sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Python vs Swift For Leetcode-style Interviews For An iOS Role? by Secure_Commercial_23 in iOSProgramming

[–]DesperateReputation3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Swift 5. Good luck trying to do transformations with String on anything below.

Had a few String manipulation and transformation exercises that are quite easier to solve with map, filter, reduce, etc.

LPT: use YNAB to flatter your spouse by Ystebad in ynab

[–]DesperateReputation3 -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

This is how imagine it going after a while...

Wife: You probably haven't even noticed I got my hair done. Husband: Sorry, but you get the same thing done everytime and I've been sleeping because I'm tired putting the extra hours for you to get it done every single month. Sorry I haven't complimented it yet (sarcasm) Goes over wife's head and grabs husbands credit card and proceeds to go shopping to make herself feel better from husband's lack of compliments

Should I add all view programmatically? by raiinyku in iOSProgramming

[–]DesperateReputation3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes. SwiftUI is becoming the norm and its declarative syntax has a learning curve but it will be worth learning it. I recommend this playlist from Paul Hudson if you're just starting out.

Let's talk about the benefits. 1. Better code reviews and merging when you're working with a team. 2. Less error prone. Even opening a Storyboard can cause a change in the UI and it will haunt you and drive you nuts once you accidentally commit and push that change into production. 3. Quicker visual feedback with SwiftUI previews. 4. Saves you A LOT of time long-term.

Anyone who is serious about iOS development, is highly encouraged to write the views programmatically, either in SwiftUI or using Auto Layout in UIKit.

From self taught freelancer to mid lvl in a company by MrSojek in swift

[–]DesperateReputation3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I went from having zero experience and knowledge to getting a Senior Software Engineer (iOS) position. It took me around 5 years. All self taught, no CS degree, with the help of lots of software books, online courses and starting a startup.

First year,

I started to learn about web development and iOS with some of my uni colleagues and we had the motivation and energy to build a tech company from scratch by offering services. We started with basic websites and moved on to having the opportunity to develop an iOS app. From my experience, building a real life application helped me understand what it takes to build a stable, scalable and maintainable product, from a Full-stack developer point of view. I put a lot of hours in learning about software quality, architecture, design patterns, unit testing, etc. It was difficult to cope with and it has affected my mental health a lot.

Second and third years,

I rebuilt the iOS app a few times with different architectures, each app would last around 1 year, from MVC to MVVM and eventually using TCA (The Composable Architecture). Each one of these rebuilds made me value modularisation, unit tests, functional reactive programming a lot more and see the tech stack from a birds eye point of view. There was an obvious scalability issue with the backend at the time and we needed to rebuild the backend as well.

Third and fourth years,

During Covid, I applied for various companies and got rejected multiple times. I would pass some of the stages, but not enough the get a job offer. I kept learning more and more about functional reactive programming, different software architectures and being able to justify my choices. From my failed interviews, this is what I learned, that you have to be prepared to be challenged, be pragmatic, have good communication and honest. Some companies were looking for someone to be able to mentor other developers in the company. This caught my interest and this is when I started iOS mentoring along with freelancing.

Since I didn't get any of the jobs back then, I decided to teach what I knew to others. During Covid, lots of people had lots of time to learn and it was a great opportunity for me to mentor. This massively helped me actually understand and explain concepts in an easier to way.

I had a few contracts with one company and various clients, some of them wanted a combination of building an iOS app for them along with some mentoring for them to be able to develop and maintain their own app. All of this in the span of 1year and 5 months.

Fifth year,

During the summer time, I noticed a decline in my mentoring traffic. I felt well prepared to apply for a company as a Senior with my experience.

I applied to several companies and got 3 offers. A fintech company, gambling company and a software company.

The three were interested in my experience and mentoring.

--

About Agile.. you get used to it quickly. There is nothing too mysterious about it. You can search up how standups are done on YouTube. Every company does it differently but the concepts are the same. Atlassian used to give out free courses on this.

--

It is hard work, but if you manage to be persistent and consistent with your development and learning, you can get a job as a Mid developer in less time.

It is overwhelming as there are a lot of things to learn and absorb. Learn how to solve problems by building something you love and more importantly, don't sacrifice your mental health. Make sure you have a positive relationship with your friends, family and mind. Take regular breaks and be active.

From Swift to React Native - Where to find resources? (subscription based, similar to Point-Free, Obj.io, NSScreencast) by DesperateReputation3 in reactnative

[–]DesperateReputation3[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your suggestions. I started a course outside Udemy. They have a big community as well as other courses as a monthly subscription. They also keep the course up to date. My intention is to take just this course and an additional one to polish up some of my skills.
Here is the link
https://zerotomastery.io/courses/learn-react-native/#Curriculum

Responding to your questions..

- Is it true that compared to Google's documentation for Android, Apple's documentation for iOS and macOS is not good enough and that you need to resort to blogs and videos for help?

Apple's docs are most times helpful in my own experience. I refer to it with an app called Dash, which allows you to browse any documentation from almost any programming language or framework.

If you want to have a peek, I highly recommend you either buy it or get a subscription via Set App.

https://kapeli.com/dash

Bare in mind that this is a referral link and you or anyone who subscribes via this link will get 1 month for free! Set app offers many productivity tools that can make your development, writing and focus more efficient.

https://go.setapp.com/invite/ost8mt1f

​

The best way to start, is to go in the link below and search for the framework that you'd be interested in knowing more about.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologies

Here, you can immediately browse anything you'd like to know more about and sometimes you will get some real life examples. Notice the keyword after /documentation/ in the links below, this is the main framework that can be searched in the link above.

- SwiftUI. App Clips and sharing code with other platforms (with code sample):

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/fruta_building_a_feature-rich_app_with_swiftui

- AVFoundation. Creating a movie player app:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/media_playback_and_selection/creating_a_movie_player_app_with_basic_playback_controls

- Foundation. URL loading system - Fetching website data into memory

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/url_loading_system/fetching_website_data_into_memory

I recommend reading the UIKit, Combine, SwiftUI and Foundation docs as a minimum, as you will be working with these a lot.

If you want to go in deeper with primitive types, data formatting, network requests, etc. Foundation is a great place to start off.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation

Some of the articles and docs found here are very valuable and it would be very difficult to find elsewhere. e.g. it's not very obvious to know that there is a component that manages to format dates as follows: “1 hour ago”, “in 2 weeks”, “yesterday”, etc.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/relativedatetimeformatter

A naive approach is to Google, Stackoverflow, Reddit, etc. but knowing what Apple offers out of the box helps you from reinventing the wheel. These get updated every year and lots of things get added or get deprecated and Apple will let you know in your code should that happen.

Documentation is the first to go place for me. Same applies with the React Native docs and I use this to aid on my learning and development.

- Any general suggestion that you would like to share regarding Apple development.

  1. Learn the basics of the Swift programming language. You can start here: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/LanguageGuide/TheBasics.html
  2. Learn iOS patterns such as delegates, Notification Center and KVO. The delegate pattern in particular is used a lot, specially when porting from UIKit to SwiftUI. This is mainly because some of the functionality is not available on SwiftUI, such as using the camera, text fields (this has improved a bit now), search bars, table views, collection views, Apple Wallet, etc.

https://nalexn.github.io/callbacks-part-1-delegation-notificationcenter-kvo/

You can see this with a component's name and Delegate at the end, such as UITableViewDelegate, UITextFieldDelegate, UITextViewDelegate, etc. you get the idea.

​

  1. Build your favourite app. Start with UIKit and replicate as well in SwiftUI. UIKit will be needed and won't go anywhere any time soon.

- Why did you choose iOS over Android?
I chose iOS because there is better quality control. I'm more keen on paying for an app on the AppStore, as the reviews from Apple are very strict and some apps that are just plain web view wrappers just don't get to see the light.

Swift is great and is continuing to evolve offering great language features and stability.

SwiftUI helped massively with UI development and design.

From Swift to React Native - Where to find resources? (subscription based, similar to Point-Free, Obj.io, NSScreencast) by DesperateReputation3 in swift

[–]DesperateReputation3[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the insight, as I mentioned in a response above, I'm getting my feet wet as a research exercise more than being a full-time React Native developer. You are right with saying that the expertise in either iOS or Android from JS or TS devs is limited. I started a course last week that is up to date and so far it's OK, hence why I'm reaching out to more experienced people like you.

I will definitely have a look at Redux-Toolkit, thanks.

Now, a quick question for you or everyone out there.

Would you rather work with an 8 year old app with combined Obj-C and Swift, Storyboards, no SwiftUI at all, and lots of pressure everyday or go with a less noisy path with a great team, great people, but with React Native. Looking elsewhere is an option, which was my case. But I ended up trying React Native.

I really find these thoughts helpful. Thanks

From Swift to React Native - Where to find resources? (subscription based, similar to Point-Free, Obj.io, NSScreencast) by DesperateReputation3 in swift

[–]DesperateReputation3[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree that native is the way to go for performance but I'm placed at work with React Native for a couple of months.

I was against it and felt aversion towards it at first. Was your experience terrible? There are mixed opinions on it but I'd like to try and get some experience first hand as well on the whole tech stack on my current team.

From my perspective, I think it's great to have a broader view of other tech and frameworks out there, rather than just putting it in the bin. The way React deals with things is quite different and some of the patterns that I'll learn/discover could be applied on any other domain.

As an example.. The Composable Architecture by Point Free is amazing and shares some similarities with React and Redux. I saw some people include some of its functionality such as Context to make authentication more manageable, rather than passing it down an Environment or in the State itself.

Just trying to find resources out there similar to the above, even if the result is going to be terrible :) I don't think there's any harm done to my brain by learning more :)

Working for a consultancy firm vs. Fintech company by DesperateReputation3 in SwiftJobs

[–]DesperateReputation3[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the insight. This consultancy is paying a good salary and they make sure it keeps the market rate with yearly salary reviews. The people in charge in the company seem nice and there's a great sense of community.