Balancing priorities

Over the past two years or so, I have achieved and done a lot. I’ve written a lot of posts for my blog, I published two books, hosted several workshops, and I’ve delivered many talks for conferences and meetups. All of this is done next to my regular day job.

A lot of times I’m asked the question “how?”. How can I do all this while also having a full time job that takes most of my time. And the honest answer is “I’m not sure”.

Whenever I do something I try and make sure I strike a healthy balance between having fun with something and working hard. Any time I set my mind to doing something, it’s always fun in the beginning. Persevering and finishing things takes hard work and discipline, and that’s perfectly fine.

Things get hairy whenever working on things is purely driven by discipline. Of course, it’s fine to push yourself a little every once in a while. But other times, it’s important to rebalance your priorities.

Rebalancing priorities is the entire reason I haven’t published blog posts in about two months already, and it’s why I didn’t send out a newsletter last week.

Fear not, I’m not going to stop doing either of those things. Instead, I’m going to continue doing what I have done for a while now. I just do what I can, when I can. And when something else takes up all of my focus and energy, or if I need a break, the newsletter or my blog might have to wait a little.

Publishing content consistently has been a fantastic way for me to grow an audience, and it’s been incredibly fun to share something new every week for such a long time. And for the longest time I told myself that once I finish my series on Codable, I’ll go back to publishing weekly. Unfortunately, I still haven’t finished the series.

I’m slowly working on it but I’m struggling a little to find the time, motivation, and focus to push through and finish it. I promise I’ll release the series soon-ish, but I won’t release it until it’s ready.

Balancing our priorities isn’t always easy, and I think I could probably do a much better job of balancing mine. The one thing I think I’m learning right now is that it’s good to take care of myself and not let the desire to write, create, publish, and share push me too hard.

With that, I’d like to pass the question off to you. How do you balance your priorities? And what’s the most important thing to keep in mind if you do?

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.

Post Malone - Hollywood's Bleeding I don’t listen to Post Malone often. But everytime I do I’m reminded of what a fantastic artist he is. That’s why he deserves to be in this week’s On Repeat section. Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Music

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FuzzyFind

You might know Tomás Ruiz-López as the creator of Bow. A functional programming library for Swift. Recently, he released a new project that helps you perform fuzzy matching on strings in Swift. I haven’t used this library yet, but it looks really promising. Especially considering Tomás’ track record with Bow.

An article by Tomás Ruiz-López

Upgrading Old Apps: The Dirty Job of iOS Development

Upgrading old apps to new iOS versions, Xcode versions, or just upgrading them to implement modern best practices. These are all things we all need to do every once in a while, and these things are almost always a little painful. This post from Leo G Dion shines a light on the process you might take when upgrading your apps and includes plenty of interesting references and tools.

An article by Leo G Dion