Category Archives: deepthoughts

Coming Back!!!

It has been a couple of years since I have last written and so much has happened in that time-frame. Some personal projects with friends and family as well as life changes.

Along the way I was able to further hone my skills as an iOS developer and self publish some more apps. During this time I expanded my knowledge and with a desire to always share my new found knowledge I would constantly think “hey I should write a blog article on this” yet the actions fell short. As more time passed I started to dismiss writing because I wasn’t sure how to start back up. Which brings me back to this post and something I have been thinking and praying about these past few weeks.

Part of me has been thinking that I should just delete all the previous articles or maybe event create a whole different site. Then I read through some of my previous posts and thought how could I delete these great memories? In short I couldn’t. =)

So in this past week I decided to leave everything in place but start writing my articles with an approach of going over some simple problems with new approaches I have picked up over these past couple of years. Some of it might repeat what I have done previously but with a different twist. I also plan to share some of my tricks and snipets that I use a lot.

I will try to reference sights where I gained knowledge for some of these articles. In case I miss it I would recommend viewing my Resources page because in it you will find all of my favorite sites for tools and also as a source of where I have gained much of my knowledge.

So keep watching as my goal is to write an article a week and maybe even expand this platform further.

Enjoy and as always Happy Coding!!!

Resolutions and Challenges

Well an old year has gone and new one is on its way.

Achievements of 2016

Each year, like everyone else, I make some resolutions and do my best to achieve each of them during the year. I can say that last years achievement I am most proud of was giving up soda and any other carbonated drinks. After a lifetime of drinking carbonated drinks this was harder to achieve than I expected it would be.

I can now say though that while eating at restaurants I really enjoy drinking water now and when I see my savings on the check it makes me feel a bit better.

At the same time I wanted to make sure that I didn’t replace carbonated drinks with high sugar drinks. Again a success and I found a new taste for a Green Tea.  Success!!

On the technical front last year was quiet and I decided to focus my time on getting more comfortable with my current knowledge set and just enjoy what I had.

Resolution for 2017

For my personal achievements I want to stop going out to eat as much as we normally do and instead eat at home more often. When I discussed this with my wife it caused some initial frustrations but I explained to her with the savings it will help achieve my other resolution for the next year. I would like for our family to take either a European vacation or something that allows us to travel to the east coast.

On the technical front I have the following planned:

  • Rewrite dooscrib.com with a Swift and Vapor backend.
  • Complete the first phase of smart mirror project.
  • Update iOS apps with more features.
  • Start going to more programmer meetings again.
  • Do a presentation on Vapor and Server Side Swift.

As I complete or work on some of my resolutions for the new year I will write about them and share my experiences.

Until then Happy Coding!!!

 

Catching the Bug… Server Side Swift

In my opinion Swift is an extremely exciting and powerful language so like many others I was excited when I heard Apple’s decision to Open Source Swift and even more when a Linux compatible version of Swift was released. Writing apps for different platforms with Swift sounded exciting but what immediately started running through my mind was the ability to do server side development with Swift much like I have done with Javascript, Java and C#.

I started to review the different options available and I finally decided to take the next step of going from reading/dreaming about the possibilities to actually doing something. It turns out that I have the perfect opportunity as my website for DooScrib was taken offline and I would like to bring it back online (future updates to the plugin planned).

The following is the environment that I have chosen:

Server Side Frameworks

There are actually several choices out there and as time progressed I narrowed down the options that I was most interested in to the following:

Kitura is great and has a lot of information as well as the security of have a big name like IBM behind it. However as a personal preference I automatically gravitated towards Perfect and Vapor and have been watching both as they have progressed over the last few months.

To be honest I think both Perfect and Vapor are great choices. At a later time I might actually even pursue a separate review of Perfect.

Getting Started

So for those interested in following I plan to write several different posts over the next few weeks as I setup a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu, install and get Swift running and finally begin working with Vapor.

Keep following and as always Happy Coding.