… has too many hobbies.

Topic:

Programming

54 posts
Oct 2012 – Jan 2026

Benefits of Cocoa: Still here in Swift

Until now we all agreed these were benefits of Cocoa: * C compatibility * Dynamic dispatch * Nil safety * Duck typing Now they're all bad? — Nick Lockwood (@nicklockwood) August 6, 2014 Sigh. Okay, let’s take this one item at a time: C compatibility Still there. Nil safety Was never there …

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 …

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& …

Elegant UITableView row selection behavior based on edit state

If you're a Cocoa Touch developer, you've undoubtedly implemented -[UITableViewDelegate tableView:didSelectRowAtIndexPath:] a few hundred times. I did this recently and needed different behavior based on whether the table view was in its editing state (whether -[UITableView isEditing]). In this particular case, the best …