Reaching milestones

It took me a long time, but I finally published some of the posts I had planned for my Codable series. I haven’t published everything I have planned, but the first four posts are out there and I’m planning to publish a fifth post today. For a full overview of all of my content on Codable, you can take a look at the Codable category page on my website. I’m excited about this series, and I’m looking forward to publishing more posts in the near future!

Finishing and publishing these first four posts really gave me a much needed boost. It feels really good to complete something and share it with the world. It’s funny how some achievement can really spark a whole new fire of motivation to work on other things as well. After publishing my Codable series I made same amazing progress on next week’s Swift Heroes talk and I’m close to wrapping up the design of my slides. (I’ll probably be tweaking until the last possible second but they’re in a really good spot right now)

Overall, I think it’s good to celebrate little milestones and push yourself a little to reach them every once in a while. Of course, you don’t want to be pushing yourself all the time and sometimes you might need to adjust your milestones a little to make them easier to reach. That doesn’t mean you should drop your original goal, it just means that you introduce an extra stepping stone for yourself to make it easier to reach your goal.

My initial goal was to write and publish eight posts on Codable all at once and I was struggling to find the time, motivation, and energy to work on them. By deciding that I’d publish the four posts I had almost done first, and then add the other posts later, I was able to get something done and reach a milestone. And now I’m super excited to work on the remaining posts and publish them as I see fit.

If you’re struggling to get something done, finished, or shipped, see if you can split your task or goal up into smaller tasks or milestones. It’ll feel good to cross them of your list and maybe it sparks a new motivational fire like it did for me!

Cheers,
Donny

Workshop: Using Core Data in a modern SwiftUI application

In this 4-hour workshop organized by Jeroen Leenarts (AppForce1) and me, you will build a simple app that features everything you might need in a moderately complex application. We'll start by adding Core Data to an app and setting up a very simple form to add data to a store. After that, we'll set up a list in SwiftUI to display data. Next, we'll add an edit screen. The next steps will be to build a filter screen, and a simple data importer. You’ll learn bits and pieces of Combine along the way too, so it’ll be a content-packed workshop for sure!

The workshop will be hosted on two dates:

• April 22nd 09:00 AM - 01:00 PM Pacific Time
• April 29th 13:00 - 17:00 Central European Summer Time

Hope to see you there!

Practical Core Data

Practical Core Data helps you learn Apple's Core Data framework without requiring any prior knowledge. You'll learn how to integrate Core Data in UIKit and SwiftUI applications. The book also covers data modeling, synchronizing your store with a custom backend or CloudKit, profiling and improving performance in a Core Data app, and using Core Data in unit tests.

By the end of the book, you'll know exactly how you can start using Core Data in modern applications.

Practical Combine

Practical Combine is a book that will help you learn Combine from scratch. You will learn about all aspects of Combine in a natural flow where you're eased into functional reactive programming with simple examples, and the difficulty gradually builds up to complicated integrations in later chapters.

🎶 Currently on repeat 🎶

If you follow me on Twitter you probably know that I play guitar. I'm a huge music lover and want to share this with you. In this section I will share a new album that I've been enjoying a lot every week.

Senses Fail - If There is Light, It Will Find You It’s a slightly older album and I don’t listen to it a lot, but every time I do I enjoy it a ton. Give it a try, you might like it too! Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Music

Other content that I really want to share with you

An introduction to working with Codable in Swift

It’s been a while since I had one of my own posts to share! This post is part of my series on Codable and it’s an introduction to the topic. From here you’ll be able to branch out to other posts in the series, and of course you can always go to the Codable category page to see everything I’ve published about Codable so far.

An article by Donny Wals

Create Publishers for HealthKit

Combine is an incredibly fun and powerful framework to work with. It’s really well suited to replace a lot of our completion closure based APIs. Unfortunately, not all of Apple’s components have received the same Combine support that URLSession and NotificationCenter have. Fortunately, you can make closure based APIs reactive by yourself using Combine’s Future, and Deferred. Isa Lima does a fantastic job of demonstrating this in combination with HealthKit. If you’re interested in Combine with HealthKit, or if you want to learn how you can wrap existing work that normally uses completion closures in a Combine layer, this post is an absolute must-read.

An article by Isa Lima