As an application developer I get to use many third party code to integrate it into my current project. I want to share a checklist of things a user of an SDK really appreciates.

The latest xcode beta is available for downloading. There are many improvements, and the usual problems with stuff that stops working… Ah the love of Apple for it’s developers :). But I want to tell you about a feature that caught my attention: New analyzer settings!

New analyzer settings

From the release notes:

The static analyzer warns when nil is returned from a method or function with a nonnull return type or is passed to a parameter marked nonnull.

Having worked in companies developing their own products, I’ve faced many times the problem developers encounter when building iOS applications: Your biggest 3rd party dependency - the OS SDK - is changing under you every year. How does your team deal with this in a maintainable way?

Swift is finally open source! This is great because of many reasons, namely the transparency and chances to learn from the people responsible of building the foundational language you work on. I’ve been checking how easy was to build the runtime, REPL and compiler, and it turns out the team made an excellent job to make the process very easy. Let’s see how to do it.

‘Know your key shortcuts’ is the mantra of the productive programmer. I’ve chosen to try using the same keybindings everywhere, investing time and learning Vim. And using xvim in Xcode. In this article I’m going to try to explain why I did this, and I’ll share my experience of the process.

I’ve recently changed workplace - we’re hiring! - and I’ve jumped into an existing codebase. This is a good time to review what I like to do when I start to work on a project in these circumstances.

In a previous post, I wrote about the choice of paradigms that Swift presents for it’s target audience. I also gave my opinion on how people with different backgrounds might see and approach the Functional Programming paradigm.

In this post I want to share how I started to take advantage of FP with Swift for the practical domain of iOS developers: Building apps.

It’s a very exciting time to be an iOS or Mac developer. The platform moves very fast and we got a new toy (language) to play with: Swift. It’s the perfect time to reevaluate, learn and evolve as a programmer, because you will be forced to adopt this new language (yes, I think Swift is the future, 100%).

I want to relate this to the fact that most iOS engineers, or mobile application developers, are traditionally familiar with Object Oriented Programming paradigm. But Swift offers more than different syntax and OOP.

I’m referring to some features inspired by functional languages. If you’ve ever had an interest, but never the chance or motivation to go forth and look into this paradigm, now it’s the perfect time to do it.

Yesterday my last post on the series ‘Let’s build Freehand Drawing for iOS’ has been published at Badoo Tech blog. It’s been a very good experience for me, and of course I recommend you visit the tutorials if you are interested.

I divided the tutorials in 3 parts:

• Part 1: Introduces the feature and a naive implementation
• Part 2: Adds undo functionality, refactoring along the way
• Part 3: Improves stroke to make it look smoother

Building tutorials is hard

This series has been my first take on writing technical tutorials. And I must say that it’s a lot harder than I thought. You need to keep track of the content, code correctness, and the pace of the articles so it’s readable and understandable. Coding while writing an article is challenging, but the experience has been very gratifying.

One commit a day. A lesson I’ve learned the hard way when dealing with long-term side projects.