Recent articles

Remote configuration is a common practice in almost every app I have worked on. Sometimes these configurations can be large and the implications of a configuration change can be far-reaching while other times a configuration is used to change the number of items shown in a list, or to enable or disable certain features. You […]

Working with dates is hard, there is no doubt about that. And formatting dates properly for every user of your app is no easier (if you want to do everything manually). Luckily, the system can help us. For example, in the US one would write "October 15" while in The Netherlands we write 15 oktober. […]

A common pattern in Core Data is to fetch objects and show them in your UI using one managed object context, and then use another context to update, insert or delete managed objects. There are several ways for you to update your UI in response to these changes, for example by using an NSFetchedResultsController. I […]

You may have noticed that when Xcode generates your NSManagedObject classes based on your Core Data model file, most of your managed object’s properties are optional. Even if you’ve made them required in the model editor, Xcode will generate a managed object where most properties are optional. In this article we’ll explore this phenomenon, and […]

As a developer, you’ll come across the term "deadlock" sooner or later. When you do, it’s usually pretty clear that a deadlock is bad (the name alone implies this) and if you’ve experienced one in your code, you’ll know that your application crashes with EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (code=EXC_I386_INVOP, subcode=0x0) when a deadlock occurs. A few weeks ago, […]

When you’re using Combine for an app that has iOS 13 as its minimum deployment target, you have likely run into problems when you tried to apply a flatMap to certain publishers in Xcode 12. To be specific, you have probably seen the following error message: flatMap(maxPublishers:_:) is only available in iOS 14.0 or newer. […]

If you’re a programmer looking for a job it’s very likely that you’ll have to do a coding interview at some point. Every company conducts these interviews differently. Some may have you work through several heavy computer science problems, others may present you with a task that’s related to the job you’re interviewing for and […]

When writing iOS apps, we regularly run into code that is asynchronous. Sometimes you know you’re writing something that will run asynchronously and other times you’re passing a completion handler to code that may or may not run asynchronously on a different dispatch queue. If you’re familiar with using DispatchQueue.main, you have probably written code […]

A common use of a Core Data store is to cache data from a remote resource locally to support offline functionality of an app. There are multiple ways to implement a caching mechanism and many of them don’t involve Core Data. For example, you could simply fetch a JSON file from a server and store […]

Every once in a while I look at a feature in Swift and I fall down a rabbit hole to explore it so I can eventually write about it. The OptionSet protocol is one of these Swift features. If you’ve ever written an animation and passed it a list of options like this, you have […]