Newsletter #32 - macOS network programming in Swift Sep 13 2020

Hello, and welcome to issue #32!

How are you doing? I hope everything is going well wherever you are. Things seem to have been settling down around here, so I've got more time to write. I completed my guide on macOS network programming in Swift. It covers three main frameworks:

With that, you should be able to build a wide range of network applications in macOS. As always, my guides are "pay what you want". Including $0.00, so they are free, but if you find them useful and want to support me, you can buy them. Networks is a topic I always found fascinating, it is at the core of the Internet. But network programming also touches other areas like security, system administration, software engineering, and telecommunications. So it is a broad topic, but super fun to explore. Have a look at the guide and build some network applications, I bet you'll have fun.

Anyways, I hope you find it useful.

https://rderik.com/guides/

Recommendations and interesting topics

I saw that NATO released a Malware reverse engineering book. It covers a lot of interesting topics like setting up a lab, static and dynamic analysis, network traffic analysis, and more. If you want to dip your toes into malware analysis, this might be a good place to start. Here is the link:

Malware Reverse Engineering Handbook - NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (NATO CCDCOE)

A different recommendation for this week is a podcast. I've been listening to The here and now podcast, it covers a lot of topics about psychology and philosophy. Not a tech-related podcast, but I think you might find it fun. Have a look at its catalogue of episodes and pick one that sounds interesting to you.

And that's it for this newsletter.

Until next time, Derik

Tip of the week

Creating the different formats for the guides, I found myself trying to automate the process and merge two PDFs. I had the cover and the main body of the guide, so I found a couple of ways to do it. They might come in handy for you at some point:

  1. Using the Finder - Select all the PDFs, in the order you want them to be attached, and in the preview window you'll see a button that says "Create PDF", click it and that's it. You can merge Images and PDFS also, quite handy.
  2. Using Preview - Open the first PDF, then click on the sidebar to show Thumbnails, and you can drag and drop other PDFs or images and add them to the PDF when you save.
  3. Using the command-line - this is what I did in the end to automate the process. Use the GhostScript command-line tool gs(1). There are many options, but this is what I used:
1

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dAutoRotatePages=/None -sOutputFile=out.pdf cover.pdf guide_body.pdf

** If you want to check what else I'm currently doing, be sure to follow me on twitter @rderik or subscribe to the newsletter. If you want to send me a direct message, you can send it to derik@rderik.com.