Jacob’s Tech Tavern

Jacob's Tech Tavern is a Substack by the Lead Mobile Engineer at Gener8, offering insights into iOS software engineering, startup dynamics, career guidance, and mobile app development. It combines practical advice on app creation, career development, and technical deep dives into software and hardware architecture, with personal anecdotes and humor.

Software Engineering Startups Career Development Mobile App Development iOS Development User Experience Design Venture Capital Technology Trends Methodologies and Design Patterns Programming Languages Software Testing and Quality Assurance Productivity and Tools Technology History

The hottest Substack posts of Jacob’s Tech Tavern

And their main takeaways

I Wrote a Guest Post for Emerge Tools!

576 implied HN points • 26 Feb 24
🕹 Technology Apps Tools iOS Engineering Startups
  1. The blog post compares the Twitter and X iOS app binaries, revealing insights like extra app icons and heavy use of dynamic libraries.
  2. Emerge Tools offers valuable solutions for mobile engineers to monitor their app's size and performance.
  3. The author recommends subscribing to Jacob's Tech Tavern for more insightful posts and to show support for the work.

My Toddler Loves Planes, So I Built Her A Radar

1304 HN points • 27 Nov 23
🕹 Technology App Development User Experience API Integration Mobile Apps Software Development
  1. The idea for the app came from the author's toddler's fascination with planes, leading to the creation of a radar app.
  2. The app was built to be engaging and fun for kids, with features like showing nearby flights and being oriented correctly.
  3. The author went through user testing with their toddler to ensure the app was enjoyable and successful before launching it on the App Store.
Get a weekly roundup of the best Substack posts, by hacker news affinity:

Through the Ages: Apple CPU Architecture

194 HN points • 30 Oct 23
🕹 Technology Hardware
  1. Apple has undergone multiple CPU architecture migrations throughout its history, showcasing a unique ability to adapt and innovate.
  2. Intel's x86 architecture dominance was driven by innovations like CPU caches, branch prediction, and superscalar architecture.
  3. The M1 chip from Apple Silicon stands out due to its specialized heterogeneous computing approach, unified memory architecture, out-of-order execution, and physical proximity of components for efficient performance.

Apple Animation Through the Ages: 2007

192 implied HN points • 12 Sep 23
🕹 Technology Animation Frameworks Graphics Development
  1. In 2007, Apple introduced Core Animation, revolutionizing how animations were implemented on Mac OS X.
  2. Core Animation streamlined animation implementation by providing a declarative framework that leveraged the GPU for smooth transitions.
  3. Developers could easily create animations with Core Animation properties like frame, border, filters, and opacity.

The 2FA app that tells you when you get `012345`

16 HN points • 19 Feb 24
🕹 Technology Mobile Apps Development Software Bug Fixing
  1. The app's creator derived inspiration for the 2FA app from spotting interesting patterns in the codes, like counting sequences and repeated numerical patterns.
  2. The concept was proven through a proof of concept demonstrating local code generation and push notifications for rare interesting codes.
  3. The app development process included tackling challenges like storing multiple 2FA accounts securely, implementing interestingness features, and improving performance with optimized processing tasks and notifications.

Mobile DevOps for Enterprise that Just Works

3 HN points • 15 Jan 24
🕹 Technology Development DevOps Enterprise Automation Mobile
  1. Mobile DevOps for Enterprise can be challenging due to the unique requirements and constraints of mobile development.
  2. Appcircle offers a more streamlined and user-friendly approach to setting up CI/CD pipelines, especially for mobile projects.
  3. Appcircle provides advantages such as simplified infrastructure management, faster build speeds, comprehensive permissions management, and features like tester management and enterprise app store.

High Performance Swift Apps

1 HN point • 04 Mar 24
🕹 Technology Programming Performance optimization Mobile Apps
  1. Testing on a real device to identify user-facing problems is crucial for improving app performance.
  2. Profiling the app using Instruments to identify bottlenecks and implementing targeted code improvements based on the findings can significantly enhance performance.
  3. Improving processing speed, utilizing parallelism, and optimizing code to run earlier during app launch are key strategies for enhancing the performance of Swift apps.

Modular Architecture for Apps

2 HN points • 01 Jan 24
🕹 Technology Mobile Apps Software Engineering
  1. Architectural discussions should focus on how modules fit together and organizational structures.
  2. Different modular architecture approaches offer benefits like clear responsibilities and reduced build times.
  3. As apps become more complex, modularization becomes necessary for managing team, complexity, and build time challenges.

Unit Test the Observation Framework

2 HN points • 13 Nov 23
🕹 Technology iOS Unit Testing Swift
  1. Unit testing @Observable view models is crucial for ensuring reliability and stability in iOS development.
  2. The Observation Framework provides a solution for testing @Observable properties using withObservationTracking, improving the unit testing process.
  3. By leveraging the ObservationTestUtils package, developers can streamline unit testing of @Observable view models with less boilerplate code.

Advanced Swift Actors: Re-entrancy & Interleaving

2 HN points • 10 Oct 23
🕹 Technology Swift Concurrency Actors Authentication iOS
  1. Understanding Swift actors is crucial for managing re-entrancy and interleaving in your code.
  2. Building an optimal authentication service involves utilizing Swift actors to minimize duplicate work and network overhead.
  3. Swift concurrency model utilizes cooperative threading, executors, and actors to create an illusion of single-threadedness and prevent data races.

Localization in Xcode 15

1 HN point • 11 Dec 23
🕹 Technology Localization SwiftUI
  1. String Catalogs in Xcode 15 make internationalizing Swift apps easier
  2. Prior to Xcode 15, managing strings in Objective-C era using .strings files was error-prone
  3. String Catalogs simplify internationalization for different languages, including handling pluralization

Advanced async testing: Unstructured concurrency

3 HN points • 01 Aug 23
🕹 Technology Unit Testing Concurrency
  1. Unstructured concurrency introduces a different approach to handling asynchronous code compared to structured concurrency like async/await.
  2. When dealing with unstructured concurrency like Tasks, testing can become challenging and may require using XCTestExpectation to handle closure-based asynchronous operations.
  3. To overcome testing challenges with unstructured concurrency, leverage mocks, the defer keyword, and XCTestExpectation to ensure precise test execution.

Dependency Injection Demystified

3 HN points • 06 Jun 23
🕹 Technology Programming Testing Architecture Networking Software Development
  1. Unit testing helps in writing maintainable code by separating concerns and breaking code into manageable chunks.
  2. Modern language features like async/await and functional reactive programming provide great coding ergonomics but require careful testing to avoid flakiness.
  3. Dependency Injection separates the tasks of gathering ingredients and cooking, making code more testable and maintainable.

Unit Testing with async/await

1 HN point • 18 Jul 23
🕹 Technology Unit Testing Error Handling
  1. Unit Testing with async/await allows for writing robust and maintainable software using modern language features.
  2. Async tests focus on checking interactions with dependencies, successful function calls, and handling error states.
  3. By making code testable through dependency injection, it becomes cleaner and easier to reason about, with encapsulated logic and separated responsibilities.

Apple Animation Through the Ages: 2014

0 implied HN points • 19 Sep 23
🕹 Technology Animation Graphics Programming iOS Frameworks
  1. In 2014, Apple introduced Metal as a high-performance graphics API for iOS, catering to graphics-intensive applications like mobile games.
  2. Metal provided low-level access to GPU hardware, aiming to improve performance by reducing bottlenecks caused by OpenGL ES drivers running on the CPU.
  3. Developers using Metal had to work more closely with the hardware, writing shaders and managing rendering pipelines for efficient graphics processing.

Coming soon

0 implied HN points • 02 Feb 23
  1. Jacob Bartlett is launching something soon on his substack
  2. It's called Jacob's Tech Tavern
  3. Stay tuned for more updates

Check 'em Privacy Policy

0 implied HN points • 13 Feb 24
🕹 Technology Privacy Policy Data Collection Security
  1. The app Check 'em doesn't collect any data and doesn't even use the internet, ensuring user privacy.
  2. Users of Check 'em are not required to provide any personal information or create an account, emphasizing user anonymity.
  3. The app ensures high security by storing data securely on the iOS keychain and following best practices in generating 2FA codes.

Aviator demo video

0 implied HN points • 14 Oct 23
🕹 Technology
  1. A demo video for Aviator is available on the given link.
  2. The video is intended for Apple Store Review on 14 October 2023.
  3. Jacob Bartlett is the author of the post.

Combine, async/await, and Unit Testing

0 implied HN points • 22 Aug 23
🕹 Technology Concurrency Testing Swift Unit Testing
  1. Combine and async/await can be used together to write robust and maintainable software with modern language features.
  2. Testing @ObservableObject view models, Combine publishers in async methods, and Combine publishers converted to AsyncSequence are key in achieving unit test mastery.
  3. Understanding the interoperation between Combine and async/await is a powerful skill for writing unit tests and marrying the two concurrency approaches.

Jacob's Substack

0 implied HN points • 20 Mar 23
🕹 Technology Software Engineering iOS Humor
  1. Jacob is an experienced iOS Engineer with a passion for technology.
  2. He started his own technical blog to share knowledge and improve his writing skills.
  3. Expect well-structured engineering topics, hot iOS takes, and humor on his blog.