Programming
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iOS: Getting a Thumbnail for a Video
→: iOS: Getting a Thumbnail for a VideoBetween various things being deprecated, and the new Photos framework (which looks cool but seemed a bit heavyweight for this purpose) finding this took me a while! When the image picker returns with a video it has a url in info[UIImagePickerControllerMediaURL]. Then we can use AVAsset and AVAssetGenerator to get a thumbnail. // Gets the asset -…
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Things You Don’t Learn in Technical Interviews
→: Things You Don’t Learn in Technical InterviewsI spend more time than I thought I would thinking about technical interviews lately, because something I’ve been doing is conducting technical interviews for a few startups including Glowforge (they’re hiring!). Since March I’ve done ~36 interviews. Designing hiring systems is hard because you only have partial data – specifically you don’t know who your…
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Unit Testing on iOS
→: Unit Testing on iOSHistorically, there hasn’t been a lot of testing done on iOS, and we see the results of that every day—regressions, crashes, consistently reproducible failures. As we build more complex applications, manual testing takes more and more time and automated testing becomes increasingly necessary. The biggest challenge of testing on iOS starts at the UIViewController with…
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Giving a Talk and a Workshop – in Two Days
→: Giving a Talk and a Workshop – in Two DaysSubmitting I have two ways of submitting to CfPs. The first: a carefully written abstract of a talk that I have already prepped, and probably already given. The second: something that I have already been exploring in blog posts, collected into a “here is this thing that I think I could talk about, but I’m…
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Some Thoughts on Mocking
→: Some Thoughts on MockingWhen do we use mocks and when shouldn’t we? Some thoughts: Don’t Mock Data Structures We wouldn’t mock an NSArray or an NSDictionary, so why would we mock our own data structures? Data structures should be simple and well tested, so we can trust them to behave as they should. It will be…
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Discoveries About OSS Culture
→: Discoveries About OSS CultureI was hanging out with an OSS-dude (OSS = Open Source Software) for a while, and I learned a couple of things. Firstly – don’t try and buy committed OSS types books. It’s a complete nightmare. Secondly – I’ve reached a better understanding of harassment and open source. And particularly the pushback, which comes from…
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Unit Testing on iOS: Beyond the Model
→: Unit Testing on iOS: Beyond the ModelI want to introduce you to my app, it’s called Show and Hide. It’s an image processing app. This is V1, so the UI is pretty simple, so I think it’s a reasonable example. Briefly, what the app does is it detects the dominant color in an image, and creates these cool partially colored images…
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Launching! iOS Unit Testing: Beyond the Model
→: Launching! iOS Unit Testing: Beyond the ModelI’m super excited to release something that I’ve been working on for a while. Unit testing on iOS is… not common. And part of the problem is that people don’t know where to start. It can be overwhelming. Building on my years of experience leading iOS apps with over 80% test coverage, including at Google,…
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iOSNext: Paul Ardeleanu – 10 Reasons You’ll Love Swift
→: iOSNext: Paul Ardeleanu – 10 Reasons You’ll Love SwiftMy notes from Paul‘s talk at iOSNext. TIOBE Index for Nov 2014 – Swift is at #18. A language that is 5 months old – more popular than Scala, Haskell… Fortran! Proven to be quite a hit with developers, and there are reasons for that. Why do we have a new programming language? What is…