Hello Again!

Well, it’s been a year since my last post, and what a year it’s been. 2016 has been a whirlwind of unexpected events, many of them incredibly disheartening and downright frightening, with things like Brexit passing referendum and Trump becoming the president-elect. Its incredibly hard to be optimistic about the direction of the US and the state of the world at large nowadays.

Professionally it’s also been very busy and stressful this year as things at work have evolved with my role and responsibilities. I won’t go into too much detail here but as my team has grown I’ve felt those growing pains both personally and on behalf of the team as a whole. However, it has been a good for my personal growth, as I learn more about what direction I want to move myself in, and what areas I need to work to improve on.

As the focus of this blog so far has been on programming in Swift, there’s been a lot of movement in that space over the past year. Most notably Swift is now open source (yay!) and Swift 3.0 came out a few months ago. I contributed a little bit to the foundation core library (mainly around implementing some of NSPredicate) which was fun. I haven’t made time to revisit that, but I’d like to go back to it at some point. I updated Weakify to be Swift 3 compatible (which was pretty easy).

I left off last time starting a series about how Optional works at a fundamental level, but unfortunately I didn’t keep good notes as to how I wanted to progress that series, and I may have to just leave it unless I can rebuild that outline well. It’s a low priority for me right now as I have some other ideas brewing for interesting posts I’d like to get out in the near future.

Lastly, the old jekyll blog theme felt a bit old, plus it was built for jekyll 2. Now that github pages is using jekyll 3, I thought I’d refresh the blog with a new theme. I played with a bunch of different themes, but settled on this one, called Minimal Mistakes (which is by the same author of the previous theme I used). I highly recommend his themes as they’re very configurable with lots of features built in, and there’s great documentation on getting them working well.

Thanks for reading. Until next time!