Building my own static site generator, part 4: a complete redesign

An unexpectedly quick fourth article about Saga, after a complete redesign of the API.

read more

Building my own static site generator, part 3: thoughts so far

In the third and final part of this series about Saga I'm looking at the pros and cons of the current system and what I might want to change.

read more

Building my own static site generator, part 2: API design

Part 2, where I'm looking back at the current API of Saga.

read more

Building my own static site generator, part 1: inspiration & goals

In part 1 of a series of articles I'm looking at the inspiration behind my static site generator Saga, now available on Github.

read more

Swift generics and arrays

I’m in the very early stages of building my own static site generator in Swift. I want the library to provide a basic Page type, that the user can then extend with custom metadata, and I need to be able to put Pages with different kinds of metadata...

read more

Looking at the static site generator Publish

I'm taking a look at the static site generator Publish, written in Swift.

read more

Mentee Question 2: How to get started

Resources for learning Swift and UIKit, what to build first, opinions on Unit Testing, and more.

read more

Mentee Question 1: UIKit or SwiftUI

My take on the very common question "What should I learn or focus on? UIKit or SwiftUI?"

read more

Book review: Thinking in SwiftUI

A while ago I asked on Twitter which Swift-related book I should review next, and overwhelmingly Thinking in SwiftUI by the objc.io guys was chosen. An excellent choice!

read more

Exploring two-way databinding solutions in UIKit

With SwiftUI we have the @Binding property wrapper that makes it really easy to create a two-way databinding between a form field and a model, but in the UIKit world it's slightly less easy. Let's explore some solutions.

read more

Book review: Practical Combine

It's almost exactly 10 years since I wrote my last book review. Time flies! Also, it makes me realize that the way I've been learning has changed dramatically. I am much more guided by autocomplete and documentation within Xcode, and in-depth articles and videos about one particular topic, instead of reading books.

read more

Connecting Stripe to Firestore via Cloud Functions and webhooks

After adding subscriptions in iOS via Apple’s Storekit, I have now also added subscriptions to the web client of Critical Notes, using Stripe (even though they have some serious drawbacks at the moment). Since it was a bit of a puzzle to get it...

read more

WWDC20 review

A quick review of the keynote and State of the Union talks. Let's see which of my wishes have been fulfilled, and which SwiftUI problems have been solved.

read more

A review of SwiftUI problems

I've been working with SwiftUI for almost half a year now, and in that time I've learned a lot. I love a lot about it, but there are also so many bugs and issues that need workarounds that it's kind of maddening.

read more

User subscriptions on the web

As I am reaching feature-completeness of my side project Critical Notes, I need to add paid subscriptions to it. Users can already subscribe in the iOS app, but of course not everyone uses iOS, so I need to build something for the web client too.

read more

WWDC20 wishlist

WWDC is just around the corner, and we're all waiting like little kids at Christmas to see what Apple is going to announce. Most of us also are hoping for specific changes, here are my top wishes.

read more

Connecting Storekit to Firestore via Cloud Functions and webhooks

I've recently added subscriptions to my Critical Notes iOS app, using Apple's StoreKit. Here is how I hooked it all up to Firestore including server-side receipt validation.

read more

Clean up Firestore and Storage when deleting a document

When you delete a document in Firestore, its subcollections and their documents are not automatically recursively deleted. Here is a simple Cloud Function that takes care of it.

read more

After Vapor and Django comes.. Firestore

Over a year ago I wrote that I started working on a brand new side project, and that I was building the backend for that project. I started with Vapor 3, then made the same backend in Django REST Framework, and couldn't really choose between the two...

read more

Vapor 3 versus Django REST Framework

A little while ago I wrote about starting a new side project, where I was using Vapor 3 to build the backend. My initial impressions were extremely positive, but I ended up running into a few issues that made working with the framework a little bit...

read more