Hi, my name is Donny

SwiftUI offers several approaches to building lists of content. You can use a VStack if your list consists of a bunch of elements that should be placed on top of each other. Or you can use a LazyVStack if your list is really long. And in other cases, a List might make more sense. In this post, I’d like to take a look at each of these components, outline their strengths and weaknesses and hopefully provide you with some insights...

In Swift, we have several ways to “suspend” execution of our code. While that’s almost always a bad practice, I’d like to explain why Task.sleep really isn’t as problematic as you might expect when you’re familiar with Thread.sleep. When you look for examples of debouncing or implementing task timeout they will frequently use Task.sleep to suspend a task for a given amount of time. The key difference is in how tasks and threads work in Swift. In Swift concurrency, we...

Once you start using Swift Concurrency, actors will essentially become your standard choice for protecting mutable state. However, introducing actors also tends to introduce more concurrency than you intended which can lead to more complex code, and a much harder time transitioning to Swift 6 in the long run. When you interact with state that’s protected by an actor, you have to to do so asynchronously. The result is that you’re writing asynchronous code in places where you might never...

Singletons generally speaking get a bad rep. People don’t like them, they cause issues, and generally speaking it’s just not great practice to rely on globally accessible mutable state in your apps. Instead, it’s more favorable to practice explicit dependency passing which makes your code more testable and reliable overall. That said, sometimes you’ll have singletons. Or, more likely, you’ll want to have a a shared instance of something that you need in a handful of places in your app:...

A key skill for every app developer is being able to profile your app's performance. Your app might look great on the surface, but if it doesn’t perform well, it’s going to feel off—sometimes subtly, sometimes very noticeably. Beautiful animations, slick interactions, and large data sets all fall flat if the app feels sluggish or unresponsive. Great apps respond instantly. They show that you’ve tapped something right away, and they make interactions feel smooth and satisfying. To make sure your...

Okay. I’m using the term indie developer loosely here. I don’t consider myself to be an indie developer. But I am independent, mostly. I run my own business where I work on client apps, workshops, my books, this website, my YouTube channel, and more. So I think I qualify as indie, partially. Either way, in this post I’d like to explore something that I don’t write or talk about much. How do I, as someone that manages my own time...