Project Based Learning

A couple of times in conversations on Fireside Swift and Swift Over Coffee the presenters have talked about the danger of just doing more and more tutorials to learn programming, and the benefit, in contrast, of building your own real app. Although I am very much still benefiting from the 100DaysOfSwiftUI I have been seeing some of the upside of working on a real app in the last day and a half.

From my search history, I’ve learned about:

• Exporting files
• Regex
• Disabling autocorrect in a search box so the search doesn’t re-run incorrectly the second you click out of it
• You can’t use .onDelete without a ForEach
• There are good websites for converting CSV to JSON, and they mostly run in the browser which is good if you’re using sensitive data
• FileDocument
• URLs to the sandbox
• How UUIDs are really unique (spoiler, there’s only a tiny chance they’re not)
• The frustratingly large number of ways to format dates
• Sorting a FetchRequest in reverse order
• Change in initial values of pickers in iOS16
• It’s possible, but not as easy as I was imagining to add your own data to the Environment
• How to extract parts of strings
• The Array(Set(array)) method of eliminating duplicates – I actually knew, but couldn’t remember the details
• Using a toggle switch
• Jumping around in NavigationViews
• Making a bottom tab bar
• Dynamic filtering of a FetchRequest – revisited the @twostraws method
• Adding a search bar to a list
• Using url response to see why a fetch wasn’t working
• Refreshed the trick to convert from snake_case in JSON
• Copying files to a remote SSH
• Generating fake JSON data
• The range of an Int32
• Installing apache on the Pi
• Looked up what the mergeByPropertyObjectTrump rules actually are
• How to get the XCode preview back when you accidentally close it

I think it’s significant that it’s a real app. When I’m just noodling around making a fun app, if something seems hard when you look into it, there’s the temptation to just do something else. In a real app you need to push through. For example I was bogged on having a search bar that live updated the list of results returned from Core Data as the user types. But this was a core part of the user experience required in this app, so I had to push through and learn the answers.