zacharyc

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 The amount of changes in Swift has caused a lot of online code to be out of date, and hard to parse.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’m pretty obsessed with the notion of a second brain. I’m super into carrying a notebook and have carried pocket notebooks since 2008. I’m on #48 in my series of notebooks, which is pretty bad, but crazy when you think how long I’ve been carrying them. The thought that my brain is porous and stuff slips through my mental grasps is pretty upsetting. Writing it down saves it in a way that I can return and look at it again in the future. ...

This site is currently hosted on a WordPress backend. I’ve been using wordpress for hosting many of my sites since around 2005. I’ve used several different providers and hosted a bunch of sites that are around and some that have gone away. WordPress has been a consistent tool across that process. The problem: WordPress is heavy handed. It has morphed from a blogging platform to a full Content Management System (CMS). It has pluggins and extensions for pretty much everything. You can do so much with a wordpress site, but there in lies the problem. WordPress does everything, which means it is complicateed. Modifying and extending wordpress takes a bit of knowledge and as the system grows so does knowledge required to modify and work with it. ...

I’m in California for a quick minute. Despite there being a 6+ level earthquake here yesterday, I didn’t feel anything. It’s funny, but having lived here for 12+ years of my life, the most powerful earthquake I felt was in Newport, RI. One of the things I feel about being back in California, the beer is different. There is such a thing as New England IPA, but that isn’t really the difference. Beer just feels different out here. We have some specific breweries like Seirra Nevada, Firestone Walker, 21st Ammendment, Anchor, Lagunitas, Russian River, Modern Times, Fort Point, and Anderson Valley just to name a few. But beyond just the breweries is the availability of the beer. You can get it anywhere. Convience store, Grocery Store, Package Store, you name it. Some bars even let you buy beer to go. ...

I’ve been working on building styles and themes. Learning about fonts and typography and styles. Contemplating going back and getting a design degree. The more though I devote to going back the more I ask the question, why? What do I want to do with this degree that I can’t do on my own. The answer is simple, there is a ton I want to learn about illustration and design. There is artwork I want to make. Ideas that I’d like to realize. The rub is that I don’t have to go to school to learn to make these things. I can start with the knowledge and abilities I currently have. I can learn the skills along the way. ...