Using the Community

You can’t always successfully google problems when you’re starting out - usually because you don’t know the correct terminology for the issue or solution. Often you might still get a newbie StackOverflow hit, but when there’s not even that, you need a human to help out.

One of the things ZTM do with their courses is to have a Discord based community, then set tasks to encourage it’s use - for example one of the exercises I’ve already had was to go there and answer a question. Earlier ones were to introduce yourself and to find a partner to work with - both of which would have forced anyone not used to Discord to figure it out.

Curse of Backwards Compatibility

I was listening to a JavaScript podcast today (JavaScript Jabber ) and in one of the discussions a point was made about how HTML, CSS and JavaScript have all had to maintain considerable legacy behaviors that compile-able languages do not have to. For instance, when Swift underwent some substantial changes from Swift 2 to Swift 3 - some code broke for developers and needed reworking because things had changed or been removed. Nothing broke for users - they could either still use their previously compiled applications, or they were delivered new ones from the app store.

Clean code

I’ve been listening to the latest episode of the Empower Apps podcast, this one with Jill Scott talking about “Humane” development - in the sense of being humane to whoever (probably you) is going to be reading this code in the future. It helped me clarify my thoughts about a couple of things.

None of these ideas are particularly new or groundbreaking, and although I think of them as my personal style, they are very common, and in Swift could be regarded as part of the culture. Some of these concepts support each other, some represent a trade off between two opposing ideas that require us to make a choice.

List Apps

When I was first programming professionally, it wasn’t long before I noticed that there were patterns to the sort of bread-and-butter things I was writing most times - the majority of the small business applications I wrote tracked several entities; for each entity there needed to be add/edit/delete screens, there would be some business rules around those things, and some reports and search functionality.