Weeknotes № 3

After a super busy week last week, I took things a bit easier, especially on the house renovation part. Lots of family time instead!

Work-wise, I started the week by improving the README for our attributed string builder project, and also added support for custom environment keys.

I worked on adding alignment to the flow layout we built on Swift Talk. This turned out to be quite tricky: while the code isn’t that hard to write, writing it without duplication was already quite a bit harder and took a few tries. Then I tried to refactor it and use HStack to layout the rows, but I learned the hard way that Layouts in SwiftUI aren’t very composable. For example, I can’t seem to get the individual frames out of an existing layout. In any case, I am writing up my experience, both in the form of a blog post and as part of our book update.

The second half of the week we spent finishing up the details for an upcoming workshop. As we prepare each workshop individually to tailor it to the team, this always takes a lot of time. However, the end product is something we’re always really proud of.

I really enjoyed this essay about using the wrong tool for the job. I always struggled a bit to explain why we like to use Swift for almost everything, despite other languages being more fit for the job. The link explains this extremely well, much better than I could articulate myself. In short, there’s a massive gain for us when we do write things in Swift, because we know the ecosystem and don’t have to learn other tools, even though some problems are better solved using different languages.