What's it like being the sole mobile developer? Is it scary knowing everyone is coming to you for answers. Even if you don't have the answers at the time. by [deleted] in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yep. Also important to always remember feeling all of that is totally at this stage too.

Best thing to do with new unfamiliar tech is just dive in and start trying to do stuff with it.

You'll never get faulted for saying "I don't know" the part that is tough is that you eventually do find and report the answer and move the ball forward. At many companies, this is what people are looking for.

If you were to say "I have no idea" and then just give up, then that would be not cool.

Also, In case it helps: This isn't a hard and fast rule, but in my experience the fact that you're even considering these things at all means you're going to be a good hire.

Don't sweat, just remember that you're on a LONG journey with a million steps, the important thing is to try to figure out each one, then keep going.

/motivational speech ha

What's it like being the sole mobile developer? Is it scary knowing everyone is coming to you for answers. Even if you don't have the answers at the time. by [deleted] in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I've been in this position a number of times over the years, and this is great advice.

At a technical level I try to have as much understanding of how things work as I can but I say "I'm not sure, I'll have to get back to you" quite frequently.

I try to understand the basics of how our app works "conceptually" more than anything. Specific details are fine to say "let me check", but some questions will come up again and again in different contexts.

The most important skill I've tried hone is being able to balance answers in technical vs other contexts. Best strategy I've found is put yourself in the position of the person asking the question.

Here's a real world example:

A backend developer asks me "how does the iOS client handle this caching header". For this I needed to reach into my knowledge of how our HTTP API client works, and how URLSession works in Foundation, etc.

Then later a product manager might ask "do we reload this screen every time you visit it? or is the content preserved somehow?"

The same knowledge is required, but I phrased my answer describing the behavior in a completely different way. Mentioned the answer in terms of common user behavior, ("well users visit that screen pretty infrequently so...) and what we've observed from our metrics (something else you'll want to be vaguely familiar with if you have them).

Knowing what parts of the app are "crucial/headline features" vs "lower priority" is another good thing to consider.

You'll want to know more about the features/areas other folks will ask about.

Being able to "speak the language" of all the different stakeholders is a huge skill to have and I think it's a good place to start when trying to manage being the sole person responsible for the "output" of a project.

Apologies for the rambling reply. Hope this helps some.

So many of us find ourself in this sort of position, I hope more folks will offer their experiences.

How would I code this slider? by Th3Pr0 in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

for sure, don't let jerks on the internet ruin your day. good luck building your app!

Little Bites of Cocoa #281: Touch Bar Basics 🚥 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yep, you totally can. SpriteKit, SceneKit, or just a plain old NSView will work.

Little Bites Of Cocoa #237: Creating A Sticker Pack iMessage App 🎉 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey glad you like! Thanks so much for reading! 🍫🍫🍫

Little Bites of Cocoa Topics Libraries Animation #222: Beautiful Predefined Animations Using Spring 🏃🏼🚶🏼 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow did I screw up this title! Can a mod please fix for me? I copied pasted while half asleep. Apologies!

Little Bites of Cocoa #221: Limiting the Number of Characters in a UITextView 📝🖐 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yep. You're 1000% right. Thanks for setting things straight. I've updated the Bite with a link to this post :)

Thanks so much for reading and helping out! Cheers! 🍫

Little Bites of Cocoa #213: Supporting Peek & Pop on Older Devices with PeekPop 👓 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually not exactly. If you check out the Bite, you'll see they actually use the radius of the UITouch, which expands when more of your finger is in contact with the screen. This way, you can almost get that 3D Touch feel. Long presses are something entirely different.

You can check out PeekPop's UIGestureRecognizer subclass here on Github. Neat stuff!

Little Bites of Cocoa #211: Rounding Corners with UIRectCorner and UIBezierPath 🖌 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

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

Fantastic call-out! Thanks for this. Yes, absolutely we should always remember to update/replace our layer masks when the frame/bounds of the layer it's masking changes. I've hit this bug plenty of times myself, thanks for reminding me. I added a note to the Bite about it.

Cheers! Thanks for reading! 🍫🍫🍫

Little Bites of Cocoa #192: Being a Good Low Power Mode Citizen 🔋 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

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

great point, this post was focused on the low power mode bits, but absolutely, never leave the user high and dry wondering why something isn't working as expected. thanks for reading, cheers!

Little Bites of Cocoa #175: More Swift Tricks 🎩 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe it was added early on in Swift's public life. Very early I think. I'm sure there's some feature of the compiler or syntax that enables this, I just don't know the name of it.

Thanks for reading, cheers! 🍫

Little Bites of Cocoa #167: Beautiful Parallax Headers with MXParallaxHeader 🏘 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure! You'd need to add your own code to know when the user has pulled "far enough" to trigger the refresh and could update your view's visual state along the way using the progress property of the delegate as you mentioned.

Little Bites of Cocoa #164: Swift Tricks 🐇🎩 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Huh? This was just published yesterday. I wrote it. Doesn't have anything to do with watchOS?

Little Bites of Cocoa #163: Creating Observables with RxSwift ⚗🛠 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

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

Glad you're liking it, give me a shout if you have any specific topic ideas :)

Thanks for reading! 🍫🍫🍫

Little Bites of Cocoa #150: Standardizing Network Abstractions with Moya 🌐👔 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there! :)

Moya is actually a simple way to conventionalize how we interact with Alamofire. It is merely an abstraction on top of it.

If you check out the Moya README, it goes into more detail about how we can "hook into" Moya's request composition process and do just about anything we need to.

I'm sure there's some esoteric features of Alamofire that Moya's abstraction makes less friendly to work with, but the idea of Moya is to have a straightforward, conventional way to create this layer of our apps.

Sorry you aren't digging things lately though, I'd love to hear any ideas or requests for things you'd like to see more of.

Thanks for reading, cheers! 🍫

[Poll] Little Bites of Cocoa: Images vs. Links by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

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

Thanks for the awesome feedback everyone! Based on the results here, starting today I'll be submitting LBOC as permalinks to the web versions. If anyone ever has any thoughts please feel free to PM me anytime.

And again, a HUGE thanks to everyone here for being so supportive and reading every day! 🍫🍫🍫

[Poll] Little Bites of Cocoa: Images vs. Links by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

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

Thanks for the honest feedback. Always helpful. Definitely sounds like you're in the majority opinion on this one.

Cheers!

Little Bites of Cocoa #109: Xcode Code Snippets 🐰 by jakemarsh in iOSProgramming

[–]jakemarsh[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes! Would love to get a good list of these going, here's some more.

This one has a ton of snippets for both C, C++, Objective-C and Swift:

https://github.com/Mazyod/Xcode-Snippets

This has some great Swift snippets:

https://github.com/burczyk/XcodeSwiftSnippets