Archives

One of the most significant drawbacks of using the HTML/CSS/JS stack for application development is the default “fail silently at runtime” error behaviour. This was fine in the DHTML days when we were just adding decorative or cosmetic functionality to a static page, but I think it makes less sense … read more

At the recent YOW Perth conference, Andy Marks & Pam Rucinque of Thoughtworks presented a thought-provoking talk on "Reviving the art of software design". As part of the talk they had a selection of different-but-functionally-identical implementations of a pangram-checking function, and attendee… read more

I realise this blog has been quiescent for over half a decade, but I've resolved to put a little bit more time into blogging, professional development, and other not-directly-billable pursuits. There are a number of factors behind this; chief is probably that I'm not really using Twitter anymore (th… read more

Once you’ve sipped from the Reactive Kool-Aid it can become emotionally painful to have to implement callback methods the old-fashioned way when you hit a delegate-style API that doesn’t have a prebuilt Observable wrapper. Max Alexander did a great tutorial post on how to implement your own Delegate… read more

After the WWDC announcement, when I got over my initial knee-jerk ‘Exceptions - ick!’ reaction, I came around to being a supporter of the Swift 2 error handling model. While it would be nice to be able to desugar the implicit result type, and there’s a glaringly obvious hole with async error handlin… read more

Playgrounds are primarily designed as a learning tool, but with Xcode 7’s multiple pages and expanded rich markup support, they’re also really great for presentations - they allow you to mix slide-like text & image content with interactive code (for coding demos). Because everyone loves coding … read more

I spent ages debugging this one a few months ago, and just hit it again, so I thought I’d share to save others some time. If you have an older AWS powershell script, you may hit this error when running AWS Powershell cmdlets, particularly if using a cross-account role - e.g.: $aws_role = Use-STSRole… read more

I recently completed the “Principles of Reactive Programming” course on Coursera - I’m very interested in FRP (and libraries like ReactiveCocoa) as I find a lot of the most painful bugs in the iOS code I work on relate to using mutable flags/timestamps (or application state) to coordinate multiple e… read more

 I’m blogging my progress in developing an Apple Watch App. Read the previous instalments here. Telstra - grrr! I had a frustrating week trying to track down an odd issue - I wouldn’t get any train times load when I was walking around (i.e. near the station, where I want to test), but there was noth… read more

 I’m blogging my progress in developing an Apple Watch App. Read the previous instalments here. So, um, I missed a week. Sorry about that. Sad face. Step 4: The Pebble We don’t have access to any Apple Watch hardware yet, so it’s difficult to get a good feel for how you will use your app in context.… read more