Issue 367

31^st August 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I really love side projects. They are unencumbered by the need to be good ideas from day one, or the need to have a clear path to making money. They are perfect tiny droplets of relief from day to day work. ❤️

They say that the invention of cooking was what gave humans an evolutionary leap forwards, as calories became much easier to consume and digest. This led to less time being spent on hunting and eating, giving Homo Erectus time to indulge in “side projects” like developing tools and weapons. (Did I really just make that leap? Why on earth are you all reading this drivel! 😂)

Let’s get back to the point though, I really enjoyed following John Sundell’s tweets about Splash this week. It’s clearly a project that is bringing him joy right now, but why did he build it? Of course, like most side projects they start as something to scratch an itch. But, once the itch was scratched, he started experimenting and now it’s potentially mutating into something new. Combine that with potential synergies with previous side projects and who knows what will happen in the future? Will it definitely turn into something else? Who knows, John definitely doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter.

My iOS Dev Directory was a side project and it was fun the whole way through building it (it’s still open for contributions by the way). I made it to scratch my own itch: “How do I find, and subscribe to, a whole community of RSS feeds?” but now it’s very much its own thing. Does it make money? Absolutely not. Does it get a lot of traffic? Actually, no. 😀 Am I glad I built it? YES! I still use it every day.

But, over and over in my career a surprising number of these side projects turned into real parts of various businesses that did end up making money. For example, this newsletter started as a side project. I had no intention of doing this for 7 years and definitely wasn’t thinking about it making money through sponsorship when I started it. I just wanted to read a newsletter like this on iOS development. There wasn’t one, so I started one. I didn’t think much about it! It was only a side project. It was easy.

Are you working on a side project as well as whatever you do for your main job? If not, why not? 🚀

Dave Verwer

News

Kickstarting new official Docker support for Swift

Don’t be tempted to read too much into this, I don’t think it’s anything to do with an official path to Swift on the server. I think we’re far more likely to see that through iCloud “server functions” or something like that. But, this is very cool and it’s good to see more of these things being brought under the umbrella of the Swift open source project.

Tools

Improving Your Build Time in Xcode 10

Patrick Balestra has written up a good summary of the parallel build system improvements accompanying Xcode 10 after he watched Session 408 from this year’s WWDC. Thanks Patrick!

Xcode 10 Storyboard Changes

This year’s changes to Interface Builder (am I still allowed to call it that? 👴) really threw me at first. I didn’t like them straight away, especially the change in position/access to the object library. However, a few weeks of getting used to it and the discovery of ⌘⇧L and I was convinced. In this article, Steven Lipton takes us through some of the changes.

Code

NSDataAsset

You could quite happily go your whole life as an iOS developer without looking into NSDataAsset, but you’d be missing a really smart feature of the platform that’s been around for a little while now. You should learn about it! 😀 This is NSHipster at its finest, thanks Mattt!

Value-Oriented Programming

Matt Diephouse with a good article that starts out looking back at the Protocol-Oriented Programming in Swift session from WWDC 2015 (Was that really 2015? It feels much more recent than that!) and then takes us through a different way to write some of the same code from that session.

CompactMap vs flatMap: The differences explained

The introduction of compactMap to Swift recently really made a lot of sense to me. Where previously you would useflatMap to sometimes “compact” things never really sat right and the new distinction feels great. If the subtleties of the change passed you by though, you’ll want to read this article from Antoine van der Lee.

Dynamic Features in Swift

Swift may not be quite as dynamic as Objective-C, but that doesn’t mean it has no tricks up it’s sleeve. I liked this article from Mike Finney covering some of the dynamic features of Swift.

Design

Framer X first impressions

There has been an explosion of new design tools recently, some surprisingly good and some… not so much. Framer X is the latest kid on the block and this article from Andrej Dragisic gives a good run down of what the tool looks like in beta.

Business and Marketing

Surviving the App Store

This free ebook from Amir Rajan looks great. The first few chapters go through some tips and techniques for running an App Store game business, but then the book switches into transcripts of interviews with popular iOS game developers and others in the industry. There’s discussions with Ryan Cash of Alto’s Adventure, Sam Barlow from Her Story and Shaun Musgrave from Touch Arcade amongst many others!

And finally...

Siri Easter Egg

It wasn’t old news to me!