Fresh Beginning

iOS

Using RxSwift to Populate Data on UITableView (iOS and Swift)

It's been a while since I posted. But better late than never. In today's blog post, I am going to write about how to use RxSwift to populate data in UITableView on iOS. RxSwift is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based code by using observable sequences and functional style

New SwiftUI APIs

SwiftUI: Apply Custom Formatting to Localized Strings

In today's post, I am going to touch on a niche area in SwiftUI designs and string formatting. This is about how to apply custom formatting to localizable strings. It sounds complicated, so let me explain it with an example, Suppose I have a localizable string like this, Going from

Annual Report

On Reading and Analyzing the Annual Reports

Recently I have taken to reading annual reports of companies - For now, only public Indian companies. My father used to and still trades in stocks and I remember when I was a kid, we used to receive several huge paper reports at the year's end. Now, thanks to increased

Property Wrapper

How to Use Property Wrappers in Swift

Swift 5.1 introduced a concept of property wrapper. Property wrappers is a mechanism that allows developers to centralize code for modifying the variable properties during setting and getting their values. For example, as soon as the variable is set, you might want to apply some changes to its property

Advanced Swift

How to Apply Global Styling in SwiftUI Apps

Although not strictly required, it's good to have a basic understanding of creating custom Environment Keys in SwiftUI. If you haven't already read it, I strongly recommend you to go through my previous blog article about creating a custom environment key-value pair in SwiftUI so that you will get more

Advanced SwiftUI

How to Create a top and bottom Sticky View in SwiftUI

SwiftUI offers a flexible way to create views on iOS. In today's blog post, we are going to look at how to create a sticky view accompanied by a scrolling counterpart on iOS using SwiftUI APIs. A sticky view is any view that sticks either at the very top or

Management Lessons

How to Become a Better Engineering Manager

An engineering manager is a key role in the organization and employees' lives. It's difficult to be a good software engineer, but it's much harder to be an engineering manager. As a manager, your expertise is not limited to management issues, but you also need to have a strong engineering

stress

How to Cope with Layoffs and Job Loss?

Job losses are never easy. No matter how much you justify your feelings by saying you are not your job, it still feels personal when someone calls you redundant, unnecessary, or whatever other adjectives and wants to get rid of it. I have been on both ends of receiving and

relocation

Moving to Netherlands from the USA

Introduction After living in the USA for more than a decade, last year me and my wife, we decided to move to the Netherlands. It was a sentimental decision since I spent more than a decade in the country and had to move away. But it was also a practical

Advanced SwiftUI

Say No to AnyView in SwiftUI iOS Applications

SwiftUI allows developers to use heterogenous view types by making use of AnyView type. AnyView encloses any kind of SwiftUI type into a generic type that can be returned from a function. In this article, we will take a look at, 1. Why developers may want to use AnyView type

Advanced Swift

How to Use Actors on iOS to Achieve Thread Safety

Apple introduced the concept of Actors in iOS 13.0 and macOS 10.15. Actors allow us to modify the program state in a concurrent environment without data races and the possibility of corrupting data due to simultaneous access. Data races happen when two threads access the same data and

iOS

What I Learned from My Recent Experience Creating iOS Tutorial

Recently, I was asked to write a tutorial and build an iOS app prototype to teach high-school students how to write iOS apps. The goal was to create a basic project that will include all the basic iOS concepts they've learned so far and build the app on these foundations.

Ghost

Why I Shifted from Ghost to Self-hosting for My Blog?

Recently, I made a move to self-hosting on DigitalOcean away from hosting my blog on Ghost's servers. The ride wasn't exactly smooth, but all the support from Ghost and DigitalOcean customer service members still made the transition possible. I have been a Ghost customer for the past 7 years and

iOS

iOS - Convert Array to String and String to Array in Swift

Some of the most frequent operations in iOS involve converting an array to a string and string back to an array. This happens when the user has an array of objects but needs to convert them into the user-facing message, or a long string separated by a fixed delimiter needs

iOS

Acceptance Criteria for Grading Beginner iOS App Projects

The content of this post is copyrighted material. If you wish to reuse any part or copy this post somewhere else, you must have written permission from me to do so Are you a teacher or instructor teaching students the foundations of writing iOS apps? You already have a list

iOS

Beginner iOS App Ideas for Quick Prototype

The content of this post is copyrighted material. If you wish to reuse any part or copy this post somewhere else, you must have written permission from me to do so If you're a new iOS developer and have just started learning a few concepts, chances are, you want to

unit test

Mocking URLProtocol and Unit Testing the Network Stack on iOS using Swift

In the previous post, we learned how to write a reliable and scalable network stack on the iOS platform. However, that is just the beginning. After writing the implementation, we also need to unit test it to make sure it's stable with all the business logic and unintended changes do

Style

How to add Rounded Corners, Rounded Borders, and Shadows to SwiftUI views

SwiftUI offers a convenient and quick way to design UI elements for your iOS app. However, some things in SwiftUI are more complicated than UIKit. In today's blog post, we are going to look at one such feature and learn how to add rounded corners, rounded borders, and shadows to

mock

Why do you need to Mock DispatchQueue in Swift on the iOS platform for unit testing

This article is a part of unit testing series which will teach you how to write a testable code, create mocks and how to inject them during unit testing. Today, we are going to look at the use-case where you need to mock the DispatchQueue and inject the instance to

Advanced SwiftUI

How to Perform Custom Action on a load of SwiftUI view

UIKit offers a convenient viewDidLoad method that gets executed as soon as the ViewController is loaded and is called just once in the view controller lifecycle. Unfortunately, SwiftUI has no such feature. There is no way to perform the action just once after the view is loaded. Today, we are

Network

Building a Reliable and Testable Networking Stack on iOS

💡This is the first article in my networking series where I am teaching how to build and test a reliable network stack. In the second and final article, I have written about How to Write Comprehensive and Robust Unit Tests for your Network Stack if you want to give it

infinite

Implementing an infinite scrolling list and pagination with SwiftUI

Recently, I was working on a feature that needed infinite scrolling and pagination. After searching for a few articles online, I realized that there is little to no help on how to achieve infinite scrolling on SwiftUI views. So I ventured a little, did some research, and came up with

Conference

My Public Speaking Adventure

I started participating in public speaking in early 2018 through the local tech meetup CocoaHeads Boston. I want to thank the organizers for giving me the first opportunity to present at the tech meetup. First is always big. You have a lot of doubts and anxieties over your abilities. The

Promise

How to Convert Legacy async code to use Combine using Swift and iOS

💡In the previous post, we learned how to convert the existing legacy async structure to the async-await mechanism. If you haven't read that yet, I strongly recommend going through it. In this post, we will see how to convert legacy async code to use the Combine for performing asynchronous operations

async-await

How to Convert Existing Async Code to Use async-await using Swift and iOS

Software engineers are expected to spend a lot of time on improving and modernizing the codebase. If the codebase hasn't been given enough attention, it's possible that the codebase might get deprecated soon and will have undesirable consequences for production users. In today's blog post, we will see how to