I just released a small hobby project to the App Store. It wonât make me rich, but its nice to start on a fresh project and try new stuff. Now that Iâm a consultant, I need to keep my tools sharp, and thereâs a lot of tech Iâve been wanting to try for some time. The app is written in 100% swift, using promises, value types were possible, etc. It has a thin backend written in node.js that runs on Heroku. Check it out!
In Swift, a protocol can have an associated type, which is kinda like generics, except it isnât. This is most often apparent when trying to use it as such. Youâve probably seen the compiler complain: Protocol 'SequenceType' can only be used as a generic constraint. In this post we explore why, and how to solve it.
After five years in Telenor, the last two and a half in appear.in, I have finally decided I needed new challenges. It wasnât an easy decision, but it was time. Five years in the same company feels like an eternity. Starting tomorrow, I will now work for a small consultancy. Iâm excited to get started. Hopefully, Iâll be working on many more diverse projects.
One very nice thing about Swift is that functions are first-class values. They can be assigned to variables, curried, and you can pass them as arguments: If a function takes a closure as a parameter, you can pass a reference to a function in place of an in-line closure, as long as the types match. We may think of functions as just special kinds of closures with a name. But beware! Therein lies dragons.
Since iOS 9, Apple has enforced best practices in the secure connections between your app and its back end, by adding something called âApp Transport Securityâ, or âATSâ for short. ATS is on by default, and prevents accidental disclosure and provides secure default behavior by mandating that a network connection is over HTTPS, and by limiting the supported ciphers to a subset that is known to be secure, notably TLS 1.2 and so-called forward secrecy.