First Post

Hello and welcome to my site!

I taught myself how to program largely by reading online tutorials and other developers' blogs. Eventually I was lucky enough to be employed as an iOS engineer, and from there my career grew. I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for all the people who came before me and wrote about their experiences developing software. So it is only natural that I contribute my own writings back to the web. Better late than never!

Most of these posts will be related to iOS development since that is the first platform where I got serious (unless you count Macromedia Flash 😛). I am no longer an engineer though iOS still has a special place in my heart and remains my main passion outside of my current day job as a product manager.

Recently I have been working on an iPad app, which I am tentitavely calling ShapeUp. It will allow anyone to create professionally-designed flow chart diagrams without having to be good at design themselves. This past year or so I have gone down a rabbit hole of refactoring the codebase from using UICollectionView to something that can only be described as a total reimplementation of SwiftUI. Do not do this. It is not worth it and I am just now coming up for air. As a product manager I should know better than to embark on giant refactor projects without a clear timeframe and goal. But the great thing about hobby projects is you don't need to think about business value.

Now that I have done it I have a lot more insights about how the internals of SwiftUI is built. Hopefully I can organise everything I've learnt into a coherent series of posts…