Beginners often can’t successfully Google coding problems because they don’t yet know the terminology, and I describe how the Discord community attached to ZTM courses helps fill that gap, with tasks that push students to introduce themselves, pair up, and answer others’ questions. Getting community help still requires doing your homework and providing enough context for someone to answer. A CodePen example demonstrating how to center an image in a div is included...
My reflections on a JavaScript Jabber podcast discussion about how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript must preserve backward compatibility in ways compiled languages like Swift do not, illustrated by my 1996 website still rendering fine in modern browsers. I argue this legacy burden weighs down web technologies and makes them harder to learn, noting CSS features like flex-box can never be deprecated in favor of newer approaches. A later episode on semantic HTML revisited the theme, with hosts wishing breaking changes would force site owners to update...
After listening to a podcast episode about “humane” development, I describe my personal Swift coding style, which centers on being kind to whoever reads the code next. The principles I cover include following community conventions, writing code that reads like natural language, keeping functions small and single-purpose, avoiding hidden dependencies like globals, and using comments as temporary scaffolding that usually gets deleted once the code is written...
Reflecting on the Day 47 habit-tracking milestone challenge, I observe that simple SwiftUI list apps follow a common recipe: Identifiable/Codable structs, an ObservableObject collection with @Published state, and a List inside a NavigationView. I outline that pattern, its benefits for building quality apps quickly while staying HIG-compliant, and the risk that such apps end up looking and feeling like every other list-based offering...
