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Current Events Programming What I’m Up To

RW Community Care: Free community support for mobile developers (and aspiring mobile developers, too!)

One of the reasons I write for raywenderlich.com — the premier mobile developer tutorial site — is that they’re wonderful people to work with, because they’re such good people. And as good people, they’ve put together something to help developers during this time of pandemic and quarantine: RW Community Care. It’s a series of office […]

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Career Programming

Programmer interview challenge 1, revisited again: “Anagram” in Swift, the easy and hardcore way

In the past two articles, I’ve been writing about a challenge that’s often given to programmers at a tech interview: Write a program that determines if two words are anagrams. In the first article, I wrote a basic Python solution. In the second article, I refined the Python solution and then based a JavaScript solution on […]

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Users

UI developer hint: Test your apps in both light mode and dark mode!

Tap the image to see it at full size. I recently made the mistake of not double-checking my UIs in light mode and dark mode, which left the checklist app in the book I co-wrote unusable in dark mode: I’d set the text color to the system default text color, which becomes white in dark […]

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Career

Requiring eight years experience for a junior position is ridiculous (or: How to get a job, part 1)

Take a look at the snippets above, which come from the job description on LinkedIn for a junior front-end developer at Boeing. I’ve highlighted key parts in red. Note those requirements: Either a bachelor’s degree in a technical field or 12 years’ development experience? They’re seriously overestimating what you learn in a computer science undergrad program […]

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Current Events Reading Material

I’ve finished revising the book!

I just put the last chapter of my revisions to iOS Apprentice, 8th edition to bed. It’s in the editors’ and layout’s hands now. To me, this isn’t just any book. I learned iOS programming from an earlier edition, and from there, became a regular reader of the site that publishes the book, raywenderlich.com. When the […]

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Career Current Events Editorial Entrepreneur

Reasons for startups to be optimistic (My guest editorial for Startup Digest Tampa Bay’s newsletter)

I was the guest author of this week’s Startup Digest Tampa Bay newsletter, which was sent out on Monday. I was free to write about any topic that I thought subscribers to the newsletter might find interesting or useful, and I chose to write about reasons startup founders and members have to be optimistic even […]

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Current Events Programming Reading Material

Did I mention that I’m revising a book that I co-wrote last year?

I may be out of a job, but from now until the end of next week, I do have work: finishing the revision of iOS Apprentice, Eighth Edition, a book that teaches you how to write iPhone and iPad apps, even if you have no prior programming experience. In its 1200+ pages, the book walks you […]