Using a Slack App, Webhooks, and a Simple Curl Request — Do you use Slack and have tasks you wish you could automate communication for? Slack Apps and bots make that pretty easy, but a lot of people struggle with sending messages to multiple channels and often end up creating multiple bots or implementing an unnecessarily complex solution. Using the strategy…

Update the frontend as the backend changes in real-time — Are you working with Firebase Realtime Database and wish your UI would just update when the backend does? This can be really helpful when changes can come from anywhere — i.e. in a multi-user app where one user performing an action may change another user’s data. …

Good discipline should be more of a concern than using a value type over a reference type — If you’ve been doing Swift Development for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard that it’s good practice to use a struct over a class by default. While this is true in many cases, and for good reason, it’s very easy for a struct to be just as unsafe…

You don’t pack the whole house when you go on vacation, you bring a suitcase — Imagine you’re going on vacation. You know exactly where you’re going, how long you’re staying, and the weather pattern is very reliable. You’re super prepared for what’s to come, and you know exactly what you’ll need when you get there. It wouldn’t make sense to pack everything you own and…

Write a fully functional ViewController in about 30 lines of code — So you’re sick of massive view controllers? Me too. Many architectures attempt to overcome this problem in a way that I view as extremely complex for the problem they’re trying to solve. I favor simple architectures and simple solutions because they’re easy to understand, develop, and maintain. For this reason…

From heavy to lightweight — Say you’re making a singleton or static class to represent data and/or logic that will never change. In many cases, you can convert this logic to an enum and save yourself a bunch of hassle. An enum has much of the functionality of a class, but doesn’t require an instance…

Implementing a reusable programmatic UICollectionView — In this tutorial, we’ll implement MVC in a way that you may not be familiar with. We’ll create a reusable UICollectionView that’s implemented by its parent UIView and delegates item selection events to a UIViewController. This makes for a very small view controller when compared to the default way we…

Introduced at WWDC 2021, it will clean up your existing async code… with a little help — A lot of us have been waiting a long time for async/await syntax in Swift. First proposed in 2017, this API sets out to clean up the pyramid of doom that happens so often with async code. In the WWDC State of the Union, we were introduced to some amazing-looking…

Stub -> Fail -> Implement -> Test/Implement/Test Until Pass -> Refactor -> Test/Refactor/Test Until Pass -> Repeat — If you’re anything like me, you make a lot of assumptions when you develop software. Also, if you’re anything like me, you probably didn’t realize it until recently, or maybe you still don’t realize it. Trust me when I say, “assuming you aren’t making assumptions is the worst assumption you…