In this short post, I link to Brad Traversy’s Web Development In 2024 – A Practical Guide YouTube video, describing it as a comprehensive, beginner-friendly overview of web development that he publishes each year...
A short YouTube video on building REST APIs with Node and Express prompts a plan to replace my existing weather data setup—a Python cron job on a VPS that writes API results to a text file served by NGINX—with a Node.js endpoint that fetches and caches fresh weather data on request. This would cut the up-to-ten-minute staleness of temperature data polled by homelab servers, and I break the work into small steps, starting with replicating the current text-file behaviour in Node behind NGINX...
I found the ZTM webdev course was skipping ahead too quickly and decided it needed supplementing. For CSS, I’ve chosen a YouTube series by Dave Gray as the additional material...
Prompted by a Fireside Swift episode on SOLID principles and the arrival of Core Data in the 100 Days of SwiftUI course, I reflect on when architecture should enter an iOS developer’s toolkit. Drawing on a long-standing habit of wrapping external dependencies for easy replacement, I conclude that scalable code suits real apps but not learning—which is likely why Paul Hudson defers architecture until later in the course...
While building a calculator-style answer keypad for a multiplication tables practice app, I follow an iOS Academy video that recreates the iOS Calculator in SwiftUI and enjoy spotting edge cases the tutorial’s quick implementation leaves unhandled. I also reflect on copying existing Apple apps as a way to skip design work, and on wanting to improve at design over time...
I explain how to bring a feature branch’s changes back into the main branch, comparing merge, squash merge, and rebase with example commit histories. I close with a note on why rebasing commits that have been pushed to a shared repository is considered bad practice. Branching per feature is part of my effort to become more competent with git...
I briefly recommend Afraz Siddiqui’s iOS Academy YouTube channel, which features iOS development tutorials, including shorter focused videos such as one covering the new SwiftUI chart views...
Working through Day 26 of 100 Days of Swift, I watch an iOS Academy video on dates, calendars, and date components. My main observation is how long UIKit and storyboard setup takes before any useful code gets written, prompting my appreciation for SwiftUI and Swift Playgrounds as learning tools...
A SwiftUI tutorial video on @ObservedObject versus @StateObject turns out to be outdated, referencing older APIs like @ObjectBinding and Combine. The experience prompts me to reflect on how technical content should signal its age, such as through version tags, so future readers can judge whether it’s still relevant...
My HTML experience ends in 1996, before CSS existed, so I am catching up on the basics. I share and recommend a Tech With Tim video introducing CSS for non-web developers, embedded in the post...
A short post recommending iOS Academy’s brief video tutorials on Swift iOS programming, with an embedded example covering Grid Views. I reflect on how today’s freely shared Swift and iOS learning material differs from the magazines and thick books I relied on when learning to program before the internet...
After watching part of a video by Emmanuel Okwara, I explain my new understanding of how MVVM differs from MVC: in MVVM the ViewModel doesn’t manipulate the View directly, it just broadcasts changes and lets the View update itself, which fits SwiftUI’s declarative style. I raise an open question about what constitutes a View in MVVM and plan to build a minimal MVVM app as a practice project...
I set up Git and GitHub for the first time by following a video tutorial, working on a Mac. I cover the basic workflow of cloning, staging, committing, and pushing, along with minor troubleshooting around the default branch name, unset git config, and a first encounter with Vim. Generating an SSH key was the only real complexity...
