Recently, I finished an almost final draft of my novel and decided it was time to refresh my online presence and website. Instead of starting my next novel, I dove into creating the next version of my site, what I call alejandromp4. And, of course, you know what that means… using a new static site generator! Yes, I have a problem with focusing my hobbies; I’m working on it.
In the early days of Swift, one thing I really enjoyed was the focus on properties (bye-bye ivars!) and the unification of stored and computed property syntax. It became very common to define properties that initialized some parts of your view automatically.
Swift’s Optional type is one of the biggest hits of the language. Mainly because it’s opt-in. Everything is non-optional by default, which solves the old problem of having to deal with nulls everywhere. That said, nulls (or Optional.none) still shows up a decent amount of times, so the second thing Swift did very well was to provide great affordances to work with optional at the language level.
In this post I want to show you a little behind the curtain. As you may have noticed if you follow me on Twitter, recently the tweets with links to this post got a little fancier. What you may not know is that these images are generated using SwiftUI.
SwiftUI is an amazing tool to create all sorts of views in our applications. But many times we want that ease of use to generate graphics that can be used outside of apps, usually as simple image files. That’s why is so useful to know how to generate images from SwiftUI views. This power unlocks a new world of possibilities!
Legends of Runeterra has become one of my favourite games. I started playing it since the beta was available and haven’t stopped since. It caught me by surprise, but it’s been one of the few games that I’ve played for so long. It was just a question of time that I found some little project to mix the passion for this game with the passion for coding.
My birthday is the middle of July, seven days from now, which has always made me consider summer as the division between years. That mentality was reaffirmed when as a teenager I got hooked up on TV Shows. Those shows are broken down in seasons, and usually summer was that weird space between seasons without much interesting content to watch.
After writing about my perfect notes app and comparing the available options I decided to move to Bear. My tasks from Todoist were one of the first things that I moved, and with that change I immediately noticed that in some occasions I really needed a quick way of seeing my tasks.
Last year I wrote about Improving struct composition in Swift by levering the using keyword and feature taken from Jai. Recently I’ve been inspired by pointfree to implement this feature using code generation.
Last week I participated in the first Blackthornprod GAME JAM. I had so much fun creating a small game involving some mechanics that I wanted to explore for a while.
One year ago I decided to start working on a Lox interpreter in Swift following Bob Nystrom’s book Crafting Interpreters. Today I’m happy to say that the work has been completed. Mission accomplished.
I’ve been always a big fan of productivity, time is gold. But funny enough, as many other people, we fall into the traps of being productive by just spending more time on looking for tools and solutions to be more productive. This is not a bad thing per se, but it can end up being. You may end up having a false sense of productivity because you improve your workflows and tools. But, in reality, the only thing that matters is the output of your work and, specially, your happiness.
A couple of days ago I was reading Crafting Interpreters written by Bob Nystrom and it awoke my passion for programming languages so I decided to implement an interpreter for Lox in Swift!
A while ago I wondered how easy would be to make a screenshot of a window in OS X from another application using some system API. With that idea in mind last Christmas I started a project that ended up being too time consuming.
A couple of months ago I wrote a small prototype of the well known Conway’s Game of Life. This kind of simulation has always fascinated me. Giving a set of rules and an initial state to the computer and let maths (and life) do its job has something special.
On March 1st of 2015 I released ScrumVotes in the App Store. It’s an application that helps in the Sprint Planning Meeting when the development team has to give estimates to each user story.
This weekend I wrote a little script that helped me to connect two of the main things that I do everyday: save things into the Safari Reading List and watch Youtube videos offline.
A sad notice today. I’ve retired Shopless from the AppStore. The reason is simple: I can’t afford the costs of the server that stores and syncs the data.