Programming

Life is full of things to catalog, especially for someone like me. Someone who loves organization in data and looking for patterns. Someone who is convinced that the random things in my life will probably come together someday like the unification theory. But how? How does one sort, contain, and search data? The first step is recording the data. There are many ways to do this. Databases have traditionally been a great way. NoSQL databases with their loose document format are interesting. The second brain methodology uses documents or notes to contain the same thing. And while these documents can be formatted in things like Markdown and have front matter for categorization, much of the data is contained in the raw text which means a human has to parse and read it. ...

For many years of my life I was an iOS Programmer. I worked in Objective-C, but Swift came out while I was working transitioning out of that area. Swift has always been a bit confusing for me, but I have a new complaint today. The amount of changes in Swift has caused a lot of online code to be out of date, and hard to parse. The problem. I’m looking at my address book and I want to iterate through my contacts. I started by looking at ABAddressBook, but it turns out that technology has been depricated. Then I started looking at CNContactStore which is the new hotness. There are several fun methods on that object including unifiedMeContactWithKeys which is pretty cool. It only returns my contact, not all contacts, but at least I was able to get it work. There is a similar function called ...

I work for Airkit. I’m technically a Solutions Engineer but have done a bunch of building and education for the product as well. While the company has a bunch of documentation about how to use each tool, I figured I’d write quickly about how I build an Airkit App, what some of my practices are, and generally how I go about things. Start with the UI My first big tip is to start by creating the UI. One of the greatest things about Airkit is its ability to rapidly prototype interaction with your end users. Create the app quickly and show it to users. Often there are use cases that are missed when initially thinking about a project and this rapid prototyping brings them out. ...

What some of you may not know is that much of the time at Salesforce was spent in the world of electronic mail (or email for short). Email is interesting and relevant today because almost everyone has it and communicates with it. It is an official form of communication. What you may not understand is that the world of email is rather confusing. Basically, the email that comes over the wire is presented to you by your email client and where email gets very confusing is that there are a million different email clients. You probably use more than one. If you look at your email on a mobile device and on a computer that is two different clients. Then when you think about 3rd party clients and even GMail which renders in a browser, you have a client which is actually a client within a browser. ...

This post was pulled from my TLog project, but it felt relevant enough to make it to this blog as well. Some interesting stuff about reading and writing code. I’m trying the Nitro Cold Brew coffee from Stumptown that they just started carrying at Planet Granite. It is tasty, but I like the regular cold brew better and will be sticking to that in the future. Still, I do love coffee. ...