Something I came up with while playing around on GarageBand.
It’s rough – and yes even offbeat at times, but I like the idea. I did the drums with my fingers on the iPad! 🥁
Author: patmcg
Orange Julius (rough take)
Trying to learn GarageBand by making a new song. Rough but fun. Check out the surprise ending. 💥
Using Protocols to Remove the Network Layer from Your iOS App
Most of us developers know can we can should abstract the network layer to support mocking, unit testing, and just to produce a more flexible design.
While lots of us know this, in practice it seems to get overly complicated and not always done well. A good design should simplify things, not complicate things. This is why I like this post focusing on using protocols to simplify network requests and improve testability. It even gets into decoding responses to give you a useful end-to-end flow.
👉 Removing the network layer in your iOS app
Even better, this is part of a Power of Protocols series (yay!).
Playbook
Developing features for a large, established app, I often run get slowed down trying to throw together a new screen. You have to find the right spot in the code to update, build the whole app (not just what you changed), log in, and drill down to the right spot to try out your creation. Something’s off? Do it all over again.
Which is why I love the idea of the Playbook library, which is “a library that provides a sandbox for building UI components without having to worry about application-specific dependencies.” Yass! 🤟
Supports both SwiftUI and UIKit.
Via iOS Dev Weekly.
Improv Class and Uncharted Territory
A few months ago, I took an improv class. You might think I did it to learn to be funnier. I mean, it did help a little. But mostly it helped my attitude, just being open and ridiculous. I do still have a stockpile of ready-made dad jokes, though.
Improv is not only about laughs. It’s about facing uncharted territory with curiosity, enthusiasm, and fearlessness.
The post below perfectly captures the real reason that I took improv, which is mainly dealing with fears and ambiguity when you can’t sit and think about it for more than, say, two seconds. I’m naturally a sit-and-think-about-it kind of person, so I needed some help on that. 🤷🏻♂️
👉 Improv as a Crisis Management Tool: Tackling Uncharted Territory
Cheat sheet from the article… Improv helps with:
- Helping people build out their ideas even if you don’t agree with or understand them
- Learning how to make decisions on a shoestring
- Fearlessness, bravery and getting comfortable with mistakes
By the way, Merlin Works, the same place where I took my improv class, is now offering online Zoom improv classes for the pandemic. If this thing drags on long enough, I might do improv 201 online. 🤷🏻♂️
Mental Break Town 