3 May 2025 No, the Optional type in Swift, denoted by a question mark ?, is not harmful when used properly. Optional is, however, easy to misunderstand and mis-apply, particularly for people new to programming, or new to Swift and arriving from other languages. I think the question mark syntax scares people by connoting the unknown and ominous. Many people associate that question mark with the big red compilation errors they get when they first start programming in Swift. (Read...)

30 Apr 2023 If you work on codebases any larger than a few lines, at some point you will have to deal with data stored in some sort of document. Inevitably, this type will change, and you’ll need to add, remove, and rearrange fields—while still needing to retain compatibility with stored documents in earlier versions of the format. This is a problem I’ve recently encountered on my side project, Unspool. Even though I’m the only person ever to have used the app, I still found myself iterating on the data structure to make more logical sense—leading to decoding errors and un-openable documents, along with lots of boilerplate that wouldn’t have been sustainable in the long run. (Read...)

29 Mar 2023 I am pleased to announce the side project I’ve been working on for the past 3 months, and hope to release to the public some time this year. It’s called Unspool, and it exists because I’ve recently got back into film photography and wanted a metadata tagging app that doesn’t make me want to throw things. I intend to write a developer blog on my experiences building Unspool at least once a month, to give me accountability to: (Read...)

27 Apr 2021 On 3rd March, Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp (a company that runs an online project management tool and Hey, a privacy-focused email service) tweeted: Company culture is not written down, it’s acted out. A company’s culture is a 50-day moving average of how it is, not how it thinks it is, wants to be, or was supposed to be. Fifty-five short days later, on 26th April, he would publish a long and baffling blog post entitled “Changes at Basecamp. (Read...)

27 Mar 2021 In 2014, a Tumblr post featuring an implausible anecdote involving a homeless man dancing to Gangnam Style and a miserly rich man being shamed in front of a crowd of applauding strangers was posted to Reddit, where it was roundly mocked. Over the years, Oppa Homeless Style, as it became known, became an infamous part of the ‘Tumblr canon,’ a widely-acknowledged example of the absurdity of a platform at the time famed for hosting naïve teens and ‘social justice warriors’ (a term used by people who think opposing social injustice and oppression is a bad thing, for some reason. (Read...)

12 Oct 2019 Here are three disturbing ideas: There is more infrastructure in the world than you think; The infrastructure you rely on is more vulnerable than you think; The people in charge of managing that infrastructure either don’t realise that it’s infrastructure, or don’t care. What do I mean by ‘infrastructure’? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: infrastructure (noun) The basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. (Read...)

6 Jul 2019 Today is Pride in London. Many tech firms have been festooned in rainbow bunting for the last week, and some app developers have even changed their apps’ icons to suggest solidarity with LGBTQ+ people. It’s important to remember that Pride is, fundamentally, a protest. This year marks 50 years since the Stonewall Riots, when the queer community in New York City rose up against the police’s violent oppression—an uprising led by drag queens and queer people of colour. (Read...)