John Makes Things

Its been a few years since I last participated in Advent of Code, and I actually forgot about it until I saw some folks mention it on Mastodon. I’ve also been working on my Swift + iOS development skills this year, contributing to Pocket Casts iOS a few hours a week in addition to my regular web dev work at Automattic.

So I decided I’d take up Advent of Code again this year and use Swift to solve all the coding challenges to improve my skills a bit more. All of my Swift development so far has been in Xcode, but I also enjoy using Vim as much as possible. Since I discovered the wonderful world of Vim plugins a few years ago and realized I could do everything I enjoy in vscode right in a terminal window I’ve been using it as much as possible for smaller projects. It is something I like to do since the more comfortable and familiar I get with vim the less awkward it is to do more complicated work directly on the server when needed. Anyways, after solving the first 2 days of coding challenges, I decided that I needed some syntax highlighting in Vim because I was making silly mistakes that could have been avoided if every character on my screen wasn’t the same colour.

I went to my favourite vim plugin repository, VimAwesome, and searched for Swift. I was surprised to see, about 5 results down, that there was an official Apple vim plugin. Its buried a few levels deep in the Swift repo but it works, and its pretty awesome. It just wasn’t very straight forward to setup. Simply installing the repo as a plugin didn’t work, and after reading up on the documentation for vim-plug I discovered you can target a subdirectory in a repo.

Plug 'apple/swift', { 'rtp': 'utils/vim' }

… and just like that my monotone green editor window is now full of productivity-inducing syntax highlighting!

And since I already had ALE installed all I needed to do was install SwiftLint and SwiftFormat and I’ve got linting and formatting ready to go as well.

I’m not really sure there is a singular proper way to learn anything, but I do know that there is a way that I learn things and that is through doing, not reading. So instead of messing around reading tutorials or massive O’Reilly books again (I think I’ve tried that twice over the years) I’ve decided to take a stab at “properly” learning iOS once again.

This time around I am following Paul Hudson’s 100 Days Of Swift. It is a 100 day video tutorial walking you through learning Swift and then iOS development. The initial 10 day Swift tutorial was a little basic for someone who already understands programming concepts, but it was a good introduction to the Swift way of doing things. I’ve reached day 62 so far (which I completed in far fewer days as I’ve found I can do a few days worth of the course at a time) which had me learning UIKit and various other iOS frameworks and I feel pretty confident about starting a new app, and adding what I need to in order to get the job done… supplementing with web searches when I get stuck.

There is still a lot to learn though, but I feel like I’m at a good spot where I could maybe dive into an existing code base, figure things out and start contributing to a REAL project. That is eventually my goal at least. For the time being I’ll wrap up the rest of these “100 days of Swift”, maybe dive into some SwiftUI and put together a real, honest-to-goodness modern iOS app!

For anyone looking to try out iOS development, or just development in general, 100 Days of Swift is a pretty comprehensive program and its FREE! The pace in the beginning is very good and introduces basic programming concepts pretty clearly. For anyone looking to speed through it if the pace is a little slow, I would recommend purchasing “Swift in Sixty Seconds” and “Hacking with iOS” from the Hacking with Swift website as they are the videos that the free course is based on. They include all of the videos and you can play them automatically back-to-back instead of having to click through the pages and interact with the YouTube player for every lesson.

This post was just sitting in my drafts presumably waiting for me to add to it… then a year went by and I did nothing with it. So here it is now, better late than never.

I’m not sure when this site just became an announcement blog for my work projects (I really need to start writing more), but I’ve got yet another fun WordPress block to be proud of… the Applause Block!

Today my team launched our second WordPress block, the Vote block! The vote block lets your readers up or down vote content on your page that you’re looking for feedback on. You can already use it on your WordPress.com site or download the plugin for your self-hosted site here

What do you think?

That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I’ve just imported the entire archive of my old blog at johncaruso.ca to this site. It was about 360 posts that date back to 2004 when I used to ramble on about mundane day to day things I was up to.

Its been fun to re-read some of those posts and reminisce, but at the same time, there are a bunch of formatting issues I now have to deal with since it was a completely custom site before and I had some weird css to make certain things (like code snippets) look just right. I’ll need to groom those posts and fix whatever needs fixing.

At the same time, it was a fun little exercise to generate a WordPress compatible XML file to export my old blog database to. Now I just need to generate the URL rewrites from my old site to point here so I can remove those posts from there and clean up that site a bit.

My team over at Crowdsignal has been working on a cool new poll block plugin for WordPress called Crowdsignal Forms. We officially launched it this week for self-hosted WordPress sites and on WordPress.com! Please go check it out if you’ve got a WordPress blog or website.

I’ve had many web presences over the years. My first website (built with NetObjects Fusion and then Microsoft Front Page) was hosted on Geocities and it was a fan page for my heroes at the time: Patrick Roy, Saku Koivu and Jacques Villeneuve (if memory serves). After that I decided to learn HTML and build my first blog engine in java that would write out static files to be served. I then went on to learn PHP and mysql, built my own custom blog software and the rest is history. I’ve been building web apps ever since for fun and professionally.

And all that has lead up to where I am now, writing this first post on my newly minted WordPress.com site from the comfort of my sofa on the week and a half I have off between leaving my last job at Connected (which I thoroughly enjoyed but can’t speak too much about the super cool but secret projects I worked on there… damn NDA) and starting my next adventure with Automattic where I’ll be working on products for WordPress itself!

As I’ve said in the past, I’m going to try writing more. We’ll see how long it lasts this time around, but I think I’ll have quite a bit of content to go through before it starts to get tough. I’m going to try to write about my experience interviewing with and getting hired by Automattic as many have done before me, and also try to talk about what its like to work in a completely distributed company (oh yeah, I forgot to mention I get to work from home every single day).

I’m also going to try to import my existing blog’s content over here, but I’m not sure how that’s going to work with the existing links, so I may just leave things there and start fresh over here. I imagine JohnCaruso.ca becoming more of a portfolio site with links to all of my other stuff (including this blog). But we’ll see how that shapes up.