Puzzlin’ Code

Okay, here’s some SwiftUI code: Why, why, do I need to prefix tipPercentages with ‘self.‘ once we’re in the third closure but not inside the second or even the first? What’s magical about this situation? I know there’s something, but nobody is saying what.

Specify Your Dream

I keep wanting to be able to write native apps for my devices, and it keeps being true that I can’t wrap my brain around The Way You’re Supposed To Do It. I’ve taken Coursera and Udemy courses on iOS and macOS programming, and I’ve even shipped a couple of toy apps to the App

Why Monoculture

At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I told my family that since I didn’t use Windows in a professional capacity and I didn’t use it personally, there was no way I was going to go to the effort of becoming and staying smart about Windows, and if they wanted me to do tech

Next Project

So, I’m writing a pantry inventory app.

Sounds Like a Job for Perl

In which I write a continuous build system for bagpipe music using Perl and a Makefile. The problem: the band has sheet music that everyone is supposed to memorize, the membership is geographically dispersed and not everyone can make it to every practice, and during practices and workshops and after competitions the music can get

Programming for the Ages

So this feels like the most Silicon Valley thing I’ve said in a few years, but the thing I’m working on right now is basically the same parts and programming language I was working on as a hobby back in 1997. Yes, the machine is in someone else’s data center, yes, the services it’s interacting

Greatness Abides

Okay, so when I looked at Google news this morning, this story was in the “For you…based on your interests” section: Gremlin Brings Chaos Monkey Testing to Spinnaker CD Platform. Now, I’m a respecter of Dev Ops, but I’m not really a practitioner of Dev Ops. So I think this is cool, but the coolest

It Could Be Better

A long time ago, my housemate (who is one of the only people who reads this – Hi, Kurt!) had this great explanation for why his homework wouldn’t compile: “It was perfect, so I fixed it.” Man, that so describes every programmer I’ve ever worked with. (Incidentally and orthogonal to the point of this post,

Things I Wish

I wish that Google provided an offline/dev version of Firebase so that I could work on my mobile app when I’m not actually online. Sort of like they offer a dev version of Datastore for App Engine development. I wish that Google made their Flutter documentation available as a downloadable package so that I could

Mobile Enterprise

So, I’m writing another mobile app. This one is a chore list for our household. And, since our household is not technologically homogenous, I’m writing it in Flutter so I can deploy it to All The Devices. Flutter’s idiom is lambda-heavy, and most of the tutorials and examples wind up embedding application logic in the