Tag: tools

  • Who is Emmet?

    I knew there was some magical way of entering all the the <HTML> boilerplate in Visual Studio Code as I’d seen it happen in several videos, and assumed is was some sort of macro expansion thing in the editor. Fast forward a few blog post readings and youtube viewings and I keep seeing tangential references…

  • ChatGPT’s code writing

    This week, the internet has been all about ChatGPT, the rather remarkable natural language AI with a very large model. If you’re a twitter user, you were probably amazed, but now eventually tired of seeing examples of it’s output. I’ll add to that with an example of a SwifUI CoreData based todo app it wrote…

  • Copying a file via SSH

    I have a Raspberry Pi on my home network that I purchased for some project that I can’t actually recall. It gets used for all sorts of completely unnecessary things such as playing with node.js or a private git server. To add to the list of things that I do on pi that could be…

  • Mock Data

    One of the things we need during app development is some data to play with. It would be unethical for me to use real student data to test my app, even if I wasn’t sharing screenshots of the development here, so I’ll need to build some mock data. The prospect of making 400 rows of…

  • iOS 16 Developer Mode

    I updated my iPhone to iOS16 this morning, and tonight when I went to run one of my apps, it complained that it needed Developer mode. This is a new, probably wise, way to avoid dodgy apps being loaded on a phone. I don’t know exactly how you’d do that, but then I’m not a…

  • SwiftLint

    I was watching a Tim Ruscica video about the things that highly effective developers do, and it called to mind a book I read years ago called Code Complete. It is the only book I ever owned that I immediately purchased the new edition when it came out. It was about the meta stuff around…

  • Testing, testing

    I have unit testing in my list of goals, and if I’m going to throw this space trimming macOS utility up on the web, now might be a good time to figure out how to add unit tests to a project, how to write them, and how to run them. XCode is well set up…

  • How to upgrade XCode and Swift

    With the September release of XCode 14 and Swift 5.7 it was time for my first update – I looked in “About” for an update link but there wasn’t one – so if you’re as dense as me, the tip is to head to the Mac App Store and have a look at the Updates…

  • Visual Studio Code

    I’ve noticed Visual Studio Code in a few videos, and admired what a clean interface it had, and was impressed how opening a terminal window was automatically in the directory you were working in. I had a need to write some html/css, and some C++ in the last couple of days, so that seemed like…

  • Oh My Zsh

    I’ve been playing in the zsh shell since I started on the Missing Semester, and was wondering how to get my git branch name in the prompt. A few googles later, I’ve installed Oh My Zsh, and added the git and macos plugins. Pretty.