2021 in review
Welcome to the end of 2021, a.k.a. the second year of the pandemic. Another year of not going abroad, barely seeing friends, playing Dungeons & Dragons via Zoom instead of at the table. A year of mild depression and feelings of loneliness. But also a year of hope when we all got access to the vaccines and when we didn't hear about Trump every day in the news. And last but not least: it was also a very productive year!
Working around HttpOnly cookie problems in SvelteKit
When HttpOnly cookies didn't work as expected in my SvelteKit project I had to find a workaround.
Saga 1.0.0 has been released
About ten months ago I wrote that I was confident that the API of Saga wasn't going to change a lot anymore, and that I'd release 1.0.0. Well, it's taken a little bit longer than I expected back then, but 1.0.0 has finally been released!
Vapor 4 vs. Django REST Framework
Over two years ago I wrote an article where I compared Vapor 3 to Django REST Framework. It's time for a rematch with Vapor 4.
Architecting a SvelteKit app - and failing
I was working to architect a SvelteKit app so that it does as few requests as possible, from a central place, so that all subpages have access to the content. Sadly dealing with SSR makes it very hard to achieve my goals.
My one big complaint working with Vapor 4
I'm trying out Vapor 4 for a side project, and one thing that I am constantly running into is the amount of boilerplate and copy-pasted code. Are there no better solutions for this?
Interview with proglib.io
Recently I was interviewed for the Russian IT website proglib.io. Since it might be interesting for non-Russian speakers, here it is in the original English version.
WWDC21 keynote review
A new year, a new WWDC with once again new iOS, iPadOS, macOS and watchOS releases. If you ask me, I think yearly releases are overkill and really not necessary; I’d rather have Apple split off features like Weather, Maps, Notes and more into...
Mentee Question 5: What's the deal with coordinators?
A few weeks while ago in my how to get started article I mentioned coordinators in the “What architecture should I use?” section, and how they allow you to decouple your view controllers from one another, and improve the way you can test your code....
Mentee Question 4: When to use PassthroughSubject and CurrentValueSubject?
That’s a great question! And actually one I asked myself too, when I just got started with Combine. Let’s first explain what PassthroughSubject and CurrentValueSubject are though. Subjects are a kind of publisher that you can subscribe to, but can...
Mentee Question 3: How to know when multiple publishers completed?
In JavaScript-world, it's really easy to know when multiple promises completed: just use Promise.all. How do you do the same thing in Combine?
Automating your changelog and GitHub releases
In a short time I’ve created 25 releases for my static site generator Saga. For each release I’ve manually updated the CHANGELOG.md file, which is a bit tedious and easy to forget. I really wanted to automate this using GitHub Actions, which I was...
A review of Markdown parsers for Swift
A hugely important part of any static site generator is of course the parsing of Markdown content. The default parser for Saga is Parsley, a custom wrapper around a cmark fork. While I am generally quite happy with it, there are some problems.
Building my own static site generator, part 7: updates & the road to 1.0.0
In the past few days I’ve made some pretty substantial improvements to Saga, to make it work for me and my website, which is now built using Saga.
Building my own static site generator, part 6: replacing SwiftMarkdown
I've already replaced my own SwiftMarkdown package...
Building my own static site generator, part 5: replacing Ink and Splash
I've replaced the Ink and Splash dependencies with my own SwiftMarkdown package.
Building my own static site generator, part 4: a complete redesign
An unexpectedly quick fourth article about Saga, after a complete redesign of the API.
Building my own static site generator, part 3: thoughts so far
In the third and final part of this series about Saga I'm looking at the pros and cons of the current system and what I might want to change.
Building my own static site generator, part 2: API design
Part 2, where I'm looking back at the current API of Saga.
Building my own static site generator, part 1: inspiration & goals
In part 1 of a series of articles I'm looking at the inspiration behind my static site generator Saga, now available on Github.
Swift generics and arrays
I’m in the very early stages of building my own static site generator in Swift. I want the library to provide a basic Page type, that the user can then extend with custom metadata, and I need to be able to put Pages with different kinds of metadata...
Looking at the static site generator Publish
I'm taking a look at the static site generator Publish, written in Swift.
Mentee Question 2: How to get started
Resources for learning Swift and UIKit, what to build first, opinions on Unit Testing, and more.
Mentee Question 1: UIKit or SwiftUI
My take on the very common question "What should I learn or focus on? UIKit or SwiftUI?"