDZLinkOpenManager

Part of the Project Announcements series. Update: the software described in this post is no longer maintained. While developing BuyVM Manager, I built a little framework that allows your app’s users to select a default browser, and open links from your app in that browser. It’s now on …

Where is this awesome airplane playground?

Updated: some additional Googling reveals that this is at the “Lugansk aviation museum”. Some relevant links: a biography/history of the museum; additional information about the museum; notes and many photos from someone’s blog; another large photo gallery. Googling “Lugansk aviation museum” will let you find some more info. …