Is coding a science or an art?

— Matthew Garlington (@dejadu13) May 21, 2022

I've seen many versions of this question posed over the years, and to Matthew's credit it's a very good question. As you can see in the replies people translate their lived experience writing code and answer art or science based on however they conceptualize and practice programming. A few years ago MIT conducted a study that concluded "reading computer code is not the same as reading language", answering the question of whether coding is art or science with a rigorously documented "both". While I'm hard-pressed to argue with science, I'd like to provide a different answer, one that's a little more conceptual. Continue Reading →

The work of writing maintainable code is an ongoing endeavor and some of my favorite problems to solve are ones that build maintainable systems. Maintainable systems are ones you can learn once, easily manipulate, and ideally take from project to project. My favorite part of building maintainable systems is that it minimizes the amount of work I need to do when starting a new project, and like it is for many programmers hitting ⌘ + ⇪ + N to start a new project is one of the most satisfying feelings in the world for me. Continue Reading →

GraphQL has been on my list of technologies to learn for a few months now, and last week I came across Majid Jabrayilov's post, feeling pretty excited to tackle the subject. The post was very good, but it didn't answer the one question I've had as I've gone through numerous exercises to understand GraphQL, how do I make GraphQL requests without a library? Continue Reading →

I've been thinking about privacy lately. No, not online privacy, but about how APIs can balance exposing the right amount of implementation details without revealing too much.

I'll walk through a task I find myself doing often when building iOS apps, creating a view controller with header view, and four different ways to go about it. Continue Reading →

If you haven't checked out Part I, I recommend reading it because if you don't, none of writing below will make sense! Continue Reading →

As iOS developers, a lot of our work involves taking models from a server, and transforming them to be displayed on an iPhone or iPad. This sounds like a job for some declarative architecture. 🤔 Continue Reading →