I'm at a conference right now

I can hear you thinking “You’re at a what now?” and it’s true. I’m at a conference. It’s online though, so no worries. We’re probably still more than a couple of months away from in person conferences.

The conference I’m attending is SwiftHeroes, and I’m due to deliver my talk on Core Data and SwiftUI in a couple of hours.

Speakers had the option to either pre-record their talk or do it live.

I chose to do it live.

Even though I can’t see the audience, and I’ll be talking at my screen the whole time, there’s something about the idea of my talk being live that I find more comforting than pre-recording. In a pre-recorded talk I feel like there almost no room for mistakes. After all, you’re pre-recording so you can do endless retakes.

The endless retakes are what get me. Every “um”, “eh”, mispronunciation, and every awkward pause can be cut or re-recorded. This means that I’d most likely deliver my talk not once, not twice, but most likely five times or more just to get that perfect take. It’s exhausting, and when conference day comes and you watch your pre-recorded talk, you still notice the imperfections.

For that reason, I’d rather do the talk in the moment. Sure, I might make a mistake. But I don’t feel the stress of needing to do a retake if I inevitably do or say something that’s not perfect and that’s a big relief. Just shrug it off, and move on.

If you’re attending Swift Heroes today, I hope to see you there. Just say hi to me on the conference platform!

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.

Enter Shikari - Moratorium (Broadcasts From The Interruption) With the pandemic convining musicians to their homes, and their home studios they have to get creative to pass the time they normally spend on tour. Enter Shikari have spent a lot of their time recording live videos from their homes, and they’ve even done a couple of acoustic streams on Instagram. This album collects all of these new and different versions of their existing songs and it’s an absolute joy to listen to. Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Music

Other content that I really want to share with you

An extensive guide to sorting Arrays in Swift

Sorting arrays is a common task in any programming language. Maybe it’s for that reason that we often don’t stop and think about the workings of our built-in sorting tools and we just use them however they come. In this post I attempt to explain how Swift’s sorting works, and I shed some light on the different options we have for sorting arrays.

An article by Donny Wals

Best practice to build accessible apps with SwiftUI

Accessibility is an important yet too often overlooked topic. In this post, Fanny Demey explains how you can make your app more accessible through seven best practices that you can, and should follow when developing your apps. She also explains how you can test your app’s accessibility which is crucial to do if you want to make sure that your app is as accessible as you’d hope.

An article by Fanny Demey

Bringing Polymorphism to Codable

Codable is a really cool and powerful API for working with JSON data and more. In some cases though, you need a ton of flexibility and you’re not entirely sure which type you should decode for a given key in your data. In those cases, polymorphism can be really useful to still decode this data into a Swift struct. Learn more about this topic, and how to apply it, in this post by Matthaus Woolard.

An article by Matthaus Woolard