Andrew King

andrewking.ca · American English

rss2 wordpress content slash wfw atom dc sy

Open the feed

https://andrewking.ca/feed/

Last post: Apr 28, 2020
Posts in 24 h · 7 days · 30 days: 0 · 0 · 0
Our last check: Answering
Served from: United States
Text score at discovery: 9,381
Format: rss2
Features in the feed: content, slash, wfw, atom, dc, sy
Community: wordpress

Posts

What our queue read from this feed. Open one to read it here, or go to the site that published it.

How to Enable Custom Debugging in Release Builds
Apr 28, 2020 · original
Reliably enable debugging features for yourself. Hide them from your end users. Stop using #if DEBUG. TLDR: Use a custom Profile that includes a certificate. Install that on devices you want to enable debugging on. By detecting if that profile has been installed on the user’s device, you can enable/disable debug features that are impossible for your users to find. At my work we use TestFlight to distribute beta builds for internal and external testing. This a great, because once you certify a build as “ready for production”, you can just release it – it’s the exact binary that you’re going to ship. But there’s a problem – we also want to give ourselves some extra debugging controls in our TestFlight builds for things like switching to a staging environment, toggling feature flags, and viewing extra error info. These are features that we can’t ship to end users, but that we want available
Using a Swift PropertyWrapper to ensure a closure is only called once
Feb 27, 2020 · original
Learn : how to write a property wrapper that avoids boilerplate for your asynchronous callback code. The Solution Code Want to skip to the answer? Variables marked with this property wrapper will be destroyed after they are read once. Use with caution! @propertyWrapper struct ReadableOnceT { var wrappedValue: T? { mutating get { defer { self._value = nil } return self._value } set { self._value = newValue } } private var _value: T? = nil } Now lets see how we got here. Avoiding multiple invocations of a completion block Let’s say we have a class that does some work, and then invokes its completion block. class NumberChecker { private var completion: ((Error?) - Void) init(completion: @escaping ((Error?) - Void)) { self.completion = completion } public func check() { if someCondition { handleFailure(NSError(domain: "MyDomain", code: 1)) } handleSuccess() } private func handleSuccess() { s
When is it *good* for your App to crash?
Feb 18, 2020 · original
Most of the time, a crashing app is the very last thing you want. Obviously. But sometimes you really do want your app to crash to enforce correct usage of your APIs. What’s worse than a crash? Crashes are obviously bad – it’s disruptive to your user, they might lose data or work in progress, it makes them feel frustrated and less likely to open your app again, and it just smells like bad quality. But there’s something worse than a crash: undefined behaviour . Our programs are carefully thought through, and crafted so that the right input data is manipulated, used for calculations, stored, outputted, and otherwise trusted . But this also makes them brittle. Whether you realize it or not, all of these complex behaviours only work when you constrain your code to be used with some predefined, known range of inputs. When your code is given unexpected types of data, you can’t control what wil
11 Habits of an Effective Developer
Feb 9, 2020 · original
Being a developer is hard – and being an effective developer demands that you juggle many responsibilities at the same time – from writing and reviewing code to mentoring others and communicating with stakeholders. How are you supposed to be good at all of these things? Each one is hard even just on its own! The answer – build good habits. Then you don’t have to actually remember to do the things, you just stick with your habits. So here are some habits that I believe can make you a more effective developer. Practice these, and you will be the most valuable member of your team. 1. Read Reading makes you smarter. There’s just something about it. Obviously you learn information from the content you are reading, but its also exercise for your brain. I’ve been back in the habit of reading for the past year or so, and I feel it making my mind a little fresher – a little sharper. Set yourself
Why Agile-at-Scale is So Painful for Developers
Feb 4, 2020 · original
Does you use the Agile methodology at work? What do you think of it? Do you think it helps you be more productive? I suspect your answer to that question depends on a number of factors, but the key determiners are likely the role assigned to you by the Agile framework, and the details of how Agile has been adopted by your company. Why Agile is Supposedly Better Than Waterfall Waterfall has a fatal flaw – although thorough planning and a long-term roadmap are useful in organizing a coherent project plan and achieving a big goal, you’re stuck with this plan once you’ve started. Projects planned with waterfall will often do huge portions of their work before they are able to grab the separate pieces of a system and try them out together. This means that if something is wrong, you don’t find out for a long time – possibly until its too late. And if the market changes while you’re working on
How to do High-Bar Code Review Without Being a Jerk
Jan 25, 2020 · original
How to do code review that enforces high standards while avoiding common problems on your team . Code review is the hardest part of being a developer. Seriously. Whereas most of our work is between you and a computer – a machine you just have to operate correctly and indicate clear intentions to – code review is a thing between humans. And like it or not, those humans are squishy, opinionated, emotional creatures. And those traits make code review a challenge. In principle your goal in a code review is simple: examine another person’s code and make sure their pull request (“PR”) is “good enough” to merge. But in reality there are a gazillion other things swirling around in your brain. Urgency – is this a hot fix for a major production outage? Seniority – am I allowed to decline this senior developer’s PR? Reaction – will someone yell at me if I decline this PR? Grudges – will you decline
What is Git? Taking Control of Source Control
Jan 15, 2020 · original
Let’s say you’re working on a big project – your final paper for a class at school, or a report for your boss. The project is long and complicated, you chip away at it over a period of months, and go through many many revisions of editing. Then you save your last copy, Big Project Final Version and hand it to your trusted friend to look over. They find 100 more little typos, so you fix those, then Save As: Big Project Final Version 2 . Just to be safe you read over it one more time, and decide you actually want to go back to what you had before in a few places. Hmmm… how exactly was that worded again? Save As: Big Project Final Version Final. Save As: Big Project For Real Last One. Save As: Big Project FINAL. Then your trusted friends trips over your dog and spills coffee on your computer and you lose everything. Does any part of this sound familiar? What is Source Control? Source contro
A Day in the Life of an iOS Developer
Jan 3, 2020 · original
An iOS developer probably has a similar day to most other kinds of developers – it includes reading and writing code, discussions with teammates, and maybe some meetings. But what exactly does that look like? Well here’s a rundown of a typical day for me (if I’m not working from home): 7:00 – Alarm goes off. Get up, eat breakfast and make coffee. 7:30 – Leave the house. Head to the train station and start the commute. I live pretty far from work, but taking the train allows me to make use of the travel time and avoid sitting in traffic. I also bicycle from the train station to my office, so I get some exercise in as well. While I’m on the train I read or write, or get an early start on my work for the day. 9:30 – Arrive at work. There is no set start time at most jobs, you arrive at whatever time you want, within some acceptable range as determined by the company culture. In my experienc
The Art of Cautious Self Improvement
Jan 5, 2019 · original
Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about self improvement. Some of this has been about creating better habits and making better or healthier decisions in my personal life, and most of this has been concentrating on work – how do I become a better developer, a better leader, a better professional. But as I’ve been going through this, I’ve found that on the basis of aiming for self improvement, you first accept that there are things to be improved. And when you make this acknowledgement, not all the feelings that come out are positive, growth-y, or productive. Starting Somewhere My first instinct on self improvement is very literal – get better at something by educating myself and practicing that new skill. So over the past year I spent time reading Robert Martin’s famous programming books: Clean Code, Clean Architecture, and The Clean Coder. These make up a portion of what
New Year, New Goals
Jan 2, 2019 · original
Happy New Year, folks. The new year is a time for reflecting on how the last year has gone and how the next year might be better, and so like many of you I’ve set myself some goals. These are goals that are supposed to help me improve some aspect of myself or my life, and by writing them here I hope to provide some inspiration for you, or at least some accountability for me. These aren’t entirely programming-related, so this post diverges from what many of my other posts are about, but if you take a more holistic approach to work and life, you will already know that these things aren’t really separate. Your personal life and health affect your quality of work and your relationships with your colleagues, and vice-versa. So here are my goals for 2019. Start each day with 30 mins of self-improvement. The key rule is that this time isn’t spent on something for work. Instead, this can be one

Discovered by the rss-feed-index crawler, which checks each feed at most once a month.

Same record as JSON: https://api.agentalog.com/api/feeds/fd_andrewking_ca_97caed681dc48504. More from this site: andrewking.ca in the Feeds tab.