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On several occasions I've worked with server devs who build endpoints for image uploading (eg user profile pictures, image posting, etc.) that expect the data in multipart format. As someone who mostly uses a thin wrapper over URLSession for my networking, this can be... frustrating. There's no simple way to just tell URLSession that the… Continue reading Easy Multipart Uploads in Swift

I've become quite the functional programming advocate, but one difficulty I often face is the prevalence of Object Oriented code throughout the iOS platform, and perhaps most obviously in UIKit (I'm not going to talk about SwiftUI here – it's still too new for production in my opinion, though of course I'm looking forward to… Continue reading Making UIKit Functional-Programming Friendly

Imagine, for a moment, that you're on top of a hundred story tall sky-scraper standing in front of a tightrope that goes a 50 feet across to another hundred story tall sky-scraper. Suppose you knew that 90% of people who attempt to cross this tightrope fall off of it (there's no net, no balance bar,… Continue reading Why Socialism Is Better for Entrepreneurs

I don't know about you, but I often find myself casting objects in Swift. This used to involve writing code like this: if let myDataSource = tableView.dataSource as? MyDataSource { doSomething(to: myDataSource) } This is especially annoying when I'm using a functional programming style, as that entails writing a lot of functions, and casting parameters… Continue reading Swift Custom Operator Spotlight: Optional Casting

How often have you written code like this: var object: MyObject? ... if let unwrapped = object { doSomething(with: unwrapped) } Or, worse, in order to minimize indentation or because you're relying on a library you don't control, how often have you written a function like this: func optionalDoSomething(with myObject: MyObject?) { if let unwrapped… Continue reading Swift Custom Operator Spotlight: Optional Unwrapping

Operators are just a special type of function that can help make your code easier to read. Operators you might be familiar with include +, -, and even ??. They come in three flavors: prefix, infix, and postfix, depending on where you put them with respect to their arguments: Prefix operators go before their (only)… Continue reading Quick Swift: Operators

Here's what I want in a networking layer: Should be easy to switch between different hosts and API versions while keeping all the endpoints the sameShould be possible to separate the logic for setting up a network call and firing itShould be easy to mock server responsesShould be easy to separate concerns when handling responsesShould… Continue reading What makes a good network layer

Slippers is not a networking library. It won't make server calls for you (I have other libraries for networking). What it will do, however, is make it easy for you to trigger network calls when you need to. It does this by providing some protocols and simple implementations thereof to control common network tasks like… Continue reading Slippers: a library for paging, refreshing, and JSON

There are three things you generally want to do with Combine: publish values, manipulate those values, and receive those values elsewhere. Let's see how we can do each of those. Publishing Values Values are published with, predictably, Publishers. The most common way I see this happen is through @Published fields. So, for instance: class App… Continue reading Quick Swift: Combine (Just the Basics)