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Here are some of the main advantages I see to doing things in a functional way: Less code – writing simple, small functions allows you to reuse them in many different places by giving you the flexibility to compose and combine them in any way you can think of. This leads to fewer levels of… Continue reading Swift/Kotlin Functional Programming: Tips and Tricks

At I/O a few years ago, Google announced Instant Apps, an innovation that promises to be good for users and app developers alike. Instant Apps allow visitors to your Play Store listing to try before they buy – in one tap they're able to quickly download a demo version of your app and see how… Continue reading Android Instant Apps – tips and tricks

Today I'd like to talk about how I've set up my apartment's homegrown, multi-room, auto synced speaker system. When I discovered Sonos a few years ago, I was amazed at it's multi-room sound syncing speakers... I was also disappointed by the cost. So, I set out to build (or, at least, assemble) my own system… Continue reading Smart Apartment Speaker System Setup

Originally, UITableViews were envisioned to hold homogenous data. Something like this: Every cell was the same type, just with different data backing it. And so the UITableView API was designed with that in mind. In your controller you'd register a cell type, and in the data source you'd set the data on that cell. Easy.… Continue reading More flexible UITableViews

A student recently asked me how to come up with ideas for new products... all the good ideas, it seemed to them, were already taken. I realized from talking to this student that a lot of people looking to be entrepreneurs think you have to come up with something new in order to be successful. But… Continue reading Don’t make something “new,” make something better

Those effin little lines are called 'separators' (you can adjust their insets over in the sidebar) and UITableViews add them whenever the list on the screen is too short to fill up all of it. It's annoying. The way you get rid of them is by adding an empty view as the footer of the… Continue reading UITableViews: removing those effin little lines

Every year, I do a retrospective in which I review the past year. Up until this year, I've kept those retrospectives private, for many reasons: I'm a fairly private person (though this year I've tried to change that a bit). I've been afraid I didn't measure up. I've been afraid that things I think might… Continue reading 2018 Retrospective

As someone who's worked from home for years, I've been asked about this a lot. How do I concentrate when I'm at home? How do I get things done? What keeps me from playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time all day? I think people ask me this because they think about how they behave at home… Continue reading Staying motivated while working from home

Ugh, Facebook, amiright? You've probably seen the news about how awful FB is about privacy, and how they've been sucking up all the info they can squeeze out of you and giving it to advertisers and other billion dollar companies. How can you mitigate this? You may be thinking it's too late, or that what… Continue reading Protecting yourself from Facebook