Newsletter #8 - Making a C library available in Swift using the Swift Package Manager Nov 8 2019

Hello,

So glad that the weekend is here, time to relax. I found this post that you might find interesting. It is about the reason that 80x25 became the standard display.

There are many things we do out of habit and end up forgetting why we started doing them in the first place. One example in my case is that I try to always keep my commit messages in under 72 characters per line. I don’t claim to be 70 years old and got used to it by using IBM’s 3270. What happened is that I read this Tpope’s article on writing good git commit messages, where he explains the reason why 72 characters per line is the ideal. The relevant reason is this:

Newsletter #7 - Multithreading with pthreads in Swift Nov 1 2019

Hello,

This year Unix turns 50! You can check the website thatBell Labs created for the commemoration. I’ve always found these stories fascinating. I can only imagine how cool it would be to be part of the team that built something as impactful as Unix. I’ve always wanted to be part of a team of “scientists” that changes the futures. I remember reading Nerds 2.0.1 and getting sad that those times have already passed, but also enjoying the storytelling.

Newsletter #6 Launch Agents that provide XPC services Oct 25 2019

Hi,

How was your week? I hope it was a good one. It was a busy week for me. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to publish an article this week. But I made it.

I enjoy writing these articles. I wish I had more time to dedicate to research and writing, but I’m happy that I can dedicate at least a small amount of time every week.

Anyways, it’s the weekend, so it’s time to relax. I’m a fan of AudioBooks and podcasts. So on Saturdays, I take some time to get a coffee and listen to an interesting story. If you are a fan of audio content, here is one of my favourite podcasts:

Newsletter #5 - XPC Services on macOS apps using Swift Oct 18 2019

Hello,

The weekend is here, so before we go get some rest here is this week’s newsletter.

Did you see that Ken Thompson’s BSD Password was finally cracked? If you don’t know who he is, he was one of the creators of the UNIX operating system. Someone found an old(39 years old) /etc/passwd file containing some users and password from the source tree of BSD version 3. And they finally cracked the last password. The article is a fun read. I think you might enjoy it.

Newsletter #4 Using Kernel Queues notifications in Swift Oct 11 2019

Hello,

New OS version this week! I hope you had an easy upgrade to macOS(10.15) Catalina. I’m glad that everything went smoothly on my laptop. A couple of friends reported that their installation got stuck at the “Setting Up Your Mac” screen. The solution was to force restart and after everything completed as expected.

It’s crazy how far we’ve come. Many people complained about the upgrade being buggy, but I think upgrading now is smooth. I remember having to recompile everything after a kernel update on my Linux box, that’s when things got interesting. Different times.

Newsletter #3 - Understanding the RunLoop model Oct 4 2019

Hello,

This week I spent some time away from the computer relaxing and visiting San Francisco. Had such a good time with friends I haven’t seen in a long time.

This week’s post was about understanding the RunLoop. We used a basic shell implementation to show how to use different input sources on our RunLoop. There are not many examples on how to do this, and I feel that the RunLoop is central to the macOS architecture, and understanding it helps us design better applications.

Newsletter #2 - Using BSD Sockets in Swift Sep 27 2019

This week was fun. It was the first time I got an award for one of my posts on Reddit. It’s always fun to receive messages from people that find my posts useful.

You can see the post with the little badges on top :) here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/swift/comments/d915ja/using_bsd_sockets_in_swift/

I usually share my posts on Reddit. I find it less cluttered with random posts (unless you subscribe to random subreddits). I don’t use Twitter much, but I think I’ll start using it as Seth Godin uses Twitter, mostly a feed for the blog. I want to share more content but spending time on Twitter takes time from researching and writing. So I’ll probably won’t pay much attention to it. Anyways, let me know if you have any thoughts on using Twitter.

Newsletter #1 - Objective-C and Swift Interoperability and Mach-O executables Sep 20 2019

Hello,

Another week has gone by trying to figure out how computers work under the hood, and also enjoying dark mode on iOS. I hope you are enjoying the update too. Everything went smooth on the update, the only problem I had was with my reminders.

I make heavy use of reminders, both on my phone and on my laptop. So you can imagine, I was all excited tapping yes to every new popup on my phone. And I didn’t pay attention to the warning for Reminders. If you update to the new reminders, you won’t be able to see them in macOS until you upgrade to Catalina. My advice, make sure you won’t be needing your reminders on macOS before tapping “upgrade”.