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

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.

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.

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.
Get a weekly roundup of the best Substack posts, by hacker news affinity:

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

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: 2019

0 implied HN points • 26 Sep 23
🕹 Technology Animation
  1. Apple's animation journey evolved through NeXTSTEP, Mac OS X, Core Animation, and SwiftUI, showcasing advancements in UI development.
  2. SwiftUI's declarative approach makes animation easier than ever by treating UI as a function of state.
  3. The latest SwiftUI release introduces keyframe animations, providing fine-grained control over animations with advanced new APIs.

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.

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.

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

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.