I’m ready to starting holding sessions of Tampa Bay Apple Coding Meetup, but I’m missing one thing: a place to hold them!
Prior to the pandemic, I’d been doing monthly meetups where I’d walk Tampa Bay’s developers through “code along with me” tutorials where I’d show them how to write native iOS apps in Swift such as:
A simple text editor
Pomodoro timer
“Magic 8-ball”
Weather app with geolocation
“Frogger” / “Crossy Road”-style game
An augmented reality app similar to the IKEA furniture app
A machine learning app that can identify specific images
It’s time to bring these meetups back!
I need a place in the Tampa Bay area where I can lead a group through an exercise where we get together and build an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Mac, or augmented reality app together. If you’d like to host such an event or know someone or some organization that would be willing to do this, please let me know via email.
I think we all understand that the poster actually means GitHub rather than Git. Personally, I think that cleaning up your code before putting it on Github is a good thing — after all, Harold Abelson put it best:
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
I’m bringing back the Tampa iOS Meetup in 2023 under a new name: Tampa Bay Apple Coding Meetup. If you’re in the Tampa Bay area and want to learn how to program Apple devices in Swift, this meetup will be for you!
I’ve got a fair bit of experience showing people how to build applications for Apple devices and technologies, from doing presentations on coding augmented reality apps for the iPhone…
…to co-authoring the book on iOS development…
…to writing all sorts of apps:
These meetups will follow my usual modus operandi:
We’ll define a simple app that we want to make for the iPhone/iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, or other Apple device.
Then we’ll look at the tools and techniques that will allow us to create that app.
And finally, you’ll code along with me as we build the app together. You’ll leave the meetup with either a complete app, or at least a part of the app that you can continue working on.
The goal is to help you learn coding or sharpen your skills by building apps for the preferred devices of the digerati!
I’m currently working on getting a space for the first meetup of Tampa Bay Apple Coding in January — watch this space for announcements!
Advent of Code is an annual event featuring Christmas-themed puzzles that are meant to be solved with code. Since 2015, tens of thousands of programmers have tackled the new puzzles that appear every day from December 1 through 25 at the stroke of midnight (U.S. Eastern standard time).
If you’ve been working on the same sort of programming problems day in and day out and feel that you’re in a coding rut, Advent of Code is a great way to sharpen your skills. If you’re learning a new programming language, Advent of Code’s challenges are a great way to discover the in and outs of your new language. If you’re interviewing for a developer position and a coding exercise is part of the process, Advent of Code can help prepare you.
In the video, I’ll walk you through the solutions for Day 1 of the 2015 and 2020 Advent of Code in Python. Combined with my Advent of Code article on the Auth0 by Okta blog, which covers even more challenges, it should help you get started with this year’s Advent of Code!
My newest article on the Auth0 Developer Blog is a two-part that covers adding authentication to Android apps built using the Jetpack Compose UI framework!
Here are the two parts:
Jetpack Compose Basics: An introduction to Jetpack Compose through building a single-screen app with composable functions and managing state the Jetpack Compose Way.
The main talk will feature André Crabb — a “once digital nomad settled in Tampa” — talking about “mobile app development, its evolution, and life as a digital nomad.” His talk outline includes:
Evolution of mobile development
Existing frameworks
Android
iOS
React Native + Expo
Other frameworks, but in not as great in detail as the ones above
Lifestyle of a digital nomad
Here’s the schedule:
6:00 – 6:30 pm: Networking
6:30 – 7:00pm: Intro slides + quick game
7:00 – 7:30 pm: Lightning talks, 5-10 minute talks anyone can come speak
7:30 – 9:00 pm – Main talk + networking time
This meetup will take place at USF in the “Education Building,” a.k.a. EDU 115, located on 4110 USF Apple Drive:
If you did that and actually competed with tik tok that’d be hilarious
— MrBeast (@MrBeast) October 31, 2022
Vine started as its own company in June 2012, Twitter acquired it in October 2012, and its first official release was in January 2013. Twitter announced that it would discontinue Vine in October 2016 and disabled all uploads.
If Vine could be turned into a TikTok competitor as YouTuber Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson suggests, it could help counter TikTok’s serioussecurityissues and help give Twitter a much-needed image boost.
Here’s the problem:
Musk has asked engineers to look at the old code. This would be a sensible thing if we were dealing with a hardware, mechanical, or physical artifact, but Vine is software. Even more challenging is the fact that it’s mobile software. That was first released in 2012 and last updated in 2016.
As software developer and product manager Sara Beykpour put it (and on Twitter, no less!):
some free advice, from someone who worked at Vine and also led the shutdown of Vine.
This code is 6+ years old. Some of it is 10+. You don’t want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over.
I have no inside knowledge of Vine, but I’d be willing to bet that the Android and iOS Vine apps were probably written as native apps. React Native wasn’t out until 2015, and every other cross-platform solution at the time (including Xamarin) wouldn’t have been up to the task.
In 2012, when Vine began, that would mean:
On Android: writing the app in Java using Eclipse (the stable 1.0 version of Android Studio wouldn’t come out until December 2014).
On iOS: writing the app in Objective-C, quite possibly using NIBs instead of storyboards.
Simply put — ancient stuff, at least by the standards of mobile development. While there are still some Java-based Android and Objective-C-based iOS projects out there, the majority of the top apps in the stores are written in either Kotlin or Swift.
It would be a good idea to have a handful of developers look over the old Vine code for an audit. There’s a chance that there might be a few useful ideas in there, possibly in feature switches that never got turned on. However, that old code will probably be useless as a starting point to build on in the short timeframe that Musk suggests for the relaunch of Vine.
