I have done all that while moving across countries, cities, uprooting my life and dealing with fear, uncertainty and instability in the process. How do you expect a man to grow in such harsh conditions? How do you expect him to feel safe? What do you think it does to him? What do you make of him? Is he a free spirit? Do you really want to live his life? Does he come across as a jerk? Can you accept him for who he is? Is he worthy to be celebrated as a human? Does he deserve love? Can you really love him?

How do I expect order when I am made of chaos?

I was well past the deadline of giving notice to my flat. Which in practice would mean being liable for money I wouldn’t have and had to borrow while also getting my ass kicked back down the ladder. Imagine playing high stakes poker. It’s the last round. You have lost all of your money and this is the final hand. You decide to bet the house on a last ditch attempt to win everything back. You win the hand.

I started a new role in June, on a 6 months probation. I started building myself back up again. Saving money to prepare for the next emergency.

It’s been almost 6 months and for the past couple of weeks I finally had a feeling of peace and stability. I would even go as far as to say I had been the happiest and most relaxed I had ever been since a brief period in my twenties.

Then calamity came knocking at my door.

On Thursday night at 23:00, I heard a loud, persistent, urgent knock on the front door. Bang! bang! bang! I opened the door to see a man from the fire brigade instructing me to leave the property. The building on which I am housed was at a risk of a collapse. I had 5 minutes to go. No time to pack a bag. Things were happening so fast before I knew it I was one of about 70 people in a Sports Leisure Centre with a blanket and a chair to sit on. I spent the night barely getting any sleep.

With very little explanation and a lack of timely, prompt and regular updates, my mind started filling in the blanks for me. All I could think of was the worst. I couldn’t believe that having just spent the last year building my life back up, it could all just crumble again in an instant.

I thought of how I could lose all my possessions should the building collapse to the ground. How I would have to use months of savings to find temporary accommodation, buy clothes and basic household items. How this was putting at jeopardy my job and how I could lose it. How I would have to build myself back up yet again.

I started feeling very vulnerable, tired and powerless. All I wanted in that moment was to have a shower, take a nap and to feel safe in the presence of a friend, family or a loved one.

I looked at the glass screen of my phone, opened up the contacts app and starting scrolling through my contacts.

• This person seems upset with me and don’t know why.
• This person hasn’t responded the last few times I have reached out to.
• This person is just an acquaintance.
• This person is an ex.
• This person and I have lost touch.
• This person is going through some hard time right now.

It slowly dawned on me that there is no-one I feel close enough to, don’t fear rejection, one who lives in close proximity, one I can reach out to, one I can rely on. I am by myself. Which, to be fair, has felt true for most of my life. I was staring at an empty glass. I felt like crying.

After 24 hours I finally made it back home. It’s corny but it’s true. Home sweet home. I channelled my mom’s attitude who knows how to have fun, lift others and be full of life even when she is hurting. I had a hot shower, trimmed my hair, shaved my beard, put on a shirt, my perfume and headed out to clear my head. I wanted to be in the presence of others, feel connected and alive.

I wanted to feel human again.

Between my 9 years relationship coming to an end, resigning from a workplace that was making me miserable, the UK economy being in a dire state and the job market in the tech industry facing its biggest crisis probably since the dot com boom, I am heading towards bankruptcy.

Fuck that.

Today I basically need to give notice to my flat and with that start the clock. I have 2 months to find a job or pack my shit and fuck off of London. That means going back to Greece and live with my mom. The last time I lived with my mom was 30 years ago. What happens after that? Who fucking knows. I’ll just go for a swim.

I don’t know what needs to go into this post. I have stated how I want this website to be mostly about human stories. How life is fucking messy. I am just not in the mood to be reflective right now when I am in the middle of my life crashing down like a house of cards.

I know very well the challenges I have been facing ever since I was a child. I always did. I am aware of the risks I am taking and what makes my life hard. I am fortunate to be in good health so it’s easy to tell me I am being over-dramatic; offering unsolicited opinions and lecturing from the comfort of your perfectly knit life you have wrapped in a bow telling me I have a choice.

Fuck off.

To distribute Delta Riley went through the effort of creating an alternative App Store, AltStore. AlStore on the iPhone which is now officially supported by Apple as of iOS¹ 17.4 is made possible thanks to EU regulation.

Riley’s perseverance, ingeniously, courage and resolve are commendable. Alongside Shane Gill they accomplished more than I could ever do with Windmill.

I tip my hat to you both 🎩.
Well fucking done.

Related

• Windmill for iPhone Rejected From the App Store

I have been absent from the developer scene in years, cause life! I had a great time and got a buzz out of giving this talk. My favourite moment was when people clapped at the big reveal! Thank you! It was good to see some familiar faces from back in the NSConf¹ days 👋🏽.

I want to give a special shout out to Daniel Jalkut who gave a talk at NSConf (sometime between 2013 and 2015) where he went on to debug Mail.app. Daniel² was the first one to talk about frames and registers that I had come across. He was an inspiration. I hope this talk can act as an inspiration to others!

Related

• How to debug a “class JKserializer is implemented in both” case (Part 1)
• Sound Debugging

References

• DateFormatter, fixed-format dates and iOS Simulator
• Pause on a symbol outside your code
• Debug Swift debugging with LLDB
• Objective-C Runtime/objc_msgSend
• Clang 14.0.0 documentation
• lldb – The Debugger
• Registers
• Customizing Existing Classes, Programming with Objective-C

As late as 2010, about 10 years later and the introduction of the Euro in Greece, Sterling in the UK, transferring money to a Greek Euro bank account would still cost tends of pounds and take days to complete. The only difference is that going to a branch wasn’t required anymore. You could setup, make and monitor the progress of a transfer all with the power of the internet, using mobile or web banking. Roughly, you would come to expect the following in terms of the time taken and associated cost:

• £XX (tens) of pounds in fees from a UK bank to “convert and make” a transfer
• €X of euros in fees from a Greek bank account to “accept” the transfer
• X days for the transfer to complete and the money to become “available” in your account

Say, to send £1000, you would have to pay £30 to a UK bank, €5 to a Greek bank and wait 3 business days for the money to become available. It was widely accepted and understood that a transfer on a Friday evening, could mean your money was outside of your control and unavailable until Tuesday.

Over the last 10 years there’s been many changes in banking that albeit slowly, have lead to a steady overhaul of the banking system over time. Changes to KYC², the introduction of the E-Money Directive³, SEPA⁴, the Cross-border Payments Regulation and the migration to IBAN for bank accounts to name a few.

In my opinion, these changes in the regulatory framework is what eventually forced banks and new participants in the market to innovate using technology.

To the point where, today, I can send £1000 from a UK bank account with a total cost of £4.49 and have the money available within seconds to my Greek account, even on a Sunday. I believe this is only the beginning of the banking transformation and one factor that can play a role and have a knock-on effect on how we think of money/currency, what is the role of a bank account, where/how we get paid/credit, how a tax residency is defined.

As someone in tech and with some experience working in fintech⁵, I find this prospect more exciting and the environment ripe for the next innovation in banking/finance. Keep in mind that technology followed regulation reform that paved the way; not the other way around.

I see the light UK drizzle outside. Tears of happiness are running down my eyes. I can’t believe I’m back. I made it. I’m back. Back in my old flat. That’s a funny story. With my old furniture back. A bit rundown but the same. Like my body.

I had no idea. I would have never imagined. I wouldn’t believe you if you told me. Five years ago, I was running away. Now I’ve run home. It’s been less than a week yet it feels like a month. Feels like I’ve never left. I am fortunate. I know I am. I am also a survivor. I can’t believe I’ve survived this but I did.

In these past 5 years I found my father. In these past 5 years, I did years of therapy to get to the bottom of my anxiety and depression. In these past 5 years I got to know myself better that ever before.

I am glad I did this. Even though I didn’t know I had to. I neither had the insight nor the awareness 5 years ago. Imagine having to “put on hold” your life as it is today and go away for 5 years to work on yourself, pay your dues, pay back the debt from the time you’ve borrowed to keep going. I was in my late thirties. I now am in my early forties. I feel good! I feel good because of how much I’ve grown. I feel good knowing this is behind me.

As I was getting ready to leave Athens, I met with a friend. He said to me, “This is the most relaxed I’ve ever seen you as you are about to pack up and leave again.”

I am not running away anymore.

Rachel asked me to give an interview as an alumni about my experience arriving and working at CERN.

We talk about the circumstances that lead to my arrival at CERN, my life there as a technical student and how CERN defined my career trajectory for the next 10 years. Also, the great people that supported me and taught me valuable lessons at the age of 21 that shaped me as a professional.

Rachel was really accommodating and asked questions that dug deep into the human psyche. It’s a story I was happy to share and I would like to thank Rachel for giving me the opportunity to do so.

Know that doing the course is only the beginning. You will still have to dedicate time and effort practicing what you have learned. Building verylargebox as a side project was what helped me build confidence and accumulate experience.

Developing for mobile was fast becoming an essential part of your business strategy at the time. The iPhone was still in its infancy in 2011 so not much experience was needed or expected. It might be a higher bar to clear today but demand, as far as I can tell, is still high. As a seasoned software engineer it was easier for me to get a job and get started so keep that in mind.

If you are young and only just starting out as a software engineer, see if you can get a some work experience through school. Alternatively, reach out to companies that do iOS and ask whether they offer any short term internships.

Related

• AIESEC - “AIESEC is a global platform for young people to develop their leadership potential through international internships and volunteer opportunities.”

I finally took the plunge and booked a flight. I stayed for a week and I remember feeling unsettled at least for the first few days. Anticipating that something bad was going to happen at any moment. At the same time, I was impressed by the industrial development I could bear witness to.

This wasn’t a country paralysed in fear. People weren’t just dragging their feet. They where studying, working, falling in love, raising children, building and decorating their houses, going for coffee, surfing at the sea. They celebrated life, making the most of it.

In my head I couldn’t reconcile the two. How can people, under constant threat, live life seemingly carefree?

– “Are you not afraid?” I asked.
– “To live in fear is to not live your life.” Eli responded.

It was a profound statement to hear back then. Still, I believe there is more to what Eli said. To live without fear is to live life in solidarity. It’s ok to be afraid; you are not alone.

Related

• Fear, support and endurance in the face of adversity - “Sometimes, comfort found in your presence is what people look for as they endure hardship.”
• Anxiety looks different in men - “When a man explodes in anger over something seemingly insignificant, he may appear like just a jerk. But he could be anxious.”

Swift provides a Foundation API to serialise from and to JSON “by implementing the Encodable and Decodable protocols on your custom types”.

The team at Apple has also written a great article about Encoding and Decoding Custom Types that provides a few examples to get you started and a few ones that require “a custom implementation of Encodable and Decodable”. I want to add two more examples that may not be immediately obvious after you read the article.

Both examples build upon the knowledge you have on encoding and decoding custom types from the article above. So consider that a prerequisite. The first one shows how to decode only part of a JSON document. This can be useful when working with an API where you are only interested in part of the response.

The second example is useful typically in an API that uses JSON to encode a “data” or “error” response. In this case, the HTTP response code is typically 200 OK yet the actual JSON response communicates whether the request has been successful, returning the data requested or unsuccessful in which case an error is returned in the JSON payload.

Decode only part of a JSON document

{
  "user": "qnoid",
  "created_at": "2021-01-19T18:47:01+0200",
  "text_entries": [{
      "text": "Hello!"
    },
    {
      "text": "¡Hola!"
    }
  ]
}

In the example above, we are only interested in the text entries returned and have no need for the rest of the data. Consider an Entry type describing each text entry that stores the “text” and a TextEntries type that holds the Array of entries:

struct Entry: Codable {
    let text: String
}

struct TextEntries {
    enum Key: String, CodingKey {
        case entries = "text_entries"
    }
    
    let values: [Entry]
}

In the example below, the TextEntries type is extended to conform to the Decodable protocol by implementing its required initialiser, init(from:):

extension TextEntries: Decodable {
    
    init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
        let response = try decoder.container(keyedBy: Key.self)
        var entries = try response.nestedUnkeyedContainer(forKey: .entries)
        
        var values = [Entry]()
        while !entries.isAtEnd {
            let entry = try entries.decode(Entry.self)
            values.append(entry)
        }
        
        self.values = values
    }
}

The TextEntries type can now be decoded using the JSONDecoder:

let entries = try JSONDecoder().decode(TextEntries.self, from: data)

Let’s dymistify. JSONDecoder uses the initialiser in the TextEntries type to decode the data. In our case, the root object in the JSON is a collection of name/value pairs ¹. The try decoder.container(keyedBy: Key.self) “‌returns the data stored in this decoder as represented in a container keyed by the given key type.”. In simple terms, the code will try to interpret the root object as a dictionary where its keys are typed by the TextEntries.Key enum type. The TextEntries.Key defines only one key present, namely the case entries (“text_entries” in JSON), as this is the only one we are interested in. The response variable represents that dictionary.

Next, we want to extract the array of text entries. Hence the call to nestedUnkeyedContainer(forKey:) which returns an UnkeyedDecodingContainer type. You can think of the UnkeyedDecodingContainer as an iterator where every call to decode() decodes the type at the current index, starting at 0, then increments the index. When the iterator is exhausted, isAtEnd will return false.

At the end of the initialiser, the values are initialised with every entry in the “text_entries” Array and a TextEntries instance is returned.

entries.values.map { entry in
    entry.text
}

Decode a custom success/error JSON response

{
  "success": true,
  "contents": {
    "text_entries": [{
        "text": "Hello!",
      },
      {
        "text": "¡Hola!",
      }
    ]
  }
}

{
  "success": false,
  "error": {
    "code": 1,
    "message": "User not found"
  }
}

In this case you have two possible JSON responses thus the decision as to which one to decode must be done at runtime. One is considered a success with the “contents” (or “payload”) holding the data you are interested in. The other one is a failure that includes an “error”. The Result type is ideal to describe this “exclusive or” truth and the init(catching:) initialiser is fitting in trying to decode a successful response or throw the returned error in case of a failure. Let’s see how that looks in practice.

Consider the Error type that stores the “code” and “message”:

struct Error: Codable {
    enum Key: String, CodingKey {
        case error
    }

    let code: Int
    let message: String
    
    init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
        let response = try decoder.container(keyedBy: Key.self)
        let contents = try response.nestedContainer(keyedBy: CodingKeys.self, forKey: .error)
        
        self.code = try contents.decode(Int.self, forKey: .code)
        self.message = try contents.decode(String.self, forKey: .message)
    }
}

The Error type can now be decoded using the JSONDecoder:

let error = try JSONDecoder().decode(Error.self, from: data)

Now consider the Contents type with an “entries” property of type TextEntries:

struct Contents {
    enum Key: String, CodingKey {
        case contents
    }
    enum CodingKeys: String, CodingKey {
        case entries = "text_entries"
    }

    let entries: TextEntries
}

extension Contents: Decodable {
    init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
        let response = try decoder.container(keyedBy: Key.self)
        let contents = try response.nestedContainer(keyedBy: CodingKeys.self, forKey: .contents)
        
        self.entries = try contents.decode(TextEntries.self, forKey: .entries)
    }
}

As a reminder, the Contents is at the root object in the JSON data. First, we obtain the container as keyed by the “contents” key, followed by the “text_entries” as the TextEntries type:

struct TextEntries {
    let values: [Entry]
}

extension TextEntries: Decodable {
    init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
        var entries = try decoder.unkeyedContainer()
        
        var values = [Entry]()
        while !entries.isAtEnd {
            let entry = try entries.decode(Entry.self)
            values.append(entry)
        }
        
        self.values = values
    }
}

Notice how in this case the TextEntries decoding is part of the Contents decoding hence the call to unkeyedContainer() as this is done under the “text_entries” key². The Contents type can now be decoded using the JSONDecoder:

let contents = try JSONDecoder().decode(Contents.self, from: data)

contents.entries.values.map { entry in
    entry.text
}

Before we can write the closure expected by init(catching:) for the Result type, the Error type must be declared as a Swift.Error that we can throw:

extension Error: Swift.Error, CustomNSError {
    public static var errorDomain: String = "com.qnoid"
    
    var errorCode: Int {
        return code
    }
    
    var errorUserInfo: [String : Any] {
        [NSLocalizedDescriptionKey : message]
    }
}

With both Content and Error types defined, here is how we can now construct a Result.

let result = Result<Contents, Swift.Error> {
        do {
            return try JSONDecoder().decode(Contents.self, from: data)
        } catch {
            //log `error` in the catch block
            throw try JSONDecoder().decode(Error.self, from: data)
        }
    }

Effectively, the closure will try to decode the Contents type. In case that fails, there is an assumption³ that instead this is a failure response and the included Error is thrown. Keep in mind that the try to decode the Error might fail, in which case the Result type will throw the Swift.Error as thrown by the decode(from:) function.

This is the calling code:

do {
    let contents = try result.get()
    contents.entries.values.map { entry in
        entry.text
    }
}
catch {
    error
}

Resources

• codable.playground

Related

• Using Swift Result and flatMap “Create A Result From A Throwing Expression”

I watched a few documentaries on the history of video games and the rise of an industry.

• Insert Coin by Joshua Tsui.
• From Bedrooms to Billions: The Playstation Revolution by Nicola and Anthony Caulfield.
• From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years! by Nicola and Anthony Caulfield.
• From Bedrooms to Billions by Nicola and Anthony Caulfield.
• High Score by William Acks, France Costrel, Sam LaCroix and Melissa Wood.

I am a sucker for these types of documentaries. Documentaries that provide a retrospective, hearing the stories from the people that made history. Nostalgia definitely played a part in my enjoyment as well. I grew up in the 80s and the 90s so I saw the video game industry unfold before my eyes.

What I find most fascinating is how people came together and how their creativity flourished. I wish I could know more about both the personal and societal circumstances that lead to that. Granted, back then the boom of personal computing and the video game industry was just getting started. Still, what I want to know is how people had the time, support, resources, attitude and appetite to take risks and pursue their dreams?

The gaming industry hasn’t stopped as far as I can tell. My guess is that there are way more indie developers now. On the other end of the spectrum, video game productions are growing bigger and bigger. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage in diversity and development of video games.

The rest of the tech scene looks and feels much different. You have “indie hackers” chasing monthly recurring revenue. Startups thinking of becoming the next billion dollar company. Venture Capitalists betting money left and right playing the odds of winning back tenfold on an acquisition or a public listing.

We live in a world that is more connected, technology is more accessible, the bar to entry for manufacturing and production is lower yet Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google pretty much dominate.

It seems like we have all become numb, waiting for the next big tech event, year after year to hear about the “new innovations” and latest products.

What happened to the tinkerers, creatives, rebels and dreamers in the tech industry? What will it take to create a movement? I’m dying to be part of one right now.

Related

• Video Game Prices Are Going Up for the First Time in 15 Years
• Cyberpunk 2077 has already recouped its development costs, CD Projekt says
• Insert Coin - Where to watch Insert Coin
• From Bedrooms to Billions - The studio behind the “From Bedrooms to Billions” films.
• High Score - On Netflix
• The Documentary Exploring Midway, Mortal Kombat & NBA Jam - Noclip Podcast #44 - How I learned about the “Insert Coin” documentary
• From fatalities to flip tricks: Josh Tsui’s 20 years of Chicago game development
• Noclip - Noclip is creating Video Game Documentaries
• Remaster - A show about playing games and making games. Shahid Kamal Ahmad who appears on the Playstation Revolution documentary is on it. I love listening to this show.

Just recently I came across a Q&A with Yanni at The Grammy Museum with journalist Steve Hochman at the Los Angeles, USA dated September 18, 2014. Here are a few things that stood out and spoke to me on personal level for different reasons. I do recommend that you watch the whole session. I have edited the responses for brevity down to the specifics that caught my attention.

On creativity and judgement. How the two don’t go together.

Question: “Being a creative soul, is your mind constantly working? Are you able to quiet your mind and if so, how?”

“You must not judge it. Judgement and creativity are opposites. They cannot exist together. Because as soon as you judge what’s coming in, you are outside looking at yourself and the creative moment has just ended.”

On the importance of technology being accessible. How something as “primitive” as a short wave radio has technological merit and can be empowering as long as freedom of expression exists and there is no centralised control.

Question: “You came from a place that was a fairly small town and you didn’t speak any english when you came here. I am curious what music you were exposed to there?”

“We didn’t have a turntable or a tape recorder so the only music I could hear was on the radio. […] At night I would stay, I have a short wave radio and since I was living in southern Greece, I had access to all of the music from Italy, Rome I could hear all the stuff, all the way to north Africa, Morocco, Middle East and I would sit there and I would listen to all types of music.”

On depression, the importance and significance to feel worthy as a human above all of your titles and achievements. His depression kicked in having reached new heights at the time. Performing live at the Acropolis and being the only westerner to perform at the Taj Mahal and the Forbidden City at the time.

“There was a time in my life that I got lost. I went through a depression. […] I run home to Greece, stayed with my mom and dad and didn’t play the piano for a whole year. I did not touch it. I just wanted to know that I could be a normal human being. That there was a Yanni without the music.”

On what every artist strives for and how time is the ultimate judge.

“I was thinking, when I started writing music. What could I possibly do that could last more than a week. Maybe a year. People are going to hear a song then a year later they can go ok, next one, I can’t hear this one anymore. Every artist strives for that. We all strive to create things that stand the test of time. […] Ultimately, I will never know. I can’t decide that. You have to decide that and the ultimate judge is time and I have nothing to do with it.”

I feel tired. Tired and lost.

Related

• Yanni - No borders, no boundaries - “A 60-min documentary from PBS show, narrated by Christopher Plummer. This is a unique film journal describing the extraordinary effort, purpose and achievement of Yanni’s groundbreaking performances at Taj Mahal, India and Forbidden City, China, 1997.”
• Coding - “It’s like the 80s all over again, where you plug in a machine, and you can instantly start coding. I for one miss that.”
• Coding challenges as part of an interview - “Nobody is watching me type and judging.”
• Over a year since Apple gave me an ultimatum on Windmill - “I got especially emotional hearing an audio clip of a book seller pleading to Jeff Bezos to restore their business operations so that they could earn their livelihood.”
• An Apple Developer for 10 years - “On a personal level, Windmill allows me to have freedom of expression, be creative and pursue excellence.”

First and foremost, to obtain a bachelor, you must prove that you can research. In other words, gather enough information on a subject that will help with your understanding of the problem.

As a practitioner of software engineering, that could be doing research on design patterns and being able to write code in the one that is best suited for the task at hand.

For a master’s degree. Not only you have to research but also draw your own conclusions from that research. You have to be able to put two and two together. You need to prove that you have mastered the knowledge enough that you can wield it.

Each individual knowledge of generics, asynchronous programming and http may not be enough. You will need to be able to combine them in a meaningful way to write an http client capable of sending requests, serialising responses and calling back with results.

For a PhD, you have to read on existing research, draw your own conclusions, do your own research that leads to something new which in turn can be added back to the knowledge pile. That could be because you realise that existing knowledge is not enough. You need to break new ground.

In a programming language that you use, that could be working on the interpreter or the compiler to introduce new features to the language that help you write code that previously wasn’t possible.

It is fair to say that each stage takes hard work. It certainly can’t be done on a whim. It takes time to do research, evaluate, comprehend, apply and expand your knowledge.

This mantra of knowledge gathering and application isn’t unique to a University study. It is very much true as part of a professional career too. It has been my guide to a professional conduct and in critically evaluating my place on a subject matter.

Related

• We need to raise the bar on software development “Finally you, the developer, study, practice, challenge, repeat. Read books, attend courses. Get structured, formal education.”

Everyone at Poolside FM, know that joining you at the pool has brought joy to my life.

Thank you.

The App Store is not simply a marketplace – it is part of a larger bundle of tools, technologies and services that Apple makes available to developers to develop and create great applications for iPhone, iPad and other Apple products. We know you knows this. You have been a major beneficiary of this investment and support. You have made great use of Apple-provided tools, such as TestFlight, VOIP, Stickers, iCloud document storage, ARKit, Messages Extension, ReplayKit, and Push Notifications. To highlight one example, for years now, you have used Apple’s groundbreaking programming language, Swift. […] Apple doesn’t charge separately for the use of Swift or any of the other tools that you have used to develop great apps on iOS.

Not only has Apple supplied tools and technologies for you to build your apps, but it also provided a marketplace—the App Store—to help make them a success. Because of the App Store, you have been able to get this app and other apps into the hands of millions instantly and at no cost, as Apple charges nothing upfront to distribute apps that are free to download. […] Of course, you could not have achieved this success without great apps, but it nonetheless underscores the value Apple brings to developers like you.

Still, you have many ways to reach consumers, including through Android stores, PC-based platforms, consoles (Xbox, Nintendo, Play Station) and your very own app marketplace.

Apple has hundreds of thousands of developers distributing apps on the App Store, and Apple is proud that it offers them all, from the student in her living room to some of the largest companies in the world, the same terms and opportunities.

The App Store is not a public utility.

Sincerely,
Apple

Exhibit E, Email exhibits from Epic v. Apple.

Related

• What has become of Apple?
• Over a year since Apple gave me an ultimatum on Windmill
• An Apple Developer for 10 years

Assign a project to a team, Xcode Help

This issue went completely off the radar, for weeks, as I have been focused on writing a framework instead, hence never had the need to run code on a device. I reached out to Apple for help and 10 days later here is the gist from their response.

I escalated your issue to the senior desk, and have been advised to tell you that Apple Developer Program Support only provides direct assistance to Developers that hold active Apple Developer Program memberships.

Effectively Apple says it cannot help because I am not a paid member.

Leaving aside the fact that I had been an Apple Developer for 10 years until I stopped this year, since when does the “I cannot run code I write on hardware I own” started being a paid, active Apple Developer Program membership support ticket?

Apple may claim that all you need is “just an Apple ID” to “access Xcode, software downloads” and “test your apps on devices” in their Apple Membership support page yet it casually dismisses the fact “I cannot” under the pretext of “not an active Apple Developer”.

Now, I believe this to be some misconfiguration on Apple’s backend combined with the level of support you have come to expect from an enteprise company that Apple has become, still this is an indication on where Apple’s priorites lie.

Apple has been on a very slippery slope over the years, methodically excercising control on distributing and running software on Apple platforms while at the same time trivialising and commercialising software.

Are we on a path where being a software developer will only be a profession exercised as part of an established business? With distribution only controlled by Apple and the only means to deliver software via the App Store? In this dystopian future how much freedom do we have over devices we own and code we write as independent software engineers?

The main reason I stopped the development of Windmill wasn’t because Apple rejected Windmill on the iPhone. I stopped because Apple made it pretty clear it wasn’t happy with Windmill and brought forward violations of my Apple Developer Membership agreement.

With Apple now threatening to cut Epic off from iOS and Mac Developer tools by closing down their Apple Developer account based on violations of the App Store agreement, this is exactly the kind of retaliation I feared at the time.

It’s upsetting, sadenning, madenning and troubling because I love the Swift language, the Apple SDK, the devices and the development platform yet Apple seems hell bent on ruining it all with its petulance, not having the courage to accept it is in the wrong.

I’ve been a self-employed dev ever since I became an adult (over 35 years). The Apple platform has been my main base of income for the last 30. I’m invested in this platform. And suddenly Apple wants to change the rules - from being a provider of a platform and infrastructure to the one controlling who can use that platform and who can’t - I feel immensely threatened by this. This is not progress, this is the opposite. Thomas Tempelmann

Update (23 Aug 2020)

I pushed back

I should be able to run code on devices I own. You don’t need to be part of the Apple Developer Program, https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/

None of the support documents you have provided help with the issue. I am unable to sign any code I write to run on any of the devices I own. That is a Mac, an iPhone and an Apple TV right.

While I understand Apple cannot provide “free support” to non paid members, this isn’t something that the Apple Developer Forums can help me with.

This is something that only Apple can and needs to act on. Please escalate this.

Appreciated

Only to get the same response

As previously advised our department, Apple Developer Program Support is an administrative team that assists our Developers with the creation and maintenance of their Apple Developer Program memberships. Therefore, the support we have provided up to this point is the limit to what we can provide given that that your membership is not active. Thank you for your understanding.

I pushed even more

You are putting a $99 ransom fee so that I can get support on what is meant to be working as expected.
Xcode reports “No Teams” for the Apple ID when I should be assigned to a “Personal Team” so that I am able to launch apps on devices I own.

https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/11.4/index.html?localePath=en.lproj#/devaf282080a>

This is unacceptable.

You have clearly demonstrated that you are [not] able to solve this.
I demand you assign someone else about this case.

At which point I was assigned a “senior advisor with Apple Developer Programme Support” who resolved the issue in 3 days.

So that was a total of 16 days. Make of that what you will. The writing is on the wall. The risk is only growing larger. The risk of being locked out of your account, the risk of being asked to pay Apple 30% of your revenue, the risk of not being able to write code for your devices.

I want to run miles away from what Apple has now become.

Related

• The Windmill source code is now public “These are times where running software, on your computer (desktop or mobile), unfettered is near impossible.”
• Six Colours, “Apple is now the IBM that fans booed in 1984, or the Microsoft that fans booed in 1997”
• Epic Precendent
• On Monopolies, Apple, and Epic
• Concrete freedoms
• Jeff Johnson “Prior to the introduction of Gatekeeper in 2012, Mac developers didn’t need to sign a contract with Apple to distribute software outside the Mac App Store.”

Yesterday, I watched live a session by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on “Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law | Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.”

It so happened that yesterday, was the 1 year anniversary of the post Where is Windmill on the iPhone?.

Hearing the committee standing up for small business owners and individuals trying to support their family and employees, calling out corporations’ tactics on excercising control with a firm grip over people’s freedoms to operate on a free market while also hindering innovation brought back memories.

I got especially emotional hearing an audio clip of a book seller pleading to Jeff Bezos to restore their business operations so that they could earn their livelihood.

It’s fair to say that Apple got the least amount of attention and scrutiny by far.

Apple arguably got off the lightest of any of the companies in today’s hearing, if only by volume of questions: Tim Cook got just 35, compared to 59 for Bezos, 62 for Mark Zuckerberg, and 61 for Sundar Pichai

Casey Newton - Antitrust finally gets its hearing

With this enquiry as a landmark, I feel now is the time to share a few more details on what happened behind the scenes last summer as I was fighting to earn a living having spent countless months working on Windmill burning through the last of my savings. I want to also share some emails that capture my thoughts and emotions as I was going through the motions. I will also share, in full, the letter of appeal that I sent to the App Review Team.

Timeline

May 20, 2019: Windmill is approved on TestFlight for beta testing.
May 22, 2019: Windmill is “Waiting for Review” in the App Store.
June 12, 2019: I send a “Status Request”.
June 22, 2019: I email Phil Schiller bringing the case to his attention.
June 22, 2019: I get a call from the App Review Team where I am being given the reasons why Windmill on the iPhone will be rejected.
June 22, 2019: Windmill is “Rejected”.
June 26, 2019: I send an 8 pages “Letter of Appeal” to the App Review Team with the following:

1. An overarching description that explains, what Windmill does, why I think it’s useful for developers, why it does not violate the App Store Guidelines and Apple Developer Program License Agreement, how Apple benefits by approving Windmill.
2. The security considerations and implementation details that went into Windmill, for full transparency in an effort to make Apple feel comfortable about Windmill.
3. In detail, why I believe Windmill complies with the App Store Review Guidelines and the Apple Developer Program License Agreement
4. Final thoughts

July 3, 2019: “Based on the current material, the original rejection feedback remains valid.”
July 3, 2019: I send a message to the App Review Team asking for clarification on what grounds Windmill is rejected and for feedback to help me work towards making Windmill compliant.
July 9, 2019: I get a call from the App Review Team where I am being told that Windmill, “holistically” is not appropriate. This decision was made in collaboration with the App Review Board.
July 12, 2019: I email a developer tools evangelist at Apple asking for help to find a way forward with Windmill and for some some course correction to be done.

I never hear back.

Correspondance

Hello Phil,

My name is Markos and I am an independent Apple Developer living in Athens, Greece.

Apple’s developer relations and customer service has been overwhelmingly positive throughout the years, kudos for that.

In this rare case however, the App Review process seems to have fallen a victim of a scripted, no individual stepping forward, corner case where it just falls apart.

I will just give you the gist of it.

Windmill has been In Review for 21 work days, i.e. since the 23rd of May. I made a Status request 7 work days ago, i.e. since the 12th of June, It’s been about 12 hours since I have asked for some visibility on the status.

I wanted to bring this to your attention as this is now the cause of anxiety. I would very much appreciate you looking into this. I don’t expect a personal reply.

Thank you
.-
Markos

Seemingly, this email prompted the call I received on the very next (US) day.

I strenuously tried to understand Apple and listen to its concerns in an effort to meet its demands even though there was very little guidance in making Windmill compliant. At the same time, I vigorously made the case for Windmill’s approval. Alas, it eventually became clear to me that the call was a “courtesy” call. The decision had already been made and I was just being told how it is going to be.

I was confident this was a misunderstanding. That Windmill was not seen by Apple as a serious endevour given that I was just an indie developer. I was not ready to give up. I started drafting a letter of appeal with some feedback from fellow developers.

On 24 Jun 2019, at 12:29, Markos Charatzas markos@qnoid.com wrote:

Having had some time to think about the rejection, I now get the impression that Apple strongly believes Windmill on the iPhone to be no different to TestFlight which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Also, since Apple itself hasn’t really been much in support of the development process outside of Xcode, I worry that it may not believe in the value of Windmill. It does not help that Apple has a tendency of having a narrative that everything must fit into it.

2 days later, I sent a Windmill Letter of Appeal to the App Review Team. Windmill gets rejected again.

From:  Apple
Date: 09/07/2019, 19:13
2. - 5 Performance: Software Requirements
3. - 1.2 Business: Payments - Subscriptions
5. - 2.5 Legal: Intellectual Property - Apple Products Other - Other
Date: 03/07/2019, 07:02

Hello Markos,

Thank you for your detailed response and ongoing patience.

Based on the current material, the original rejection feedback remains valid.

However, if you believe your app is compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines, you are certainly well within your right to file an appeal to the App Review Board. As a member of the Apple Developer Program, you may exercise this option at any time.

Best regards,
[Redacted]
App Store Review

Date: 03/07/2019, 07:37
Hello [Redacted],

It is not clear to me whether the App Review team believes Windmill is still in violation of every App Store Review Guideline as well as the Apple Developer Program License Agreement. Can you please clarify whether Windmill is in compliance with some or all? Your feedback can help me work towards making Windmill compliant.

In regards to filing an appeal to the App Review Board. Given that the form to submit an appeal, only accepts plain text, how can I best send the letter in the PDF format?

Appreciated,
Markos

Date: 05/07/2019, 13:13
Hello [Redacted],

I would love to get on a call with you so that I can better understand how to proceed. Not sure what your schedule is like. I am generally available in the next few days and happy to talk during the weekend like last time.

By the way, I noticed that the number to contact you, [+1-XXX-XXX-XXXX], does not support FaceTime audio. It would make a positive difference to have that option available.

Regards,
Markos

From:  Apple
Date: 09/07/2019, 19:13
2. - 5 Performance: Software Requirements
3. - 1.2 Business: Payments - Subscriptions
5. - 2.5 Legal: Intellectual Property - Apple Products Other - Other

Hello Markos,

Thank you again for your time on the phone today, and further discussing the App Review Guidelines.

Whereas we are unable to provide you with specific development feedback for your app, we are dedicated to evaluating any revisions you would like to make in the form of a future resubmission.

Best regards,
[Redacted]
App Store Review

In the phone call I stated my intention to appeal. While I was told it was certainly within my right, I was given the impression that it wouldn’t make much of a difference. The decision was made having already consulted and factored in feedback from people outside the App Review Team.

It was on that final call, where it became pretty clear that Apple wasn’t willing to work with me on this. It was a call to tell me how this is going down. It is striking how differently Apple conducts itself on a call versus in writing; in public versus in private. The call sounded eerie familiar to the one made to Kapeli back in 2016 in regards to Dash. Dash and Apple: My Side of the Story.

“Has Apple ever retaliated against or disadvantaged a developer who went public about their frustration with the App Store?”

Going public

Having been given an ultimatum by Apple, I was encouraged by fellow developers to go public with the story. I was hesitant.

On 24 Jul 2019, at 08:07, Markos Charatzas markos@qnoid.com wrote:

1. What is the end goal? Apple to reverse course and approve Windmill on the iPhone? Apple to change its stance, that holds privately, when it comes to how Command Line Tools can be used? Apple to have a public debate about developer tools on and about iOS?

2. What is the case I am making and on what grounds? What’s possible to ship as an Apple Developer on Apple platforms, how the App Store is the only way to distribute iOS apps and the role of Apple as a gatekeeper? How that hinders innovation, competition and user choice?

These subjects have been debated for some time and right now are at the forefront even. How and why would they make a difference now?

Writing what Windmill does, how it’s helpful to developers, why it was rejected is only the setup. I don’t see that being sufficient to either get others’ support or for Apple to take this seriously.

Apple’s stance has caused me grief and a nihilistic view about the future of Windmill. At the same time, having Apple’s decision that Windmill holistically violates the Developer License Agreement hanging over my head is something I want to get off of me.

To be honest, I don’t feel comfortable, confident or keen on taking Apple, leading a movement or becoming a martyr in the process. I wish I could just go back to building Windmill and helping businesses get on board. I just feel that I can’t do that either.

Thank you for going through this with me.

On 24 Jul 2019, at 22:56, Markos Charatzas markos@qnoid.com wrote:

It’s possible that I’m overly emotional and choose to complicate things. I generally want to be well calculated and get things right. Even more so when I’m about to go on the public record with Apple when my developer license is on the line. It doesn’t help that have been beaten down by Apple twice already on this case.

This comes after more than 4 weeks of the App Review Team, the App Review Board and possibly Phil Schiller looking into Windmill on the iPhone. Also taking into account the 8 pages letter where I did say to Apple what the app does, how it works, and why the app would be helpful to other developers. I just can’t see how that alone would rally people. I might just be pessimistic.

After that letter, Apple decided to come after Windmill on the Mac saying I violate my developer license by building on top of the command line tools. This is more than simply an iPhone app being rejected.

The way I understand it, Apple does not want to set a precedent or open the door for others to exploit.

Keep in mind that Windmill on the Mac is the only 3rd party native macOS app that offers “continuous delivery”. The other one is Xcode bots by Apple itself. Any other service that uses the command line tools is on the web hence outside of Apple’s influence. Thus yet again being the only one directly affected by this. I believe you are using CircleCI so you know what I’m talking about.

I left London behind, a high paying job and have sacrificed at least 2 years of my life to build Windmill. I feel a lot of pressure and have a lot to lose on this so it doesn’t come easy.

It would help if you could tell me what you see in Windmill? What do you think is at stake? How does the decision by Apple to allow or sustain the rejection affect you as an Apple developer? Why do you think others would care? Why do you care? :) knowing that can help me build confidence.

On 26 Jul 2019, at 22:31, Markos Charatzas markos@qnoid.com wrote: Thanks!

So far I’ve had 2 more people giving me feedback.

One of them is [Redacted], who is definitely looking at this from a different, if not pessimistic angle. Which is good! Cause that means he does a great job covering the blind spots.

He made me think harder about what Apple is probably concerned about with Windmill. Creating a distribution mechanism which is available to the public, outside of the control of Apple and lacking the safety of the App Store. No matter how limited ad-hoc distribution may be.

Hard to debate about this as it brings the discussion back to the pros and cons of having the App Store as the only way to distribute apps…

Do you think there is a way to address this in the post without sounding like I’m not acknowledging the risk or sound insensitive to what Apple is concerned about?

I now think the “Final thoughts” section should be completely overhauled to touch on this issue and better communicate what I’m looking to get out of this by inviting a public debate/discussion.

I’m also thinking about removing both the “Timeline” and “Compliant” sections to keep the post shorter. I am not sure they add to anything. What do you think?

On 26 Jul 2019, at 23:12, Markos Charatzas markos@qnoid.com wrote:
But in some way, it does. Windmill today is a public offering/service. It doesn’t matter what Windmill is designed to be used for but how it is implemented and how it could be used for.

It is precisely why Apple had to say that the Command Line Tools Package is only meant to be used by developers alone.

I feel like I’ve completely misread the situation with Apple up until now.

Say, if an organisation had built Windmill for internal use. The server used for distribution would be under their control and probably in their internal network.

Windmill on the iPhone would probably be distributed using an Enterprise Certificate, internally to the employees of the organisation or using ad-hoc distribution. It doesn’t matter, it’s internal.

It completely changes how organisations would use Windmill. In this case, I am not even sure a public post is useful.

What an epiphany.

Are you following my train of thought at all? :)

I have removed the receipient in the emails above to focus on my thoughts, considerations and reasoning instead. For the final exchange though, I would like to include it as I believe it makes an important point about the App Store as the only means of distributing iOS apps.

I think I’m following you. The topic is way outside my normal areas of expertise, though.

So, to be clear — could Windmill be used to distribute apps to the public, circumventing TestFlight and the App Store?

On 27 Jul 2019, at 14:18, Markos Charatzas markos@qnoid.com wrote:

You can’t use Windmill to distribute apps to the public, circumventing TestFlight and the App Store any more than you can without using Windmill.

It’s nuanced.

The rest is history.

Related

• An Apple Developer for 10 years
• Hacker News - “An Apple Developer for 10 Years”
• New EU Regulations for App Stores
• For the longest time, I’ve been afraid to speak up about my story with App Review, fearing I’d put my popular app at risk. - Kostas Eleftheriou
• 100 Days Without the App Store
• On Apple’s monopoly power to destroy HEY
• Apple vs. HEY
• Apple’s abusive behavior with the App Store has been an open secret in the developer community for years. But very few people are interested in talking to regulators or the press, because you don’t want to get on Apple’s bad side, or you might get crushed. - David Heinemeier Hansson

As he was facing the casket, I stood by, just a few steps behind and to his side, holding onto his shoulder. He was the one that had to deal with an insurmountable event. The one that had to find ways to cope with this unbeareable loss. He knew, nothing and noone could bring his father back. He knew that he had to learn to live without his presence. Find ways to navigate his life that has just been upended by forces outside of his control.

Yet, in that moment, he wasn’t alone. He could feel my presence and the presence of others close to him. Every step he took to his father’s grave, was a step he took in the presence of others. Not feeling alone, made this ordeal somewhat bearable.

Unlike death, which is very much real, hardship can be in disguise. Seeing a loved one struggling, feeling powerless to help them can be very frightening at times. A prolonging struggle will only grow that fear. Fear that you are not doing enough to help, fear that something bad is going to happen to them on your watch.

My friend knew I couldn’t bring his father back. He knew he had to deal with what life had thrown his way, alone. There was nothing to say or do in this very moment. Being there was powerful enough.

Something so simple as being present, may seem hard to fathom outside ceremonial moments like these. Sometimes, what is being asked of you is not to come up with a solution or to offer a piece of advice. Sometimes, comfort found in your presence is what people look for as they endure hardship.

Related

Anxiety looks different in men - “Be compassionate”

With Kotlin I should be able to bring forward all that Java EE knowledge I have while also learning a new language. Given that Kotlin is also used for native Android development, combined with the experience of building iOS apps, I could also expand to another mobile platform in the future.

Some combination of cryptic error messages that I had to decode before I could have a development environment ready, open-source plugins no longer supported, out of date documentation, buggy releases, patchy tools meant that I had to jump through hoops before I could write even a single line of code.

I won’t go into detail of every problem I run to. What I will say, is that it took hours of debugging, googling, reading through support forums, trial and error before I could finally focus on the task. Building something while learning a new language.

I have over 15 years of experience as a Software Engineer and it still took me hours to go through every issue. How would a newcomer deal with any of that? How accessible is programming today? How is it fun? What happened to:

10 PRINT "Hello, World!"
20 END

Related

• Coding - “It’s like the 80s all over again, where you plug in a machine, and you can instantly start coding. I for one miss that.”
• Open-source - “I am not sure what to make of open-source software anymore.”
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• GB Studio

My brain just tells me no, it refuses. It tells me I need to spend more time looking for a job. I am wasting precious borrowed time. I am piling up debt that I need to pay back. It tells me that I need to make some progress getting my life back in order.

I haven’t been in this situation since 2009 - 2010. Just before I decided to leave Greece and return back to the UK. I was in debt while also being in limbo. I didn’t want to leave Greece even though it was a dead end.

The way I was able to cope with the debt I was piling up was by thinking of it as borrowing time from the future. My future. It was just too much to think of it as monatery value. I was going to repay it back, eventually.

This wasn’t a strategic decision on my part. It wasn’t like taking a loan to use as an investement. It was a coping mechanism.

Whatever savings I had to support me while building Windmill have run out since the end of September 2018. Back then, with only the free version of Windmill on the Mac available, I decided to look for a job. You would think that with all that talk about the brain drain in Greece it would have been easy. It wasn’t, it hasn’t and still isn’t.

With the support and encouragement from my partner, I decided to push forward with the development of Windmill on the iPhone. This is precisely the moment where I started borrowing time, again.

It has now been 19 months of borrowed time.

This is not the complete picture though. This time around another human is carrying more than their fair share and while they do, I feel like I am holding them back. This is something that I struggle with as it goes against my beliefs in equality and opportunity.

I’ve read a bunch of the advice on this, and the advice says things like: “Start talking. Restate the problem. Talk out an approach. Consider how much space/time it will use. And then start writing code.”

I feel like Brent is speaking for myself when he says:

Which is of course not at all how I solve problems.

He then goes on to explain in detail how he typically approaches a problem domain that he is unfamiliar with when writing code. Which sounds very familiar to how I go on about writing code too. Furthermore,

And — even more critical — I don’t have a 45-minute time constraint. Nobody is watching me type and judging. I’m writing code to solve a problem, rather than writing code to get a job.

There’s a huge difference between “solve this performance problem with a binary search” and “pass this test so you can feed your family.”

This hits the nail on the head. I too had to solve similar coding excercises during an interview only to suffer from anxiety. I get tunnel vision and I am unable to demonstrate clear thinking.

Thank you for saying this Brent. I take comfort reading that a developer like you, at the top of their game, is faced with the same challenges as I do. It tells me I am not alone.

Related

• Practicing the Coding Challenges - inessential by Brent Simmons
• A Coding Challenge Can’t Show How I Solve A Problem - inessential by Brent Simmons
• We need to raise the bar on software development - qnoid.com

I feel like the clock has turned back 10 years. All the sacrifices made, all the time and effort I put to change my life around. Everything that lead me to London, has just vanished.

I am in Athens but I don’t really want to be here. You would think that after 10 years of being away, coming back would feel like coming home but it doesnt. The UK felt like home. You would think friends would cherish your return, be close, want to spend time with you, be there. They are not. They are married, have grown older, are depressed, working overtime. You would think a family home would be there for you. To celebrate the holidays, to spend the weekend. There is none.

I am tired.

It’s hard to go back. The UK has left Europe. There is so much uncertainty and I am no longer 29. The last 2 years have been nothing but struggle. I want to take back control yet I end up waiting. Waiting yet again for someone’s approval, someone to tell me my worth, what I deserve.

I am tired.

It feels like I am back to where I was 10 years ago. In debt, lost, waiting. Only now I am 39 going 40.

I am tired.

I want to reinvent myself. I miss you London. You belong in the past. I still miss you.

• Windmill on the Mac
  Windmill on the Mac is a native macOS application written in Swift 5 on Xcode 10 targetting macOS 10.14. The codebase is about 16k LOC.

• Windmill on the iPhone
  Windmill on the iPhone is a native iOS app written in Swift 5 on Xcode 10 targetting iOS 12.2. The codebase is about 5k LOC.

• Windmill REST API
  The Windmill REST API is a Java EE 8 implementation written in Java 8 using JAX-RS. The codebase is about 7.5k LOC.

History

I started working on Windmill as a side project in 2014. In 2017 I decided to commit full time and in February 2018, Windmill on the Mac 1.0 was released. In July 2019 Apple rejected Windmill on the iPhone and took issue with Windmill in principle. I didn’t make any money on Windmill and was not in a position to take it forward given these cirmustances thus formally ending its development in January 2020.

Why make the source code public?

Effectively, by Apple putting Windmill on notice, the only way I can distribute Windmill on the Apple platforms is at the source code level. Even though this does not serve the mission to make continuous delivery accessible, whatever value Windmill brings even as source code, is better than none at all.

The development of Windmill did come to an abrupt end and didn’t get a fair chance to become what I had envisioned. It would bring me joy to know that developers will benefit from it by learning something new. It’s a way to give back to the community.

Windmill is not some example software after all. It is production grade that spans across the desktop, mobile and the server. The software engineering behind it is still relevant and the technologies used modern.

I was diligent, took great care and put a lot of attention in building succint, performant, reliable, and bug free software across multiple platforms. I believe the source code of Windmill has something to offer whether you are a beginner or a senior in software development in any of the 3 platforms.

What does making the Windmill source code public mean?

As a product, my gut feeling tells me that unless a company with the available resources gets behind it, Windmill will not go far. I am hopeful but don’t expect much.

As software, I believe not that much. These are times where running software, on your computer (desktop or mobile), unfettered is near impossible. In order to run Windmill on your Mac and the iPhone you will need an Apple Developer account. Since Windmill is built for developers, chances are you do have one. Still.

Windmill is built to take advantage of and be tightly integrated with the Apple ecosystem. It makes use of Push Notifications, Background Mode, CloudKit and In-App Purchases. You can strip away and refactor some of the code but the point still stands. Distributing, modifying and running software outside walled gardens isn’t as straight forward.

The Windmill REST API is no different. The implementation relies heavily on AWS infrastructure. It will also take some elbow grease to get up and running.

What not to expect

Releasing the source code of Windmill does not make it open-source. I don’t plan on contributing any time or energy developing it further. To support it as open-source would demand of me even more resources and attention which I don’t have the luxury of.

Don’t expect any instructions on how to build and run the code.
Don’t expect the code to be extensively documented.
Don’t expect me to respond to any issues raised or pull requests made.

I don’t plan to publish any Windmill architecture diagrams, security considerations or design documents either.

How to make the best of the source code

Study it.

As a Swift developer, the macOS app¹ should be the most juicy one for you.

Have a look at the ProcessManager type on how to launch a Process, wait and receive data in the background from both standard out and err. The ProcessManager also allows you to recover a Process that has exited with an error code. As an example, look at how ActivityBuild creates a RecoverableProcess.

The Windmill type makes extensive use of the design pattern as described in A series of steps post. Take a closer look at the ActivityBuilder type to see how Windmill uses it to create the pipeline to a succesful build.

As fas as the iOS app goes, have a look at PaymentQueue and SubscriptionManager on how to process transactions when purchasing a subscription that requires validating a receipt on the server.

I have already documented how to replace the rootViewController of the UIWindow that Windmill on the iPhone also makes use of.

As a Java developer, the REST API should prove useful as a reference implementation of the Java EE 8 spec. The most interesting tidbit is likely the use of an EntityGraph to retain the lazy associations of an @Entity while performing queries that require exclusively independent associations to materialise. In the case of the Windmill REST API, that would be the AccountResource#list that materialises a list of Export types and the SubscriptionResource#isSubscriber that materialises a list of Transaction types for a Subscription.

Own the code.

At the very minimum Windmill on the Mac should serve as a replacement to Jenkins. For any developers that still use Xcode 10 to build and test their app, this is as straightforward as building and signing the app using your Apple account. The iCloud capability can be disabled as it’s only relevant when used alongside the iPhone app.

If you are using Xcode 11, it will take some effort to add support since Apple has changed the result bundle format. At the very least Windmill needs to be updated to support the new format.

If you do put in the time and effort, it should be possible to have Windmill on the Mac, on the iPhone and on the server running which will give you app distribution.

What did the future hold for Windmill?

Windmill was really at its infancy. Allowing developers to distribute their app and have over-the-air installation was the first step in making its development sustainable.

I had plans to develop an TV App to act as a dashboard for teams and have company wide notifications.

I wanted to add support for nightlies, the ability to substitute resources during packaging and support conditional compilation to allow for different builds.

Finally, I wanted to tackle distributed building, support multiple configurations (e.g. to maintain multiple releases) and integration with 3rd party libraries.

Feel free to use these guidelines as a roadmap.

The licence

Created by Markos Charatzas (markos@qnoid.com)
Copyright © 2014-2020 qnoid.com. All rights reserved.

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:

This software is provided ‘as-is’, without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation is required.
2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.
3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.

Final words

I still believe in Windmill and would love for a company with the resources to step in and take it forward.

I am available for hire. I am based in Athens, Greece and able to invoice from a UK company if needed.

Why do it then? I just felt like doing something productive and wanted something to tinker with. Hugo seems more geared towards building a website as opposed to just a blog and I would like this website to evolve.

It took me about 2 days to migrate. I didn’t use any of the existing tools as I wanted to get familiar with Hugo. The most time consuming was making sure, yet again, that permalinks don’t change. In the 10 years of this website’s lifespan, I had to deal with this at least 2-3 times that I can remember.

Hugo apparently generates permalinks in the form of https://qnoid.com/hugo/#main compared to what this website has been using, https://qnoid.com/Hugo.html#main.

To be honest, I don’t recall the later format being a concious decision on my part but obviously didn’t care enough at the time. I don’t even know what the “canonical” format for URLs is. I didn’t want to open this can of worms.

I made sure to salvage the permalink for most of the posts. For those that had some obscure formatting due to using the title of a post at the time, I didn’t bother. Life is too short. The good news is that the most prominent posts weren’t affected so cheers to that.

While feeling the pain of salvaging the permalinks, I did begin to wonder. How can we better handle permanent redirects? I kinda wish for a way to “track” a resource across a URL the way Git can track a file across name changes.

Now that I have migrated the website, I have a big announcement coming up about the future of Windmill.

What’s the point in life? To have fun? I’ve certainly had fun with this Next and that is good enough for me. But if you want the wider story, then I think there are several avenues.

For some, this could simply be a programming platform free from all the libraries, framework and constraints of modern day system.

It’s like the 80s all over again, where you plug in a machine, and you can instantly start coding. I for one miss that.

There is something about the brutal simplicity, which just draws you in, and then, because this isn’t a complex beast, you can actually gain an understanding of what you are doing.

Even using a high level language like BASIC you can see how your commands affect the system. It’s an elegance we lack these days.

Sure, you could use a retro system for that, but this is a new machine, with a new community excited to see what they produce. It’s not a rehash. It’s current but it’s grounded in the past.

I miss that too.

ZX Spectrum Next | Nostalgia Nerd

A website that is deeply personal yet it’s not about me.
A website that is about forming relationships, removing barriers, breaking taboos.
A website that raises awareness to issues that trouble me.
A website that recognises contributions made by others and elevates them.
A website that helps people make sense of their lives and deal with their struggles.
A website that brings your attention to people in need.
A website that is connected to other people through the vastness of the World Wide Web.
A website of what it means to be human.

I also want a website that can outlive me. That can be used for historical purposes, for people to look back and understand what life was like in the late 20th century, early 21st. A digital cave if you like. Full of footprints, drawings, sounds, videos.

For the past few days, I have started working towards making a website like this. It is still in its infancy but there is enough to share.

Welcome to my life.

There is a whole story of how I ended up working at CERN but that’s for another day. What’s relevant is that at CERN, in 2001, I was “christened” a Java Developer. I had no prior experience in Java or related backend stack (e.g. databases). Fast forward to 2003, back in Greece, that experience landed me a job at Forthnet which created a career trajectory as a Java Developer.

Starting with Java EE as a junior developer gave ample room to grow. I practiced object oriented programming. I got a grasp of HTTP and the web. I learned about databases, multithreading, linux, servers and infrastructure. Even though I was a junior developer, I was given plenty of autonomy and responsibility. The last professional role I held as a Java developer was in 2011. That’s roughly 10 years of dedication to the platform, though just recently I wrote a full blown Java EE 8.0 application that served as the backend for Windmill. It felt like riding a bicycle.

Becoming an Apple developer was a different story altogether. Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iPhone, inspired me. I took the “CS 193P iPhone Application Development” at Stanford University of my own volition. Java and the web had failed on the promise of a rich web application and mobile as a platform had just become ready to take off. I saw it as an investment to further grow as a professional and it paid off. I spent the next 10 years as an Apple Developer.

A few days ago I watched a documentary where I learned about the World Robot Olympiad and the non-profit organisation WRO Hellas. WRO Hellas provides training to academics, educational material and robot parts to aspiring robotics engineers living in Greece. It also organises national competitions for mentees to compete. Seeing so many young people passionate about robotics and programming, got me thinking about what I want to be engrossed in for the next 10 years.

I am not sure. I would love to hear your thoughts at markos@qnoid.com.

Related

• The Real Robokids (in Greek)
• Horace Dediu, Asymco - The Innovator’s Stopwatch

I am not referring to free and open-source software nor open-source with a commercial license. There is also open-source, like NetNewsWire and Homebrew which are free and developed in the open. I am not talking about those either.

I am referring to open-source software addressed to developers. Open-source software where a developer is the end user of code. Code that is available to bring in as a dependency to software you write.

I am a user of open-source code. Having said that, adding a dependency to a 3rd party is the exception, not the rule. I believe in writing the code or at the very least, owning it. Own it as in, know how it works, understand it, maintain it as and when required.

As a potential creator of open-source code, I stop and think now. Am I sharing code that will act as a dependency? What are my responsibilities as the original author? How do I manage its development? What purpose does it serve? What risks does it pose? Why does it need to be open source?

Is it merely for educational purposes? I prefer knowledge sharing as opposed to code sharing and I would rather share that knowledge through deliberation, writing and code examples that get to the crux of the matter.

That is not to say that code sharing can’t act as knowledge sharing. I have most certainly expanded my knowledge and understanding by reading open-source code.

So, what value does open-source code really bring? Is it about writing it once, used by many? Providing a reference implementation? Time saving? Setting a quality bar, an example? Addressing social inequalities by giving equal access to code?

I have been thinking of releasing the source code of Windmill. That is, the code for the macOS app, the iOS app and the backend code written in Java.

The Java implementation could be a useful reference for anyone building a Java EE 8.0 application.

The macOS and iOS implementations are both “real world” apps that might prove useful as learning material.

The alternative would be for the source code to forever stay in my MacBook Pro as a relic. Still, I am not sure.

Related

• Empowered free software
• My FOSS Story by Andrew Gallant
• A sad day for Rust
• How We Run the NetNewsWire Open Source Project
• Notable breakages for npm
• Behind iPhone’s Critical Security Bug, a Single Bad ‘Goto’
• A response to recent concerns about security vulnerabilities in AFNetworking

This is it. I am officially ending Windmill. The writing has been on the wall for some time now. I will begin by dismantling the infrastructure that supports Windmill on the iPhone. I will also make a public announcement on the Windmill website. I expect the website to stay up until the domain expires if not sooner.

Windmill made continuous delivery accessible, without compromising on security or privacy and without the added cost that comes with paying for a cloud service. I am very proud of the work I put into Windmill.

Even though some things where outside of my control, I have no regrets. I did pursue my dream and dedicated more than 12 months of working full time as well as all of my savings.

I did it my way. It is now time to take care of the one I love.

For hire.

I watched The Game Awards last night. The whole show was oozing with talent, creativity and positivity. I came away feeling inspired.

Special shoutout to

• Lual Mayen who from refugee became a game developer.
• Fereshteh Forough for founding Code to Inspire in Afghanistan.
• Luke who built the “Let’s Be Well” video game to raise awareness and talk publicly about mental health.
• Mathew Bergendahl at Stack Up for providing mental health support to war veterans.

Kudos Geoff Keighley and team for putting on an amazing show and for being a gracious host.

I have been running RealMacMods, NoCrashMBP for over 3 weeks now and I haven’t experienced any random shutdowns ever since.

From the RealMacMods website.

The CPU has several power states and voltages. Some CPUs have become unstable at the extremely low voltage on one of it’s cores. The CPU will sometimes briefly dip into that power state, and if it happens to be on the core wherein it is unstable you will see the “silent” crash. Screen goes black, a few seconds later it dies completely. This condition was observed with external test equipment, as well as through internal cpu voltage monitoring.

Continued

This utility runs in the background and keeps it from ever hitting that extremely low state/voltage.

Indeed the “NoCrashMBP” app adds a load, at times up to 20% on a 4 core CPU that the MacBook Pro I own has. I haven’t taken any measurements on the impact it has on battery. Compared to ~€750 service cost, I’ll take the reduced battery performance.

I hope that the MacBook Pro lasts for at least 1-2 years. I’ve only had it since April 2014.

Keep in mind that just because this solution worked in my case, it does not mean it will work on yours. For me, spending €9, when I was already at a loss of €340 was a small price to pay. Especially when I was told I had to pay an extra €750 to replace the logic board.

About 2 months ago, I noticed that the battery on the MacBook Pro (Retina 15-inch, Late 2013) had swollen. I took it to an Apple Premium Service Provider in Greece where I was told that the issue is indeed the battery and would need to be replaced at a cost of €341,81 (€215.33 for the battery plus €126.48 labour cost).

I agreed to the service. After all, the MacBook has a 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 and 512GB SSD PCIe 2.0. It still holds up pretty well to do development so the cost of €340 is minimal compared to the value I get out of it.

As soon as I got the Macbook back, it started to shutdown at random times. The screen would go dark (with some light illuminating), the fans would start to spin and eventually it would shut down. Upon powering it on again, there was never a Panic Report but only once; in the tens of shutdowns.

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f928da528): “ino 37945100 no extent covering dstream alloced_size 806912 (fsize 805656) pos/len 868809:0\n”@/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/apfs/apfs-945.275.7/nx/jobj.c:11881

Kernel Panic Report

Every hardware diagnostic run by the service provider came back green.

Eventually, it took me 2 months to finally get the engineering team at Apple to trace² it to a faulty logic board (error 128 they said 🤷🏽‍♂️).

Update

Apparently, you can use log show --predicate 'eventMessage contains "Previous shutdown cause"' to check the shutdown cause.

End Update

I was referred back to the service provider. I am now told, a replacement³ logic board will cost about ~€750. At a total price of €1090 to repair the MacBook Pro, repairing it doesn’t sound as appealing or worth.

Other than the fact that I cannot afford a new MacBook Pro right now, the bitter taste left in my mouth is directly related to the relationship that Apple has with service providers in a country like Greece.

You see, the tools provided to the service provider gave no indication of a faulty motherboard⁴. As a result, I ended up paying €340 only to end up with a Mac that will randomly shutdown. As far as I am concerned, prior to the battery replacement, the MacBook Pro worked as expected. I am now €340 lighter and have a faulty MacBook Pro.

Keep in mind that a service provider is an independent, 3rd party. The manager doesn’t have the luxury, the privilege nor the overall profits of Apple to take the hit or provide leeway.

And here is where I take issue with the service options offered by Apple in Greece. The service provider does not have all the required tools to make an overall assessment which in this case has cost me.

In the end, this arrangement is a mark against the reputation of Apple. For Apple to take pride in customer satisfaction in Greece, it must take all the necessary steps to have an Apple Store in Athens.

Update

I have now bought the software listed in one of the related links below. At $10 is a low risk to take. I will report back once I have used the Mac for some time.

Related

• MacBook Pro 15" Retina mid 2014 random shutdowns
• Are OS X shutdown cause and sleep cause numbers listed/explained anywhere?
• Shutdown Cause -128

About 2 months ago, I noticed the battery had swollen, so I had it replaced at a cost of ~€340. Since then, I have been experiencing random shutdowns, ranging from every few hours to couple of days. There has been an incredible amount of back and forth with Apple and their Authorised Service Provider in Greece¹. I won’t trouble you with the details² suffice to say that I am unable to do any software development on it.

The iPhone X, running iOS 13.2.2, over time seemingly exhausts its network connection pool with Apple services. App Store downloads are stuck forever, sharing a Note via iCloud comes back with a “Connection Error” etc. At this point, I need to restart the device.

When talking on said iPhone X via the AirPods (1st Gen), people will complain that they have trouble hearing me. At random times, I sound like talking from a distance.

Apple TV (4th Generation) is working fine overall tho I do come across glitches on tvOS from time to time.

Windmill on the Mac is a standalone, native, macOS app¹ that has always been free to download and use. Developers don’t even need to have an account. I genuinely don’t know how many developers do actually use² it. I never actively tracked downloads, users, monitored engagement or any other usage metrics. It has been a deliberate decision not to.

Windmill on the iPhone on the other hand, requires significant infrastructure and a backend server. I have been using AWS for that. Even though Windmill on the iPhone never saw the light of day in public, the infrastructure did cost money to operate during setup, development, testing, beta. It still does to this day since I never dismantled it.

Up until now, I have been paying for AWS using credits that Amazon used to offer to startups. The credits have now been depleted³ so starting in October, I will have to foot the bill⁴. A couple of days ago I also got a reminder that the Windmill domain will expire soon.

I never made any money on Windmill while working on it full time. Also, I haven’t had a salary since summer 2017. Any savings I had, run out about 12 months ago. Still, it feels hard to bring down the whole thing just like that. I still haven’t come to terms with the rejection by Apple and haven’t had the head space to decide what to do with Windmill.

I still believe in both the Windmill vision and the product. I just don’t have the money and resources to dedicate on time that has now become borrowed.

The future of Windmill is uncertain.

I don’t miss it and I am happier.

At the time it felt important. I could reach out to others and others could reach out. I was “in the know”.

I am enjoying the focus. No one seems to be missing “qnoid” either.

It’s all good!

This is a deeply personal post. It is a way for me to process, come to terms with, move forward and take back control of my life. I don’t have any advice to offer or lessons to teach yet. I am still caught into this. I don’t know how this story ends.

I was raised by a single mother.

Born in the eighties. My mother was a hairdresser, running her own beauty salon just around the corner from a single bedroom flat where we both lived, in Athens. She was just 21 when she gave birth.

I grew up being quite independent. I had my own keys to the flat. I used to come back from primary school, an eight minutes walk, eat food mom had prepared for me, watch TV, study for school, study English with a private teacher, draw cartoon covers, use a computer.

Mom was working 6 days a week. When I wasn’t at home alone, I would be spending time with my best friend next door or at the beauty salon. I remember asking her to give me a “perm” hairstyle like everyone else.

These are memories I have; I was also told differently.

My “parents” separated when I was 4. My “father” used to pick me up after school in the evenings when my mother was working.

My mom had stayed good friends with him after they separated. He was living just a couple of blocks away from my mom. I could visit him whenever I wanted.

He is the one that bought me my first computer at the age of 8.

I never felt close to him. He was rarely around. He never advised me, gave me guidance, showed much affection or interest, took me to the park, parent me.

I don’t remember much of him at that age.

As a teenager and through adulthood, our relationship was no different. I had conversations with friends about it in an effort to understand. What was their relationship like with their dad? They would tell me how their father isn’t that close to them either. How they would argue or not share much affection.

Still, their answers, reasoning and life didn’t look the same to me like how I was feeling. I could tell they had a father figure. At the age of 35 I told the man, in tears, that he had been absent for all my life. That I needed him to be there for me. I got no reaction at all.

A few months later, the universe would conspire to reveal the truth.

It had been less than a year since my engagement had broken down and now I had been dealt this hand. I was technically living in Edinburgh at the time. I had quit my last job and had been on the move for close to 6 months. Savings were running out so I decided to move to London.

In the years that followed, every time I would be back in Greece, I would share with friends what little I knew. They wouldn’t act surprised as if they knew something more. It felt like being in The Truman Show. I just couldn’t deal with what curveball the universe had just thrown at me.

In a twist of fate I ended back in Athens almost 3 years later. I don’t know how I managed to pull whatever strength I had left in me. It was fucking hard. I decided to confront this man and face reality.

Thirty-eight years later, the truth had finally come to light.

This man wasn’t my father.

I never met my father, neither had a father figure in my life. I was raised by women.

My mother.

My grandma.

My godmother.

By all the women coming to the beauty salon, telling me stories, showing me affection. By all the women looking after me when I was sick or had to spend an evening with when mom was away.

A man’s lie for close to 40 years, that he was willing to take with him to the grave, defined what turn my life would take right at the minute I was born. At 02:10 that fateful Monday summer morning in 1980.

I am not the type to second guess or have regrets about my choices in life. Still, I can’t help but think how different my life would have been.

This is a choice that someone else made about what path my life should take. I had no say in this. This was not a choice I made. To this day, I am still facing the repercussions.

At the age of ten, my mom had her second marriage which lasted for four years.

My stepdad was a bully.-

“Respect the baby steps.” - Dimitra

I have gotten used to having to deal with big changes that are happening in my life.

In the begining, those changes were dealt like a deck of cards. Until I started embrasing them. I have become the orchestrator. I am not afraid of change. I even get a kick out of it. I swallow change.

These are a few¹ highlights of change.

I left Greece when I was 18 to study in Sunderland, UK. It was a planned, coordinated move. I wanted to study computing after all. My girlfriend at the time, had already been there for a year. It was meant to be an easy move. Two months into it, we had a falling-out. I made the choice to move out.

Saint Peter’s Campus, Sunderland University

I dealt with it. Packed my stuff. Talked to the students’ union. Made financial arrangements. Within a few days I was living in a new flat in different university halls. It was a traumatising experience but I took it in stride.

Three years later, I decided to take a placement year at CERN. My British peers were reluctant to leave the UK. To me it was yet another country to live in. I flew in Geneva. Since there was no direct bus from the airport to the campus, I had to get off at Route de Meyrin.

I remember, standing at a bus stop, in the middle of the night, thinking that if something was to go horribly wrong², it would take days before anyone found out. I was all alone and hadn’t met anyone personally yet.

With the aid of a secretary, I got an upfront payment and found a place to stay in Saint-Genis-Pouilly. About halfway through the tenancy, I moved to Ferney-Voltaire. I had to and I just did.

CERN campus, 2001 - 2002

In May of 2010 while living in Greece, I got an offer to join an Edinburgh based startup for 4 months. Within a day, I had accepted and booked tickets. 3 days later I had a suitcase packed, locked the door to my flat and left.

People were left wondering:

“Are you moving back to the UK now or what?”.

I didn’t know the answer. All I knew was that I had a job for 4 months. I ended up living and working in Edinburgh for 5 years.

In October of 2014, my engagement broke down. At the time, I was visiting Greece when I realised I had to find temporary accomodation in Edinburgh to stay and be back at work just a few days later. In just over 2 weeks I had completely changed my life!

Let me spell this out. I flew in Edinburgh, stayed in temporary housing while going to work every morning, did viewings, got out of a hairy situation, found a flat, made arrangements to move in, got my personal belongings and moved in to my new place. I did it all within 17 days! I even made sure to have internet on day 1. 🤷🏽‍♂️

First night at the new flat

On the last week of July 2015, after 6 months of failing to take control of my life, I decided it was time to move to London. To kick me into overdrive, I simply booked a one way train ticket to King’s Cross and said to myself:

“You are going to London in 5 days. Deal with it!”.

I gave notice to the landlord, arranged for a moving company, packed 5 boxes and left without having a job lined up. One month later, I started working for Soldo. The office at the time was near Baker Street and I had found a flat just 20 minutes away on foot, in London. It was bonkers!

Leaving on a one way ticket to London

Fast forward in December 2017 I moved to Australia. A few months in I had to retreat to Greece. All in the midst of building Windmill. You get the deal by now.

I do not respect the baby steps.

I do not appreciate what it takes to carry each of those big changes. I do not sit to think how difficult it is to take those steps. I brush them to the side. I don’t think much of them. As far as I am concerned. I just need to do whatever needs to be done to go from A to B. Get on with it and move on. That’s what I have been doing. That’s what I am good at, I guess.

About 2 months ago I started going to therapy. In the past weeks I had to face my worst fears. Having to deal with feelings and suppressed emotions that I have never dealt with in the past is terrifying.

I have also decided to exit egg so that I can focus on what matters.

This brings the biggest change in my life. It is long, tough and requires an even greater fortitude. I have to recognise and accept the effort each step will take. To pace myself.

To respect the baby steps.

✊🏽👶🏽🦶🏽

Kiva allows you to micro-loan people around the world that are at a financial disadvantage.

A family in Dushanbe, Tajikistan to help pay their daughter’s tuition.

A farmer in Kaduna, Nigeria to help them increase yields.

A group in Prey Veng, Cambodia to help buy a water filter to provide safe drinking water.

A shop owner in Sembabule, Uganda to buy more stock to sell.

I have to admit, at first I found it overwhelming and difficult to decide. There are so many people that could use whatever little help I could provide. How do I make a choice? What country? What cause? Who needs it the most?

I still don’t know how to answer this. I’d just tell you to pick one to get you started. Maybe you can relate to the person and their struggle. Maybe you want to tip the scale in gender inequality. Maybe you want to help people get out of poverty first. Maybe education is important to you.

I suggest you start with a short period loan (8 months or less) that with your contribution will be fulfilled. That way you will see the results of your micro-loan come to fruition sooner.

Regardless, you will no doubt help people in need and make the world a little bit better in the process.

It’s amazing how many people you can help over time starting with just a small fund that you relend. I started with $50 and over time I have built up the micro-fund to $150. With that amount of money I have been able to finance 21 loans at a total of $700 over the years.

Next time you have the chance to buy a birthday present to someone consider offering them a Kiva gift card instead. It can change their life and the life of others.

Greetings from Tanzania! Thank you for supporting Jackson, a hard working retailer at his own retailer shop with a loan. I’m pleased to inform you that he is doing extremely well and with the loan received, Jackson used the loan to buy food items, detergents, soft drinks, few stationary items, plastic bags, slippers, and utensils . He used the additional profit to pay his loan dues, school fees, covered household expenses such as water bills and electricity and reinvested for his business to grow. Jackson is very grateful for the loan and thankful to everyone who had supported him.

Related

• Examining inequality. How geography and gender stack the deck for (or against) you. - Bill & Melinda Gates, The goalkeepers report 2019.

I believe it’s inappropriate to ask this question, it won’t get you any meaningful answers and it may lead to awkward conversations and I do mean as part of an interview.

So here are some of the reasons:

• No room for personal development and future growth.
• Not a good culture fit.
• Politics, corporate structure, didn’t care enough at that point.
• Change in technical direction, management style that meant engineering would have a lesser role. Wasn’t willing to go down that path.
• Not supported enough, change in business priorities.
• The writing on the wall lead 3 people to resign in the same week.
• Wasn’t commited enough or “loyal” to the company, I think?

Back in September of 2009, I was let got of a role as a Java Developer. I had come to Athens looking for a job a few months prior. Instead of looking for another role, I decided to move back to Crete.

At that time, Stanford University was running “CS 193P iPhone Application Development” on iTunes U. I took the opportunity to invest in learning what seemed like the future. I was just an avid Mac and iPhone owner for some time.

Up until that moment I had been a Java Developer with a Web focus. Backend to frontend. An iPhone app was unlike anything I had seen on the web. I think, at that time, the most impressive website I had come across was Google Maps and its use of AJAX. It was jaw dropping.

Still, compared to the predominantly stateless nature of a website, building an app for the iPhone enabled me to better express my creativity and build a better experience with less effort as a developer. The user experience possible was immensely better to what I could come up by building a web app.

I remember working on an assignment as part of the curriculum created by Evan Doll and Alan Cannistraro at Stanford. It was a single view app where you could draw a polygon shape. If memory serves me well, the only control was a slider to define the number of angles. As you moved the slider with the touch of your finger, you could instantly see the shape morphing from a triangle, to a square, to a pentagon, a hexagon etc. This interactivity and responsiveness at the palm of your hand felt insanely exciting at the time. I was hooked!

In May 2010 I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland. Even though I was working full time as a Java Developer, I wanted to be an Apple Developer¹! In my spare time I was working on verylargebox. A mobile app that enabled local store owners to share their products with anyone in the city.

In June 2011, I landed my first role as an iOS Developer even though I wasn’t really hired based on what I could do as one. It was an entry level role, still it put a smile on my face. I could finally have an Apple Developer section on my resume!

Fun fact: I subscribed to iOS Dev Weekly on the 24th of October 2012 and it was already at Issue 65!

In July 2013, I released verylargebox as a free app. I finally had my very own iPhone app on the App Store, I was proud!

Even though I never pursued verylargebox as a business idea, it raised my status as an Apple Developer. I had an app! I felt like I was part of the Apple community.

Soon after, I joined Tesco Bank where I was responsible for the technical delivery of Tesco Bank Mobile Banking on the iPhone.

As an Apple Developer, 2014 was special. I traveled to NSConf at Leicester where both Evan Doll and Alan Cannistraro would be there. This was an opportunity to personally meet and greet the people that nudged me to become an Apple Developer.

My bond with Apple as a developer grew stronger and stronger. With every interaction and exposure, I became more involved with the people, more invested in the technology, more attached to Apple.

The same year, I won the WWDC lottery and got a chance to meet in person some of the developers at Apple that I have been interacting with on Twitter.

I also remember witnessing the winners of Apple Design Awards and dreaming of the day I could develop an app worthy of an award.

It was around that time, in 2014, when the idea of Windmill popped into my head. At Tesco Bank, I had hacked together a continuous delivery pipeline using Jenkins and Apple’s Command Line Tools and I thought there must be a better way to do this.

One of the very early iterations of Windmill. Notice, how this is only a menu bar item. Humble beginnings as an Apple Developer for the Mac.

Of course, I had a full time job at the time. I could only afford to work nights and weekends. Still, I pushed through. With every line of code written, with every technical note read, with every WWDC video watched, I made progress.

Years passed. I moved to London. The year was 2016, I had just left my job and I was thinking of quitting the software industry too.

Still, I had Windmill to carry me forward. In 2017, I decided it was time to commit to it full time. In September of the same year, I took a leap of faith and jumped into the unknown, being all poetic.

In the years that followed, I had to move from the U.K., to Australia, to Greece. It was shitty and tough.

In between all that (and a lot more on a personal level; not the post to disclose) one thing stayed consistent. My dedication to see Windmill through and in the process take control of my life and destiny.

I pushed long and hard to get Windmill on the iPhone out. I started working on it in January 2019 and submitted it to Apple at the end of May. It was rejected.

Windmill on the iPhone was a way for me to finally start making a living after 2 years of not making a salary and almost a year since my savings have been depleted.

I haven’t done any progress since Apple rejected Windmill.

I am definitely experiencing a burnout, still there seems to be something more at play that I’ve been trying to explain.

Every time I make an effort to think how to overcome this hurdle and continue with the development of Windmill, my brain switches off.

You see, Windmill as I envision it, is more than just a Mac app. Literally and figuratively speaking. It’s hard to put this into words, no matter how much I try. It’s a vision after all. My dent in the universe.

Windmill is on a mission to make continuous delivery of iPhone apps ubiquitous and accessible to developers and businesses.

I don’t feel motivated knowing what is possible will be subpar, constrained, unwelcome, unappreciated and on the bad side of Apple. I feel crippled as an Apple Developer to make the best of all available platforms and technologies.

On a personal level, Windmill allows me to have freedom of expression, be creative and pursue excellence.

To some extend this a cautionary tale about falling in love with a brand when an organisation is behind it. When the needs of the business precede those of the individual. Still, there is more. In the case of Apple and its developers, this is about our livelihood.

For Apple, this was just an app that was submitted, went through due process and was rejected. For me, this is a moment in time that will define what turn my life takes next.

Thinking back to that September of 2009 when life set me on a path to become an Apple Developer. It feels like that path is ending.-

When a man explodes in anger over something seemingly insignificant, he may appear like just a jerk. But he could be anxious.

Anxious “men may present as loose cannons, but they are worriers,” says Kevin Chapman, a clinical psychologist in Louisville, Ky. “Aggression tends to be more socially acceptable to many men than anxiety.”

In general, men are less likely to receive treatment for mental health issues. “We’ve been socialized from a very young age to see emotional vulnerability as a weakness,” says Michael Addis, a professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Well-Being Research Group at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “Seeking help is seen as a sign of weakness as well,” for some men.

How to Help

—Be compassionate. Don’t view him as being stubborn, see him as a human being who is struggling with a heavy burden of expectations.

Related

• Anxiety And Depression

Antony’s narration alongside the superb editing and direction of the show is so immersive that I am immediately transported to the place where he is at.

Antony’s genuine curiosity alongside the background research on both the history and the present of a city provides an incredible insight into its political circumstances and people’s daily lives.

From Koreatown in Los Angeles to Detroit and Mississippi Delta, south to Mexico City, across the Atlantic Ocean to Libya, north to Russia, east to Punjab, further into Hong Kong and Tokyo, his contribution in learning more about the world is immense.

Teaching us to be open by default, tolerant, curious, caring, respectful to other cultures. Inviting us to travel more, not as tourists but as inquiring minds looking to expand our view of the world. To learn from each other simply by having a conversation while eating together.

I believe it is a show where everyone can learn from and should watch in their lifetime. I don’t know what it takes for a Television show to be preserved in the Library of Congress but I really think that Parts Unknown should be preserved for its significance and importance.

Anthony, I dearly miss you. Wish I could have saved you.

Chapter One.

To fall in love with Asia is one thing.
To fall in love in Asia is another.
Both have happened to me.

The Star Ferry to Kowloon at night.
Lights of Hong Kong behind me.
It’s a gift, a dream, a curse.

The best thing, the happiest thing, yet also the loneliest thing in the world.

I left because of the archaic work mentality and ethos, the lack of options, progress and professionalism. I left because it didn’t feel like Greece wanted to change or wanted someone like me¹ to help bring change.

In March of 2018 fate brought me back. Hard times followed but somehow I managed to endure.

By the end of September of 2018 my savings had been depleted and I didn’t want my partner to carry all the load. In the months that followed, before I decided to start the work on Windmill on the iPhone, I reached out to organisations that were either hiring for a role I could apply (e.g. iPhone Developer) or thought I could contribute in some other capacity.

Here is one of the messages I sent at the time. I have removed a few details to preserve the anonymity of the individuals/companies.

My name is Markos and I have a software engineering background.

I have been at the helm of Tesco Bank and Soldo to bring organisational change and deliver their iPhone apps.

I have recently moved to Athens from London and I am looking to get involved in the startup ecosystem with the goal of providing aid based on my experience and expertise.

I would love to have a coffee and meet personally in order to explore this further.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Every single one responded. I followed up by emailing my CV to give even more insight into my background. A couple of them never responded after that.

Those who did respond, we arranged to meet. It became clear that unless there was an open, available role, there wasn’t much need for me. One of the responses I got went even further than that.

• “I don’t know you and you have no LinkedIn.”

Here is another experience from applying and interviewing as an iPhone Developer.

• “Why do you want to work as an iPhone Developer?”
• “I am a software engineer. This is part of my skillset and expertise.”
• “Yes but. You are overqualified.”

That is not the first time I am hearing this alongside the “You don’t look like a developer.”, which would be funny if it wasn’t stereotypical.

In another interview, I was confronted with what I would mildly call a hiring process from the past. Questions where in rapid fire mode.

• “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”
• “What is something you are proud of?”
• “What are you bringing to the table?”
• “Why do you want to work for us?”

With very little room left for a discussion in-between. Impersonal, prejudicial, biased and formulaic.

When I finally got the opportunity to have a dialogue, (“We’ve got 10 minutes left if you want to ask any questions.”) I challenged by asking the tough questions only to get generic, hollow responses back and PR speak that pat themselves in the back.

For the past few years, there has been all this talk in Greece around the brain drain. It so happens that I am here after all these years. Equipped with skills, carrying the experience, bringing in the knowledge and for what it’s worth, developing a product. What are some of the reasons to keep staying in Greece?

What is the proposal that Greece makes? Where are the opportunities? How do Greeks find them? Why should Greek emigrants come back?

Maybe this needs to be a coordinated effort between the state and the private sector. A combination of sponsorship, campaigning, incentives at the state level and opportunities, contributions, assessment done at the private level.

Greece as a country, alongside organisations and individuals need to understand that they must be willing to change and be ready to fight for, be challenged, do their homework, adapt and give way to Greek emigrants if they want to reverse the brain drain.

Just doing some thinking out loud, having been back for over a year now.

Related

• Lack of meritocracy still driving brain drain
• Young Greeks unwilling to return
• Timing’s A Bitch

A multifunctional, environmentally sustainable center of education, arts, sports and recreation.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation - Cultural Center, based in Athens is home to the Greek National Opera and the National Library of Greece.

You might have come across it when Obama gave a speech about Democracy on his last trip as the President of the United States in Greece during his last days in office.

For all of August, there are Guided Tours at the SNFCC.

Even if you have visited the SNFCC, the guided tour will give you an oral history of its origins, backstory, architecture as well as backstage access to the Greek National Opera.

I decided to take the tour and came out inspired, elevated and joyful.

A few notable insights.

The Culture Center itself runs on solar energy that covers 100% of its consumption during the summer and 20% during the winter.

In the National Library, there are about 800K books available with an overall capacity of 2 Million.

Also accessible to the public are,

• Two fully equipped audio recording studios.
• One fully equipped studio for shooting, recording and editing video.
• Reading rooms.
• Available space for researchers to study, publish and digitise any archives.
• Desk space. Extremely busy during exam reading season.
• A computer hall.

At the Greek National Opera,

• The main stage is 16x16 meters.
• Each seat has a screen to show subtitles in English, in Greek, with more coming. The screen is aligned with the viewer and the stage for optimal reading!
• There are 3 additional stages of the same size that move in and out of the main area to support multiple plays in a single day.
• There is an “alternative stage” room that can be reconfigured on demand to host a variety of music events.
• There is a room for ballet practice.
• A soundproof room for choirs.
• A room to accommodate and record an orchestra.

There are many many more tidbits that you can learn on the tour so I won’t spoil everything here.

Until the end of August, there is also a Photo Exhibition in honour of Yannis Behrakis who only recently passed away. I urge you to visit that too. His photographic journey is incredibly moving, powerful and topical.-

APW: Eyewitness / Yannis Behrakis: Exhibition

For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been in limbo.

I decided to shut down Twitter after 10 years. The last few months I have been gradually tweeting less and never kept more than 30 days of tweets on my timeline.

It was the last remaining social media presence¹. It’s been over a year since I deleted Facebook and Instagram.

Social media has become more and more hideous to the point that it makes me feel like shit. I don’t need this. There is a plethora of reporting done by major publishers and research if you need to understand more.

Personally speaking, this idea of social status (followers, likes and shit) along with the lack of social cues only leads to more entitlement and less courtesy. Let me put it differently.

On social media, you don’t know anyone long or good enough to be shitty. So take your vile behaviour and go take a breather before you start attacking.

I’ve had it. I prefer the safety and comfort of my website. The discussions that can be done across people’s blogs and the personal, private, thoughtful relationship I can have over email one-on-one.

It doesn’t help that as society we are absolutely fucking clueless on how to deal with people that are mentally struggling and I’ve been struggling in the past 3 weeks, again.

A few days back, I can’t remember where now, I think it was an interview of Tarantino, he said something along these lines.

We don’t push people when they have twisted their ankle. We don’t go up to them telling to move on. Why do we do that with people that are struggling mentally? Why do we push them?

I am really naive as a person. I take everything that people tell me at face value. I believe everything I see. I don’t have a hidden agenda and I tend to believe that people do not need to have one either. Why would you if you can just be honest? Fear.

Right now, I am at a loss. I don’t know how to move forward in my life. It’s coming up to 2 years since I left London, I have been disappointed so much by the software industry and I have heavy doubts there is a business out there where I can professionally and personally grow, find purpose, work among great people and be me all at the same time.-

Moving the needle

I am hearing from the developer community there is a broader concern around the restrictions and the limitation on the tools Apple provides and allows. I want to kick-off a discussion about this to address these shortcomings. How should Apple enable developers to improve on the tooling for the iOS development ecosystem? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Some of the questions to get the conversation going:

• How are existing developer tools limited when building for Apple Platforms?
• Are you using a 3rd party developer tool and why?
• Did you feel the need to build a developer tool, why?
• How should Apple improve on its tooling and resources made available to developers?
• Do you think iOS should have a dedicated “Developer Tools” section?

I will add what you’re saying below. Please mention @windmill_io to help me track your responses.

I wish Apple were better at collaborating with the developer community, instead of just controlling it. If Apple stopped trying to do everything itself, focused on just building a great platform, and let us solve our own problems, everyone would win.

• Ash Furrow 🏳️‍🌈

Apple should be in the business of fostering creative solutions to lots of different problems instead of shutting them out.

• Jared Sorge

Let’s see if planting the seed of making the language and some frameworks open source can grow into a more open ecosystem of tooling. The closeness of Xcode is one of the things that annoys me the most.

• Pedro

I don’t understand all the issues here, I admit, but I start by thinking that useful developer tools should be allowed on the App Store.

• Brent Simmons

Apple’s loss ultimately when people stop innovating for their platforms

• Sven A. Schmidt

Table of Contents

Introduction

Windmill on the iPhone allows an organisation with an iPhone app under development to make that app available for distribution on any devices they own, as documented in the iOS Deployment Reference.

It makes use of ad-hoc distribution to make it dead easy to get started as a small- to medium-size business, with app distribution to half a dozen or so devices, while progressing towards TestFlight.

It allows businesses to distribute their app continuously while still in development, at regular time intervals, on demand, or as a reaction.

• As individual contractors, it enables them to show progress to a client offsite and deploy bug fixes, at will, in time-critical moments.
• As part of a team, it enables them to have nightly builds to get daily feedback from a product owner.
• As part of an organisation, it enables them to have weekly meetings with the business and marketing team to do a demo, discuss, and plan next week’s development.

Windmill on the Mac continuously monitors the codebase, as made available in a git repository, so that every time a developer pushes a code change, it ensures the app still works. A developer starts using it as soon as they start working on an iPhone app.

It runs on Apple hardware that the organisation owns, on their premises. Therefore, it does not expect them to hand over their Apple Credentials, Distribution Certificate, Private Key, and Provisioning Profile, making it more secure than systems asking developers to hand these files over and keep them stored on their behalf.

Windmill can scale up to a platform where an organisation runs multiple instances of Windmill on the Mac on the available hardware to define a workflow and enforce security requirements.

An organisation in a small office with 2 developers and 1 product owner would have each developer running Windmill on their development Mac monitoring their respective feature branch, as well as an instance of Windmill running on a dedicated Mac mini monitoring the master branch.

This way, each developer gets feedback on their own codebase while the Mac mini holds the Distribution Certificate and Private Key to distribute releases and report on merges. This allows an organisation to have an overall view, a shared knowledge and centralised security on their app. Does the app compile? Are tests available and passing? Can the app be installed on a device? Can we release on the App Store?

Rejected

Unfortunately, Apple has firmly rejected Windmill on the iPhone. Windmill on the Mac does not seem to have Apple’s blessing either.

To Apple’s credit, they did take their time evaluating Windmill on the iPhone and Windmill overall.

Windmill on the iPhone was in Review for over 20 work days and an additional 5 after I sent an eight-page “Letter of Appeal” to the App Review Team with the following:

• An overarching description that explains what Windmill does, why I think it’s useful for developers, why it does not violate the App Store Guidelines and Apple Developer Program License Agreement, and how Apple benefits by approving Windmill.
• The security considerations and implementation details that went into Windmill, for full transparency in an effort to make Apple feel comfortable about Windmill.
• In detail, why I believe Windmill complies with the App Store Review Guidelines and the Apple Developer Program License Agreement.
• Some thoughts on how the Mac and the iPhone are governed by two very distinct sets of rules and how the App Store on iOS does not even have a dedicated “Developer Tools” section.

I have been on a call with the App Review Team at Apple twice. I was told that Windmill on the iPhone is “not acceptable” to be on the App Store. Additionally, taking a “holistic” look at Windmill I was told that “conceptually” it is in violation of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement.

I also emailed an Apple Developer Tools Evangelist asking for help to find a way forward with Windmill and for some course correction to be done. That was more than 2 weeks ago. I haven’t received a reply.

It’s been really hard to come to terms with this. I fought really hard for Windmill.

I both understand where Apple is coming from and I don’t.

Update

I was reminded of one very specific reason that I was given too.

Guideline 5.2.5 - Legal - Intellectual Property

YOUR APP IS TOO SIMILAR TO TESTFLIGHT, WHICH CREATES A MISLEADING ASSOCIATION WITH APPLE PRODUCTS. WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO REVIEW YOUR APP CONCEPT AND EVALUATE WHETHER YOU CAN INCORPORATE DIFFERENT CONTENT AND FEATURES TO BRING IT INTO COMPLIANCE WITH THE APP STORE REVIEW GUIDELINES.

I understand

Apple seems to take issue with the fact that Windmill is meant to be used for development, in-house, but Windmill on the iPhone was meant to be made available on the App Store.

More importantly. Apple took the stance that the Command Line Tools Package is only meant to be used by developers in-house and not by 3rd parties to provide support for continuous integration systems - continuous delivery in the case of Windmill.

Before you gasp, here is the nuance as I understand it¹.

Apple takes issue that Windmill makes it effortless for developers to create a distribution mechanism for their apps outside the control of Apple and the safety of the App Store and TestFlight.

Hosting of pre-release software through means outside of the app store and facilitating developers to use their certificate, provisioning profile to do so is not permitted.

Even though ad-hoc distribution is limited, Windmill imposes strong security requirements and is designed for in-house use only.

After all, Windmill is available to every developer. Not just organisations with the know-how. Its mission is to make continuous delivery of iPhone apps ubiquitous and accessible to developers and businesses in an effort to improve consistency, a high level of understanding and agreement across the industry.

It doesn’t seem to matter what Windmill is designed to be used for but what it could be used for. It is precisely why Apple had to say that the Command Line Tools Package is only meant to be used by developers alone.

Xcode command line tools are only provided by Apple to developers to automate building, testing and distributing their app.

Had an organisation built Windmill for internal use, distribution would be under their control, used exclusively for their apps, and operating in their internal network.

Windmill on the iPhone would probably be built and distributed using an Enterprise Certificate, internally to the employees of the organisation or using ad-hoc distribution. In this case, it wouldn’t matter since it’s internal to the organisation.

Even Xcode Server, Apple’s home grown offering to in-house continuous integration and distribution comes bundled with a web server, “where you and members of your development team can use a web browser to view the status of bot integrations and download assets and products.” See Monitor and Manage Bots.

I don’t understand

Windmill does not operate outside of the boundaries as defined by Apple.

• It expects that an organisation is registered with the Apple Developer Program.
• It expects an installation of the tools in any development Mac where Windmill is used. Windmill itself does not come bundled with the Command Line Tools Package.
• It manages signing based on the Apple Developer Team of the developer, organisation.
• It uses whatever Distribution Certificate and Provisioning Profile is managed by Xcode.
• It is limited by ad-hoc distribution device limits.

Windmill could not be used to distribute apps to the public, circumventing TestFlight and the App Store anymore than a developer can do today without Windmill or using existing services that offer ad-hoc distribution on the web.

Windmill plays by every Apple rule. It does not ask a for Apple credentials. It does not manage signing outside of Xcode. It does not ask for the private key and distribution certificate. It does everything that a developer could do today, with better security and privacy than an equivalent service on the cloud. There is a whole industry providing automation and distribution as a service for Apple platforms on the web.

Windmill may be the only third-party native macOS continuous delivery app available on Apple platforms but it probably comes last in offering such a service to developers.

Reconciliation

I wish Windmill on the Mac was also on the App Store. Reviewed, approved, endorsed and recommended by Apple. The decision to build Windmill on macOS and iOS has become a liability.

With Windmill, I effectively asked Apple to weigh in on the matter and Apple has decided that the risk far outweighs the benefits that Windmill has compared to existing offerings outside the Apple ecosystem.

It is possible that Windmill can only live within the confines of the Apple Business Manager with Windmill on the iPhone as a Custom App. Which does not help fulfil its mission.

Collectively as an iOS community, we have spent an insane amount of time and put an immense amount of effort in automating the delivery of our apps by writing flaky scripts in bash using Jenkins, reverse engineering the Xcode project file format, writing blog posts with our findings. Yet we are none the wiser and have barely made a dent. - iOS Automation - The Current State of Affairs

I completely misread the situation with Apple. It does not make it any easier that Apple has a tendency to be overly protective of the ecosystem. I understand why, I just wish Apple had embraced Windmill.

I had made plans to take Windmill even further, beyond distribution, onto other Apple platforms. Now, I am not sure what I can do while Apple stays silent.

One more thing

Windmill is the culmination of the experience I have accumulated as a developer over the past 15 or so years. On top of that, it took months of research and development on the Mac, on the server, and on the iPhone, paying great attention to the user experience as well as security and privacy that would not and cannot be made possible without deeply integrating with Apple’s tools, platforms and services.

I can’t help but feel disappointed and highly discouraged after all the work I’ve put in improving the tooling available to developers.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to everyone at the Seattle Xcoders group. They have been very supportive all this time when I struggled mentally and needed them the most.

Thank you Brent, Jared, Tom, Tim, Marc, Jeff for providing invaluable feedback, improving this post significantly in the process.

Special thanks to Daniel Jalkut.

A call for discussion

Beyond the personal and financial setback this is causing me, I am hearing from the developer community there is a broader concern around the restrictions and the limitation on the tools Apple provides and allows.

I want to kick-off a discussion about this to address these shortcomings. How should Apple enable developers to improve on the tooling for the iOS development ecosystem? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Related

• Over a year since Apple gave me an ultimatum on Windmill
• Distributing Custom B2B iOS Apps privately
• Build great business apps on iOS.

Back in March, I decided to attend an open day organised by egg. It is a business incubator, operating in Athens with a mission to encourage, support and promote entrepreneurship, primarily targeting Greeks, living in Greece.

I am happy to announce that Windmill has been accepted to join egg!

Ever since the inception of Windmill, I have been adamant on what path I prefer¹ following. I want to bootstrap Windmill into a sustainable business. That is, with the exception of a business loan, receive no outside investment in return of equity or follow a traditional “startup” path to grow the business.

In the midst of building Windmill on the iPhone, I decided to apply² to egg. I meticulously went through the website, watched talks given by the egg staff and business partners in an effort to understand its culture and attitude towards starting a business.

I was drawn to egg primarily for evangelising sensibility in starting a business as well as for appearing genuine in helping Greeks looking to build a future in Greece. Still, I wanted to make sure this was a good fit for Windmill going forward.

Here is what egg offers and how I believe it can help.

• Office space. Even though I have created a dedicated office space at home, the isolation has been tough to endure. I am looking to benefit from the discussions, interactions and a sense of belonging to everyone else there. For reference, every year about 25 businesses operate within egg.
• Mentorship. As part of your tenure, you are assigned a mentor. At this stage, it is not clear who this mentor will be or their expertise. Still, having someone dedicated where you can refer to in an effort to bootstrap your business can prove really useful.
• Business Bootcamp. You receive about 100 hours of training in Marketing, Business and Finance. This structured education will no doubt help solidify some of my limited understanding.
• Opportunities. Being part of a business incubator is bound to create opportunities in business, marketing, potential partnerships etc. I will certainly be keeping my eyes peeled.
• Support. Last but not least, you do get access to accounting and legal services as well as help with incorporating. No doubt I could be doing all this outside of egg, still I have enough on my plate already so I would rather not have to figure it out on my own.
• Once you have incorporated, there could be an option to get a business loan in favourable terms. This will come in handy, primarily for hiring as well as marketing and advertising services.

Back in 2017, when I decided to leave London and give Windmill a fair chance, I wanted to spend about a year to see if it made any business sense pursuing it.

I never would have imagined the possibility of running a business in Greece, yet here I am.

Windmill has come a long way and receiving an offer to join egg is yet another validating step.

I have a good feeling about this.

Which String initializer are you using, specifically?

String(utf8String:) is a Foundation extension and looking at the commit history, it wasn’t optimized to avoid bridging until 5.1 (commit a088e1322495).

String(validatingUTF8:) should be a ton faster in 5.0.x.

— David Smith (@Catfish_Man) May 16, 2019

In other words. In Swift 5.0.x, any String.append(:) calls can potentially take a performance hit.

It’s a bridged NSString, so in the current model either reserveCapacity or the actual append will have to convert to a native Swift String, which will (in 5.0.x) incur O(n) CFStringGetCharacterAtIndex calls for some specific types of NSString.

— David Smith (@Catfish_Man) May 16, 2019

Similarly, any NSTextView.string.append(:) operations will also suffer.

This is what that performance hit looks like in my case, where a DispatchSourceRead is feeding a NSTextView every time there are bytes available to read.

        let fileDescriptor = fileHandleForReading.fileDescriptor
        let readSource = DispatchSource.makeReadSource(fileDescriptor: fileDescriptor, queue: self.queue)
        
        readSource.setEventHandler { [weak readSource = readSource] in
            guard let data = readSource?.data else {
                return
            }
            
            let estimatedBytesAvailableToRead = Int(data)
            
            //before: var buffer = [UInt8](repeating: 0, count: estimatedBytesAvailableToRead)
            var buffer = [CChar](repeating: 0, count: estimatedBytesAvailableToRead)
            let bytesRead = Darwin.read(fileDescriptor, &buffer, estimatedBytesAvailableToRead)
            /*
            Making sure that the buffer ends with a 0 since the bytes read are not guaranteed to.
            `String(validatingUTF8:)` has a requirement that the "cString is A pointer to a null-terminated UTF-8 code sequence."
            */
            buffer.append(0) 
            
            //https://twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1128934439096971264
            guard bytesRead > 0, let availableString = String(validatingUTF8: buffer) else {
                return
            }
        
            (completion ?? DispatchQueue.main).async {
                self.output(part: availableString, count: availableString.utf8.count)
            }
        }

Use NSTextView.textStorage.append(:) and convert your String to an NSAttributedString using NSAttributedString(string:).

//before: textView.string.append(output)
textView.textStorage.append(NSAttributedString(string:output))

This is what the performance looks like after the code change.

Couldn’t be more grateful for David Smith responding to my request as well as Marcin Krzyzanowski and Paul Goracke for nudging me to take a look at NSTextStorage.

This had the potential to be a huge time sink.

Swift 5.1 will be released sometime after March 18, 2019.

.-

Update

Started noticing some crashes on String(validatingUTF8:) with a Fatal error: UnsafeMutablePointer.initialize overlapping range when using it with an UnsafePointer<CChar>. Instead using the implementation as defined in the Discussion under the String documentation. Will report back.

Update 2

Re the Fatal error: UnsafeMutablePointer.initialize overlapping range. I hate having bad code around, even if it’s bad sample code. It’s been a learning experience for sure.

String(validatingUTF8:) has a requirement that the “cString is A pointer to a null-terminated UTF-8 code sequence.”. This code on the other hand makes no guarantees that this will be the case.

var buffer = [CChar](repeating: 0, count: estimatedBytesAvailableToRead)
let bytesRead = Darwin.read(fileDescriptor, &buffer, estimatedBytesAvailableToRead)

Sure, it initialises the character array with 0 (i.e. null¹) but read may fill that array and not end with a 0.

Back to the String(validatingUTF8:) initialiser. If you look at the source, it uses UTF8._nullCodeUnitOffset(in:) which “Is an equivalent of strlen for C-strings” which gets the length of the string (based on the presence of a null terminating character of course, we are going deep in C now). I was guessing that strlen takes a trip down memory lane© looking for that null terminating character and ends up way beyond an “acceptable” length. What is acceptable you say?

For that we have to take a look at the source code of UnsafePointer

public func initialize(from source: UnsafePointer<Pointee>, count: Int) {

    _debugPrecondition(count >= 0,
        "UnsafeMutablePointer.initialize with negative count")
    _debugPrecondition(UnsafePointer(self) + count <= source ||  source + count <= UnsafePointer(self),
        "UnsafeMutablePointer.initialize overlapping range")

Builtin.copyArray(
  Pointee.self, self._rawValue, source._rawValue, count._builtinWordValue)
// This builtin is equivalent to:
// for i in 0..<count {
//   (self + i).initialize(to: source[i])
// }
}

So I decided to take the red pill, go down the rabbit hole and see for myself.

for i in 1...100_000 {
    var buffer = [CChar](repeating: 1, count: 4096)
    let string = OverlappingRange(validUTF8:buffer).string
    print(string)
}

Welcome to the Matrix².-

“Remember…all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”

This post expects that you are familiar with object lifecycles, closures, functional programming, memory management, asynchronous execution, URLSession and Process in the Swift language and the Mac/iOS SDK.

Update

11 May 2019, added custom operator and a reference to SE-0253.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The backbone of Windmill on the Mac is a series of steps¹, that execute serially.

Checkout -> Build -> Test -> Archive -> Export

A few things to note.

• The output of one step may act as the input to the next.
• A step executes asynchronously.
• Each step must be successful before the next one is taken.
• Steps only make forward progress. If one step fails, the whole series is considered to have failed and no more steps are taken.
• The implementation of each step may differ. e.g. one step might be launching a Process, another one might start a URLSession.

The problem domain may sound familiar² to that the NSOperation and NSOperationQueue solve. Apple has an excellent WWDC talk describing how powerful and useful can be in the context of dependencies; See Advanced NSOperations.

Windmill, does not make use of NSOperations for the following, arguably subjective reasons.

• I wanted a more refined control over object lifecycles; i.e. what dependencies/relationships a step has, what arguments it needs to run, what it expects as an input.
• I wanted the concepts of a step, success, output/input, optional next step to be prominent and part of the API design.
• I wanted steps to have low coupling. Being able to reuse a step and create a different series of steps.
• I wanted a step to allocate memory lazily as part of its execution rather than as part of its allocation.
• I wanted the relationship between steps to look like it’s “modelled” at compile time.
• I wanted less of an architecture and more of a design pattern.
• I wanted an abstraction that is “lightweight” rather than another execution layer on top of launching a process and/or making an HTTP request.

Let’s take a step back.

Prefix

#!/bin/swift
import Foundation

let message = "Hello World!"

let process = Process()
process.launchPath = "/bin/echo"
process.arguments = [message]
process.launch()

The code above prints the message "Hello World!" asynchronously.

#!/bin/swift
import Foundation

let group = DispatchGroup()
group.enter()

let session = URLSession.shared

let message = "SGVsbG8gV29ybGQh"
var request = URLRequest(url: URL(string: "https://httpbin.org/base64/\(message)")!)
request.httpMethod = "GET"
request.addValue("text/html", forHTTPHeaderField: "accept")

session.dataTask(with: request) { (data, response, error) in
    guard let response = response as? HTTPURLResponse else {
        preconditionFailure()
    }
    
    switch (response.statusCode) {
    case 200:
        if let data = data, let message = String(data: data, encoding: .utf8) {
            print(message)
        }
    default:
        print("failure")
    }

    group.leave()
    
}.resume()

let result = group.wait(timeout: .now() + 10)
print(result)

The code above makes an asynchronous HTTP GET request to decode a base64 message.

Let’s see how the code samples above would typically be used in an app. A Base64Service which might look familiar with what you find in the “network layer”.

class Base64Service  {

    typealias DecodeCompletionHandler = (Result) -> Void

    let session: URLSession

    init(session: URLSession = URLSession.shared) {
        self.session = session
    }

    func decode(queue: DispatchQueue? = nil, encoded message: String, completionHandler: @escaping Base64Service.DecodeCompletionHandler) {

        var request = URLRequest(url: URL(string: "https://httpbin.org/base64/\(message)")!)
        request.httpMethod = "GET"
        request.addValue("text/html", forHTTPHeaderField: "accept")
        session.dataTask(with: request) { (data, response, error) in
            guard let response = response as? HTTPURLResponse else {
                preconditionFailure()
            }
        
            switch (response.statusCode) {
            case 200:
                if let data = data, let message = String(data: data, encoding: .utf8) {
                    (queue ?? DispatchQueue.main).async {
                        completionHandler(.success(message: message))
                    }
                }
            default:
                (queue ?? DispatchQueue.main).async {
                    completionHandler(.failure)
                }
            }
        }.resume()
    }
}

An EchoService type.

class EchoService  {

    typealias EchoCompletionHandler = (Result) -> Void

    func echo(queue: DispatchQueue? = nil, message: String, completionHandler: @escaping EchoService.EchoCompletionHandler) {
        let process = Process()
        process.launchPath = "/bin/echo"
        process.arguments = [message]
        process.terminationHandler = { process in
            
            let isSuccess = process.terminationStatus == 0

            (queue ?? DispatchQueue.main).async {
                if isSuccess {
                    completionHandler(.success(message: message))
                } else {
                    completionHandler(.failure)
                }
            }
        }

        process.launch()
    }
}

The Base64Service can be used like so:

let base64Service = Base64Service()
let encoded = "SGVsbG8gV29ybGQh"

base64Service.decode(encoded: encoded) { result in 
    
}

The EchoService can be used like so:

let echoService = EchoService()
let message = "Hello World"

echoService.echo(message: message) { result in
	
}

Run-of-the-mill so far.

With both services at hand, we want to be able to use them so that given an encoded message, we can:

1. Decode the message.
2. On success, echo the decoded message.

Let’s see how that would look.

let echoService = EchoService()
let base64Service = Base64Service()

base64Service.decode(encoded: "SGVsbG8gV29ybGQh") { result in 
    
    guard case .success(let message) = result else {
        return
    }

    echoService.echo(message: message) { _ in
    
    }
}

Baby Steps

Now that we have a better sense of what we are working with, let’s break it down.

The output of one step may act as the input to the next.

Notice how the message argument to the EchoService#echo(queue:message:) travels from the successful result of the Base64Service.

The message is the “output” of the Base64Service and the “input” to the EchoService. In that sense, you can think of an InputOutput type as a key/value storage that can be used to pass data between steps. Similar to how the NotificationCenter uses the userInfo whenever it posts a Notification.

typealias InputOutput = [AnyHashable : Any]

From that, the definition of a step is trivial.

Steps only make forward progress.

typealias Step = (_ io: InputOutput) -> Swift.Void

Let’s look at the implementation of the EchoStep.

import Foundation

struct EchoStep {

    weak var echoService: EchoService?

    func make(queue: DispatchQueue? = nil, next: Step? = nil) -> Step {
        return { io in

            guard let message = io["message"] as? String else {
                preconditionFailure()
            }

            self.echoService?.echo(queue: queue, message: message) { result in
                guard case .success(let message) = result else {
                    return
                }

                next?(["message":message])
            }
        }
    }
}

Think of the EchoStep as merely a type that creates a Step that echoes a message and also defines its input/output. It has an EchoService as a dependency but does not own it since the lifecycle of the EchoService³ is not directly related to the step execution.

Look closely at the EchoStep#make(queue:next:) implementation which returns a Step and think back to its type alias.

typealias Step = (_ io: InputOutput) -> Swift.Void

It returns a function, that accepts a single InputOutput type as its input and has no return statement. It expects the io argument to have a “message” value.

Equally, notice how the Step, passes it’s output to the next step, which in this case is the message it echoed. It’s important to understand that the InputOutput type is a short lived instance only meant to be used in creating the step. It is not meant to be long lived, passed throughout the whole series of steps or as a global variable where every input/output is kept there.

This is how you would create a new EchoStep and use it

let echoService = EchoService()
let echoStep = EchoStep(echoService: echoService)

let echo = echoStep.make()
let message = "Hello World!"

echo(["message":message])

There is one more thing.

Each step must be successful before the next one is taken.

Notice how the EchoStep#make(queue:next:) above accepts an optional next Step type that only calls on the condition of a successful callback.

With that in mind, let’s define a new type SuccessfulStep, which creates a “successful” Step and optionally passes the next one.

typealias SuccessfulStep = (_ next: Step?) -> Step

This type will become useful later as part of building a series of steps. For now, take a look at the DecodeStep.

struct DecodeStep {

    weak var base64Service: Base64Service?

    func make(queue: DispatchQueue? = nil, next: Step? = nil) -> Step {
        return { io in

            guard let encoded = io["message"] as? String else {
                preconditionFailure()
            }

            self.base64Service?.decode(queue: queue, encoded: encoded) { result in 
    
            guard case .success(let message) = result else {
                return
            }

            next?(["message": message])
            }
        }
    }

    func successful(queue: DispatchQueue? = nil) -> SuccessfulStep {
        return { next in 
            return self.make(queue: queue, next: next)
        }
    }
}

Focus on the DecodeStep#successful(queue:) -> SuccessfulStep. This function accepts every argument the #make one does, except the next Step.

The #successful function is useful to better express a series of steps. It’s best demonstrated in auto-completion.

Notice how DecodeStep(base64Service: base64Service).successful() defines a SuccessfulStep. It does not create one. This allows you to defer passing the next Step until after you have created it. Alternatively, you would have to write the code backwards, starting with creating the echo Step first.

Keep in mind that this is still the creation phase. Nothing is executed until you take the series step and call it with an InputOutput parameter.

series(["message":"SGVsbG8gV29ybGQh"])

Try passing an invalid base64 encoded String and see what happens.

Now that we can chain a series of DecodeStep, let’s use them to decode a twice encoded base64 String.

let base64Service = Base64Service()
let echoService = EchoService()

let decodeOnce = DecodeStep(base64Service: base64Service).successful()
let decodeTwice = DecodeStep(base64Service: base64Service).successful()

let echo = EchoStep(echoService: echoService).make()

let series:Step = decodeOnce(decodeTwice(echo))
series(["message":"U0dWc2JHOGdWMjl5YkdRaA=="])

One thing you may be struggling with is how the heck does this line of code work?

let series:Step = decodeOnce(decodeTwice(echo))

Especially if you are not already familiar with functional programming. It’s ok! Let’s go through this.

The decodeOnce instance is a function (a SuccessfulStep). Once you call it, (i.e. decodeOnce(...) it resolves to a Step, that step is the one the DecodeStep makes. So the series instance is a Step function that you can call. (I have specifically declared its type so that this is clear.)

The decodeTwice instance is also a SuccessfulStep, once you call it, it resolves to a Step also made by the DecodeStep. It’s the next step in the series.

Finally, the echo instance is a Step (also a function). It’s the second next step in the series.

Error handling

You may have noticed that throughout the code, there isn’t much error handling. This was done on purpose since I wanted to focus on the design pattern of steps.

Having said that, you can easily incorporate error handling either through a delegate and/or notifications.

As an example, consider the following:

guard case .success(let message) = result else {

    self.delegate?.failure(error: StepError.failed("decode"))

    return
}

Mattt has an excellent article on Error⁴

Conclusion

typealias InputOutput = [AnyHashable : Any]
typealias SuccessfulStep = (_ next: Step?) -> Step
typealias Step = (_ io: InputOutput) -> Swift.Void

As long as you remember these 3 types, you can apply this pattern across your codebase.

Windmill 3.0 also uses it to distribute an export efficiently, securely and in a performant upload that requires 3 steps.

There is also nothing preventing you from combining async with sync steps.

Sample Project

Source on GitHub

Feedback

Would be nice if instead of brackets, it was possible to define a custom operator. However, as far as I know, that requires an explicit type instead of a typealias. If you have a suggestion, please let me know and will update this post.

Custom Operator

Here it is using an explicit type. Effectively, you wrap a function in a struct type, rather than simply create a typealias of the function. This way, you can also define a custom operator. In our case, that would be a SuccesfulStep.

infix operator -->: AssignmentPrecedence

public struct SuccessfulStep {
    let success: (_ next: Step?) -> Step
    
    call(_ next: Step?) -> Step {
        return success(next)
    }
}

extension SuccessfulStep {
    static func --> (success: SuccessfulStep, next: @escaping Step) -> Step {
        return success.call(next)
    }
}

I just came across Daniel Steinberg’s talk, You’re doing it wrong in which he mentions the Swift Evolution Proposal 0253 - Introduce callables which is coming. AFAICS, effectively you will be able to call a struct type as if it is a function. Which makes the struct SuccesfulStep retain it’s nature as if it was a typealias! Here is how a series of steps now looks inspired by Matt Gallagher release of CwlViews.

let series = decode --> echo

and

let series = decodeFirst --> decondSecond --> echo

I have also updated the source code.

Would also be nice if there was some type safety for the InputOutput arguments as well as its “type” required for each step.-

Acknowledgements

• Chris Eidhof, Daniel Eggert, and Florian Kugler for the wonderful Functional Swift book. It’s been extremely helpful while trying to get my head around functional programming.
• Daniel H Steinberg for his amazing insight and sharing of knowledge. His Somewhere Between Tomorrowland and Frontierland - Daniel Steinberg talk was an eye opener.
• httpbin.org
• cryptii

Excellent articles by The New York Times on the Climate Issue of April 9, 2019.

• The Problem With Putting a Price on the End of the World
• Climate Change Could Destroy His Home in Peru. So He Sued an Energy Company in Germany.

The first one is about economics and policy in relation to climate change. The second is about law, ethics and capitalism.

I found them both fascinating, especially the second one. In an alternate universe, I practice law as an attorney and have a background in philosophy.

Here are my takeaways. Market economics like “Price elasticity of demand” might make sense in theory, but in practice may not work as expected. Even more so when used in an effort to bring social change.

When a product becomes more expensive, people use less of it. Carbon pricing is an elegant mechanism by which market economics can work on behalf of the climate rather than against it. But if the idea’s straightforwardness is its great economic advantage, it has also proved to be its political flaw. Energy, for utilities and transportation, is a major cost of living. And across the industrialized world, the middle class and the poor have been struggling with slow income growth.

The Yellow vests movement, still ongoing, is a prime example of social unrest in response to carbon tax. In a financially strained society, people perceived the carbon tax as unjust rather than being persuaded to look for cheaper alternatives to warm their house and drive their cars.

The question is whether any policy is both big enough to matter and popular enough to happen.

Arizona, Michigan and Nevada tried to rally people behind clean energy while at the same time putting the responsibility squarely on energy companies. The goal was to incentivise people to opt for clean energy while at the same time making renewables more profitable for businesses through the use of performance standards. Keep the last part in mind; off to Peru.

On Dec. 13, 1941, a piece broke off a hanging glacier and fell into Palcacocha, creating a great wave that overwhelmed a natural dam and sent a flood surging toward Huaraz, a provincial capital in the Peruvian Andes, about 14 miles below. A third of the city was destroyed and at least 1,800 people were killed.

Since then, the government has posted guardians to watch the lake, measuring water levels, reporting on avalanches etc. due to the risk of flooding. In the meantime, local farmers that depend on the lake have concerns over the diminishing clean water.

“I depend, in every sense, on the mountain,” he told me. “It is everything.”

A man named Saúl Luciano Lliuya, “who had never left his country”, took it upon himself to travel to Germany and file a lawsuit against an energy company for sharing some of the responsibility. The “crazy” thing is that this German energy company does not operate in Peru nor there is evidence that is directly responsible for the ice melting. Still, the lawsuit is about the impact its operations have on the climate on a global scale!

Beginning in the 1990s, courts began to find tobacco companies liable for the health effects of cigarette smoking, even though smokers used their products willingly and even though the first 800 or so lawsuits against the companies failed.

Back then, the tobacco industry in its defence claimed that people made a choice to smoke hence it can’t be held responsible. Eventually, a subpoena to turn over internal documents proved that companies knew smoking was harmful. In an effort to maximise profits, appease shareholders and stay afloat, individuals practiced the art of deceit.

Today, this is one of the arguments energy companies are making too. People choose how to warm their homes and drive their cars. But do they, when income inequality is so prevalent in societies today?

And when New York City filed suit against BP and others, the companies responded that the city, because of its use of the oil industry’s products in its own police cars and garbage trucks and so on, shouldn’t be able to sue because it had what’s known as “unclean hands.” If everyone is at fault, the argument goes, no one can be held responsible.

The same argument you’ll hear from a kid caught eating a cookie from the jar, pointing the finger back at you exclaiming “You made them!”

But the parallels aren’t perfect. Unlike tobacco, energy companies have argued, the existence of the fossil-fuel economy has provided considerable advantages to society.

Except when energy companies lobby for coal, crude oil, fracking in an effort to keep existing profits, unless compelled by law to do otherwise. Think back to the campaign on clean energy and regulation based on performance standards.

That companies actively prevented the development of alternative energy sources and the regulation of carbon-intensive ones, thus politically and economically propping up a polluting system. “It’s incorrect to say that there’s a strong public demand for fossil fuels,” Sher, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, told me. “What we have is a desire for energy.”

Markets may decide on the price of goods and services. Individuals may act out of self-interest causing harm and resulting in people’s death but as long as morals guide us and justice prevails, I am hopeful for the future. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”-

Related

• “Ethics” and Ethics by Oliver Reichenstein
• What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel

For the past few months, I have been working on Windmill 3.0 which enables Windmill on the Mac to publish your iOS app.

Effectively, every time you make a code change, Windmill will also publish your app so that you can install it on your iPhone.

This feature requires a subscription and a Windmill account.

I wanted to make this as streamlined and integrated as possible.

Here are the requirements.

• There shouldn’t be a strong ordering between creating an account and purchasing a subscription.
• A subscription enables publishing and listing of apps.
• As long as a subscription is active, publishing and listing of apps must be enabled.
• Access to publish and list apps must be protected by an access token.
• The access token must have the same security requirements as any. Being cryptographically secure, have an expiry date, able to revoke it, not reused across clients.
• The number of steps required to create an account, subscribe and gain access to publish and list apps should be kept at a minimum.
• A user should be involved as little as possible and only where and when required.
• No user passwords!
• Anonymous.

And an important limitation.

• Windmill on the Mac is not sandboxed¹ therefore it cannot use StoreKit to purchase or restore a subscription.

I won’t go into the technical details in this post.

For now I’ll just say you need to have done a ton of background reading, gained a great deal of knowledge and experience using both Apple’s platforms and SDKs, as well as

at a high level,

• a REST API,
• JSON Web Token(s)
• CloudKit Notifications and Subscriptions.

at the low level,

• Grand Central Dispatch
• Notifications
• Property Observers
• Keychain and Secure Storage.

Suffice to say that it takes a well coordinated software engineering dance that I had to choreograph every turn across the App Store, mobile, server and the desktop.

I almost cried seeing it work for the first time.

What I have to show you is what it looks like to the end user.

Here is Windmill on the iPhone. I have just added an SKPayment into the SKPaymentQueue and about to approve the purchase.

The listed app you see is because I have already been a subscriber in the past and already have one app published.

Nothing “special”. One thing to keep in mind. At this point the user may or may have not signed in to their iCloud account. Assuming that they have, here is what happens next.

Windmill on the Mac is notified that a valid subscription exists. Based on this “claim”, it acquires an access token and starts publishing².

That’s it! There is nothing more before or after. Seriously. When the user first opens the app, here is what they see.

There is no step to create an account. Just a nudge to log in and turn iCloud Drive on.

Here is what the account screen shows for a subscribed user.

I am very proud of this.-

Maxwell Anselm writing about Life in the slow lane.

I want to take this opportunity to say why I believe going back to Jenkins alongside writing and maintaining scripts is a step backwards, re-iterate what the goal of Windmill is and what has been guiding its development.

Before I go into the details, I do wholeheartedly understand where Maxwell (among others in my mind) is coming from. I have been an iOS Developer since 2009 and in the past I too have used Jenkins (with bash scripts) to automate the delivery of iOS apps. For the record, I have also used Xcode Bots and Buddybuild. I have never used fastlane; I am just familiar with it.

Building from the Command Line with Xcode

As it stands, if you want to build (test, export, archive, etc.) an Xcode project, you have to use Xcode’s command-line tools. I believe this is great!

• It demonstrates that Apple is keen on providing developer tools beyond an editor and a simulator and hopes you can help with that. It tells me it’s been listening to the voice of the community to support continuous integration systems.
• It puts the responsibility to develop and maintain the command-line tools squarely on Apple. We should cherish, embrace and encourage Apple to do this. Apple is better positioned to know what’s coming, build to specification and provide support for developers in a timely fashion.

I have witnessed the progress Apple has made which, to me, demonstrates commitment.

• xcodebuild has unified Xcode actions providing consistency and interoperability between them. Back in 2014, you had to use xcrun PackageApplication to export an IPA. Today xcodebuild -exportArchive -archivePath xcarchivepath -exportPath destinationpath -exportOptionsPlist path mirrors Xcode’s workflow and is compatible with xcodebuild archive.
• Apple strives for feature parity across Xcode and its command-line tools. e.g. You can notarize your app from the command line.
• Sessions on automation and command-line tools are part of WWDC. e.g. What’s New in Signing for Xcode and Xcode Server
• Apple writes documentation like the Technical Note TN2339 and drops hints on what the command-line tools are there for.

Note: build-for-testing and test-without-building provide support for continuous integration systems. - “Building from the Command Line with Xcode FAQ, Updated: 2017-06-19”

That’s not to say that Apple gets everything right. I too have fought with and found running tests from the command-line to be unreliable. Having to restart the CoreSimulatorService as a result. Windmill is prone to this too.

I won’t claim to know what’s at fault here. I do believe Apple knows it reflects bad on them. Xcode engineers are working on this after all. Plus, it puts every tool that relies on them in a bad light.

Dependencies

Windmill relies heavily on existing conventions as set by Apple and aims to establish a best practice on how to automate building, testing and distributing apps. At this stage, what Windmill is able to achieve and to what extent is defined by Apple. There is no way around it. This is a conscious decision. To pretend otherwise would be to rely on reverse engineering, side effects, undocumented features and observable behaviours. For bringing that basic level of automation it should be enough. - “Announcing Windmill”

With that in mind, I made the conscious decision to build Windmill with Xcode’s command-line tools and those tools alone¹.

It’s unfortunate that as of today we can’t completely rely on xcodebuild to provide automation for Xcode projects. It is precisely for this reason why we need to keep giving feedback to Apple so that it can continue developing and supporting the command-line tools.

For example, it is not possible to know whether an Xcode project has a test target (i.e. has tests to run) until you have tried to run those tests. In other words, you have to run xcodebuild test-without-building, trap the error by querying the exit code and “assume” the project has no tests.

For Windmill, I had to write a ProcessManager² that executes a Process and can recover from an error code.

Another example is when the output of xcrun simctl list devices --json changed, effectively being unable to find the available iOS simulators.

This is what Apple had to say:

While we try to not be unnecessarily disruptive, the format of that output is subject to change over time as features are added and we need to adjust it.

Which is fine! As long as changes like this are better communicated, documented, formally specified, deprecated and retired like any API.

Reliability

Which brings us to reliability and Maxwell’s strong argument against fastlane or any automation tool built on top of Xcode’s command-line tools for that matter.

Seeing this stuff makes me nervous, because I worry that fastlane is doing a bunch of extra work that

• at best, I don’t care about or
• at worst, is going to cause problems that I have to fix (don’t laugh, read on…)"

The -showBuildSettings tells you what deployment target a project is or what its product name is. It helps finding the correct simulator to use since xcodebuild requires you to specify what destination to use with build-for-testing.

Xcode reads all of that from the project file under “Build Settings” and defaults to a scheme (or a target) and gives you a list of simulators appropriate for your project. xcodebuild is a command-line tool after all and Xcode is a GUI app.

Still, why should Maxwell care about all of this? As far as he is concerned he does know what scheme to build for his project and what destination (i.e. simulator) to test against.

It is true that when you build a tool for the many, you do need to accommodate for cases that go beyond the needs of the one. This rings more true when you build an automation tool that has to be reliable, predictable, consistent across environments and configurations.

To pick the correct device to build and test for that means being able to do so across Xcode installations and upgrades, removal of simulators, changes in the deployment target of your app, etc than merely choosing what destination may be valid right now.

Establishing a process that automates all aspects of the delivery of your app for quality assurance in order to save time, money and effort demands more than simply knowing what scheme to build your project with; as you may have witnessed in an effort to ditch, in this case, fastlane.

More importantly, it is about making continuous delivery ubiquitous, accessible, understood by everyone in your team so that together you can progress further.

Collectively as an iOS community, we have spent an insane amount of time and put an immense amount of effort in automating the delivery of our apps by writing flaky scripts in bash using Jenkins, reverse engineering the Xcode project file format, writing blog posts with our findings.

Yet we are none the wiser and have barely made a dent.

Yes, some of it is not critical or essential to any one of us as individuals but working on and having a tool that has these goals in mind will lead to a better tool for everyone in the long run. It will allow us to move on to whatever the next challenge in delivering iOS apps is.

Complexity

“I felt like I had to babysit it every day, constantly diagnosing whether build or test failures were legitimate. Consequently the rest of my team never trusted it.” - Maxwell Anselm, Life in the slow lane

When Windmill first came out, it didn’t surface any errors so you had to go through the logs to find out what went wrong. In this regard, it was no better than a bare-bone Jenkins installation showing you the log of a build job. As a developer, you had to manually go through the output of xcodebuild to figure out what went wrong.

Since Windmill is a developer tool, developers were eager to debug it! “If only I could see what command Windmill is running, I can try and replicate the issue”.

You see, I knew right then³ that Windmill was failing to live up to its mission. You shouldn’t have to debug Windmill!

Since version 2.0, Windmill mirrors the Xcode log. xcodebuild does not provide a formatted output so I had to build it and actively maintain it for each release. This costs time, effort and it’s not streamlined to Xcode upgrades. Still, I am willing to pay that price for Windmill to deliver on its promise.

I have put an insane amount of effort and time to make sure Windmill mirrors Xcode’s behaviour so that when Windmill fails it does in the exact same way as Xcode.

Windmill has a long way to go before it can be the tool I envision. As an example, right now Windmill is reactive only to code changes.

If a distribution certificate expires, Windmill will surface that error the next time you commit a code change rather than at the time it expires or even better, warn you in advance.

Why use anything else but xcodebuild?

People don’t realise how much time they have spent installing, building, maintaining, communicating, debugging their way to, at the very least, automate building and testing their iOS app until they decide they’ve had enough.

In Maxwell case, his post on Distributed iOS builds with Jenkins was in Aug 3, 2018 and “Life in the slow lane” in Mar 12, 2019.

Speaking for Windmill, I have taken the strong stance to build it on the following premise.

• Have a native, macOS app with an unparalleled user experience in an effort to make continuous delivery accessible.
• Lean on and don’t stray away from Xcode’s command-line tools provided functionality.
• Don’t resort to hacks to make Apple’s command-line tools work.
• Rely on the macOS SDK and macOS toolchain. e.g. PropertyListSerialization to convert a property list to and from several serialized formats.
• Link to Apple’s documentation and encourage developers to have an understanding of how things work where necessary.
• Minimise the use of informal contracts, i.e. parsing of standard output.
• Don’t overstep any boundaries, i.e. Xcode’s ability to manage automatic signing.
• Embrace Xcode’s provided functionality, i.e. store archives in the Organiser.
• Don’t create abstractions on top of existing concepts, e.g. what an archive is on iOS.
• Mirror and match Xcode behaviour to provide consistency across, e.g. how build errors and test failures are surfaced and communicated.
• Be a good citizen on macOS as a native app.

That’s not to say that Windmill is 100% foolproof. See its version history.

Still, what Windmill offers today, even at version 2.0, is of great value, especially if you all you need is a basic level of automation while developing your app.

In the end, I have made the decision to place my faith in Apple by building a native macOS app with Xcode’s command-line tools and invest so much in the Apple ecosystem. Until Apple comes up with something better.-

PS. I am using Windmill on macOS while developing Windmill on the iPhone and I am loving it! There is a chance of bias.
PPS. If you want to be part of the Windmill on the iPhone beta, sometime in the unknown future, please send me an email at qnoid@windmill.io.

I can recall that eye-opening feeling paired with excitement from discovering my music library all over again.

I had an iPhone 3G when I bought my first iPod Classic. For the first time I was able to carry with me all my iTunes Music library.

Every song I listened to was a trip down memory lane oozing with emotion.

Walking on top of Wearmouth Bridge on a cold winter night in Sunderland, listening to a Blind Guardian cover of Dio’s Don’t Talk To Strangers.

Spending Easter with a loved one in Coventry listening to Brian May.

Dancing to Found An Angel at The Palace Night Club on Newcastle Road.

Feeling haunted by Eminem - Stan ft Dido.

Crying to Angels by Robbie Williams.

Being melancholic to Street Spirit by Radiohead.

Music spoke to me, made me cry, comforted me, filled me with joy, caused me to reflect.

I have been a subscriber to Spotify since 2009. Music is more accessible than ever yet it sits in the background. It has lost its impact.

In an effort to increase play time (i.e. revenue) music services have lost touch with what role music plays.

You feel (want to feel) happy? Here is a “Happy Hits” playlist. Are you at the gym? Here is a “Motivational” playlist. Want to retreat to yourself? Here is a “Sad Songs” playlist.

This isn’t about owning versus streaming music. It’s not about albums vs playlists. This is about feeling connected to music. This is about “owning” a music library that reflects, encompasses, enriches life. Your life.-

• have health insurance, either private or the European health card (e.g. for a UK Citizen, Apply for a European Health Insurance Card)
• have proof of permanent residence in Greece
• have four, thousand euro (€4000) in a bank account, readily available for withdrawal.

That is, so as not be considered an illegal(?) immigrant.
That is, to call Greece home.
That is, in the European Union where ”free movement and residence rights” exist.

EU freedom of movement and residence

Based on the “Directive 2004/38/EC”, EU countries could may well ask you to leave or even deport you after 3 months. As far as I can see, the only reason they might not is purely on good faith among them.

To my mind, the European Union must be more integrated.-

I have been using curl to quickly check the API anyway so I thought I’d take it a step further.

#!/bin/bash

set -e

function assertTrue()
{
if [ ${1} -eq ${2} ]; then
echo *SUCCESS*
else
echo "*FAILURE* expected: ${1} actual: ${2}"
exit 1
fi
}


echo "Given valid subscription access; Assert GET exports 200 OK"
HTTP_CODE=$(set -x;curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://api.windmill.io/account/qnoid/exports -H "Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJpc1ZhbGlkIn0.rqED0v7meSp72MBaeQtyXce3S_dJoh_eo6iIV2Rpt3s")

set +x;assertTrue 200 "${HTTP_CODE}"

echo "Given invalid subscription access; Assert GET exports 401 Unauthorized"
HTTP_CODE=$(set -x;curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://api.windmill.io/account/qnoid/exports -H "Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJpc1ZhbGlkIn0.3zjr4euU206esZpd0w6Au4o5qYk4ydiuAKXE6SClUaw")

set +x;assertTrue 401 "${HTTP_CODE}"

Which gives the following output

Given valid subscription access; Assert GET exports 200 OK
++ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://api.windmill.io/account/qnoid/exports -H 'Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJpc1ZhbGlkIn0.rqED0v7meSp72MBaeQtyXce3S_dJoh_eo6iIV2Rpt3s'
*SUCCESS*

Given invalid subscription access; Assert GET exports 401 Unauthorized
++ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://api.windmill.io/account/qnoid/exports -H 'Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJpc1ZhbGlkIn0.3zjr4euU206esZpd0w6Au4o5qYk4ydiuAKXE6SClUaw'
*SUCCESS*

In case of a failure, execution stops right away with the following output

Given valid subscription access; Assert GET exports 200 OK
++ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://api.windmill.io/account/qnoid/exports -H 'Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJpc1ZhbGlkIn0.rqED0v7meSp72MBaeQtyXce3S_dJoh_eo6iIV2Rpt3s'
*FAILURE* expected: 200 actual: 401

It’s very primitive and not hardened but it should work in the meantime.-

This is an advanced topic. It requires extensive background knowledge and experience. Unless you feel confident with what’s being discussed here, consider and be mindful of intricacies and unknown unknowns when implementing presentation transitions, state preservation and restoration on iOS.

Errata

18 February 2019, commit “7d3cccf”

• The RootViewController had its Container View as a subview rather than being the view. Though technically is allowed, in this case it is not a requirement.
• The RootViewController.viewDidLayoutSubviews() used to call self.transition(from:to:) which in certain layouts it leads to an unwanted animation. Instead, it now uses self.switch(source:destination:) to position its child view controller.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Have you ever needed to build an app that:

• expects the user to go through a lengthy registration process then land on a “home screen”?
• has an extensive tutorial that the user can go through before they start using the app?
• goes through a series of on boarding screens, possibly keeping track of user progress?

In the above example, once the user has gone through registration, you want to discard every view controller involved in the sequence as well as replacing the rootViewController with a new UIViewController that comes after registration.

Notice how there is no use case where the user can navigate back to registration. There is no “Back” or “Dismiss” button in the MainViewController that can act as the root. For that reason, you should consider it best practise to discard any UIViewControllers and their respective views so as to bring overall memory usage down and establish a new baseline when a user has registered.

View Controllers’ Presentation and transitions

Let’s start with firing a Notification when the user selects “Done”.

class DoneViewController: UIViewController {

	static let NotificationDone = NSNotification.Name(rawValue: "Done")

	@IBAction func didTouchUpInsideDone(_ sender: Any) {
		NotificationCenter.default.post(name: DoneViewController.NotificationDone, object: nil)
	}
}

Since the AppDelegate holds a reference to the UIWindow and by extension the rootViewController, it can act as an observer. Upon firing, it merely sets the rootViewController property to the new one.

func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey: Any]?) -> Bool {

	NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(self, selector:#selector(done(notification:)),name:DoneViewController.NotificationDone,object: nil)
	
	return true
}
    
@objc func done(notification: Notification) {
	let storyboard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: Bundle(for: type(of: self)))
	self.window?.rootViewController = storyboard.instantiateInitialViewController()
}

Let’s see how that looks.

Notice how there is no transition between the DoneViewController and the MainViewController. This plays a far more important role that it currently seems as you’ll see later. Let’s peak behind the scenes on the view hierarchy.

Even though the code replaces the rootViewController for the window, notice how the DoneViewController is still in the view hierarchy under a UITransitionView seemingly owned by the UIWindow. Here is a close look at the memory graph.

It looks like the RegisterViewController and all of its children are still very much present. Let’s try something else now. Before replacing the rootViewController, use a presentation transition to present the view controller we are interested in.

@objc func done(notification: Notification) {
    let storyboard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: Bundle(for: type(of: self)))
    
    guard let viewController = storyboard.instantiateInitialViewController() else {
        return
    }

    let presentedViewController = self.window?.rootViewController?.presentedViewController
    
    presentedViewController?.present(viewController, animated: true) {
        self.window?.rootViewController = viewController
    }
}

From UIViewController.present(_:animated:completion:), emphasis mine.

In a horizontally regular environment, the view controller is presented in the style specified by the modalPresentationStyle property. In a horizontally compact environment, the view controller is presented full screen by default.

Since an iPhone, in portrait, is a horizontally compact environment, “the views belonging to the presenting view controller are removed after the presentation completes.” In this case, the presentedViewController (i.e. the DoneViewController) becomes the presentingViewController to the MainViewController, hence the DoneViewController will be removed from the view hierarchy.

The view hierarchy indeed shows only the MainViewController present. Still, the UITransitionView should give you a clue as to what to expect in the memory graph.

The DoneViewContoller is still very much allocated. The RegisterViewController as well as all of the UIViewController instances are also allocated (not seen in the screenshot). Finally, let’s dismiss the whole view hierarchy, as part of presenting the MainViewController, before replacing the rootViewController.

From UIViewController.dismiss(animated:completion:), emphasis mine.

If you present several view controllers in succession, thus building a stack of presented view controllers, calling this method on a view controller lower in the stack dismisses its immediate child view controller and all view controllers above that child on the stack.

@objc func done(notification: Notification) {
    let storyboard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: Bundle(for: type(of: self)))
    
    guard let viewController = storyboard.instantiateInitialViewController() else {
        return
    }

    let presentedViewController = self.window?.rootViewController?.presentedViewController
    
    presentedViewController?.present(viewController, animated: true) {
        self.window?.rootViewController?.dismiss(animated: false) {
            self.window?.rootViewController = viewController
        }
    }
}

Here is the view hierarchy; no UITransitionView in the window.

And here is the memory graph.

Well, that looks promising. Let’s see how it looks. The video on the right gives you a freeze frame.

What’s happening here? In an effort to remove every UIViewController from the view hierarchy and memory graph, the code completely ignores the presentation. The present and dismiss calls are happening independently and on separate transition contexts.

Let’s break it down.

• The DoneViewController is presenting, modally, the MainViewController. At the end, the DoneViewController is removed from the view hierarchy and deallocated.
• The rootViewController (i.e. RegisterViewController) dismisses the UINavigationController all the way to the just presented MainViewController, which takes us back to the initial state where the UIWindow is showing the RegisterViewController.
• The RegisterViewController is being replaced by the MainViewController as the rootViewController.

State Preservation and Restoration

Before looking into how to best replace the rootViewController there is one more thing to consider.

Up until now, we’ve only been talking about replacing the rootViewController and its descendants as part of an “initial” launch. As long as the app isn’t terminated, upon switching to it, its view will be restored. Still, the change in the view hierarchy is not permanent. As soon as the app is terminated by iOS due to memory pressure, the next time the user launches the app, the rootViewController will revert to RegisterViewController as if it was launched for the first time.

This is where state preservation and restoration feature comes in. One thing to keep in mind is that every ancestor UIViewController, including the one whose state you want preserved and restored must have its restorationIdentifier set.

The simplest way to test preservation and restoration is via Xcode. Launch the app, navigate to the view controller with a restorationIdentifier to preserve. Then:

• Put the app into the background
• Stop the app’s execution by pressing the stop button in Xcode
• Launch the app

What you can’t see from the video is that shortly after I put the app in the background, I stop the execution via Xcode. Effectively the app is now considered to be terminated by iOS.

That looks good. Let’s try it on the MainViewController now.

You can briefly see the snapshot of the MainViewController that was taken just before the app moved to the background. Followed by the “Initial UI”.

Obviously the state preservation and restoration isn’t working as expected. I haven’t been able to gather enough information so I am only guessing that state preservation and restoration is coupled to the presentation and transition context. In other words, it’s not enough to simply set a new rootViewController and expect it to be restored. Whatever UIViewController to be restored possibly needs to be a descendant of the “Initial UI”. If you do know more, I would very much like to hear from you.

Container View Controller

With what I know and can see so far, it appears that once the rootViewController has been set, UIKit does not provide for a way to replace it. As such, any presentation and transitions must originate from the rootViewController itself.

A Container View Controller is merely a UIViewController that introduces (or rather exposes) the concept of “child” view controllers. We came across the concept of a child view controller during presenting and dismissing view controllers.

Container view controllers are most often used to facilitate navigation and to create new user interface types based on existing content. In almost every way, a container view controller is like any other content view controller in that it manages a root view and some content.

One way to think about a container view controller is how a UITabBarController manages the presentation of the view for each UIViewController set in its viewControllers property. Every time you select a tab, the corresponding view appears into the window’s bounds and the control is passed to its respective UIViewController.

Thinking back to what we were set out to do. We want to bring into the window the view of another view controller while replacing an existing stack of view controllers. Which sounds awfully lot like how a UITabBarController behaves.

With the container view controller now acting as the root, the view of the RegisterViewController effectively is embedded in the view of the RootViewController. Visually, nothing has changed.

Now that a UIViewController manages the view hierarchy presented, we can replace notifications in favour of an unwind segue. Nothing to see in the DoneViewController. The unwind segue is defined in the storyboard.

class DoneViewController: UIViewController {

}

The AppDelegate has all of the code related to the notification removed. Here is the code for the RootViewController.

class RootViewController: UIViewController {

private func transition(from: UIViewController, to: UIViewController) {
    from.willMove(toParent: nil)
    self.addChild(to)
    
    self.transition(from: from, to: to, duration: self.transitionCoordinator?.transitionDuration ?? 0.4, options: [], animations: {
        
    }) { (finished) in
        from.removeFromParent()
        to.didMove(toParent: self)
    }
}

@IBAction func unwindToRootViewController(_ segue: UIStoryboardSegue) {

	let storyboard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: Bundle(for: type(of: self)))
	
	if let registerViewController = self.children.first(where: { $0 is RegisterViewController }), let mainViewController = storyboard.instantiateInitialViewController() {
	self.transition(from: registerViewController, to: mainViewController)
	}
}

Let’s see it in action.

Note that as part of the transition, the DoneViewController is effectively dismissed. Hence the animation that “presents” the MainViewController is the same as if the call was mainViewController.dismiss(animated: true) while the DoneViewController was presented.

The respective view hierarchy and memory graph

How about state preservation and restoration.

One thing to keep in mind when preserving a UIViewController that acts as the container, is that your code is responsible for saving any references to its child view controllers. Here is what it looks like.

override func encodeRestorableState(with coder: NSCoder) {
    super.encodeRestorableState(with: coder)
    
    self.children.forEach { child in
        if let restorationIdentifier = child.restorationIdentifier {
            coder.encode(child, forKey: restorationIdentifier)
        }
    }
}
    
override func decodeRestorableState(with coder: NSCoder) {
    super.decodeRestorableState(with: coder)
    
    if let mainViewController = coder.decodeObject(of: [MainViewController.self], forKey: "MainViewController") as? MainViewController {
        self.addChild(mainViewController)
    }
}

When the RootViewController is instantiated as part of the “Initial UI”, the RegisterViewController will also be present in its “children” property. Therefore as part of the layout, we need to make sure the MainViewController is the only one in the view hierarchy.

override func viewDidLayoutSubviews() {
    let registerViewController = self.children.first(where: { $0 is RegisterViewController })
    let mainViewController = self.children.first(where: { $0 is MainViewController })
    
    switch (registerViewController, mainViewController) {
    case (let registerViewController?, let mainViewController?):
        self.switch(source: registerViewController, destination: mainViewController)
    default:
        break
    }
    
    super.viewDidLayoutSubviews()
}

private func `switch`(source: UIViewController, destination: UIViewController) {
        
    source.willMove(toParent: nil)

    destination.view.frame = self.view.bounds
    self.view.addSubview(destination.view)
        
    source.view.removeFromSuperview()
    source.removeFromParent()

    destination.didMove(toParent: self)
}

This time, the MainViewController is restored as expected.

For completeness, here are the visual hierarchy and memory graph of the app after the restore process is done.

Considerations

Keep in mind that the user can, at any time, kill the app. At this point, the restoration process will not happen and the rootViewController will revert back to the one in the “Initial UI”. This will also happen if your app crashes.

ISTR that removing the app from the multitasking UI specifically disables state restoration, on the grounds that the user only does this when there’s something wrong with the app and thus it’s better to start from a clean slate. - Quinn “The Eskimo!”, Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware

You should anticipate, embrace and gracefully handle your app reverting to its “Initial UI”.

As an example, in the case of a registration, it is possible that you store some authorization token to give access to the user. On startup, you can detect that and allow the user to login with the existing credentials.

One thing to consider is that if you decide to hardcode the decision as to what rootViewController to show, you effectively limit the choices you can give to a user to recover for a “bad state”. If the user cannot merely terminate the app, they will have to re-install.

Consider giving the user the ability to fallback in stages:

• While the user is using the app:
  • to revert to a previous state; e.g. logout
• By removing the app from the multitasking UI:
  • to remove any existing state, either through preservation or in memory; e.g. recover from a crash
• By un-installing:
  • to erase any hard persisted data. e.g. an authorization token so as to start over.

Conclusion

tl;dr. You should use a Container View Controller as the rootViewController and swap one child UIViewController for another.

Should you wish to preserve the rootViewController, consider the native iOS support of preserving and restoring state.

Keep in mind that state preservation and restoration goes beyond what UIViewController is present. UIKit views can also have preservable state. As an example, a UIScrollView preserves its zoomScale, contentInset, and contentOffset properties, effectively “so that the content appears scrolled to the same position as before”.

That can be useful for persisting any registration steps as the user goes through, browses through a collection of photos or reads a long text.

I would like to thank @marc, @jsorge, @tekl of Seattle Xcoders for their input and for keeping me sane through this. Even though I am remote, Seattle Xcoders has welcomed me as if I am based in Seattle.

Shoutout to Andy. It may have taken 3 years but we did it!

One more thing

This is one of the many technical challenges that I am tackling as part of making Windmill on the iPhone the best experience it can be.

I have been busy working towards Windmill 3.0 which brings publishing of your apps during development.

You can download Windmill for free.-

Sample Project

github.com/qnoid/rootViewController

References

• Preserving Your App’s Visual Appearance Across Launches, App Programming Guide for iOS
• Preserving and Restoring State, View Controller Programming Guide for iOS
• Implementing a Container View Controller, View Controller Programming Guide for iOS
• UIViewController, Documentation > UIKit > View Controllers

Related

Ask yourself a question. “Do we hire for diversity”? If the answer is “We hire based on merit”, chances are you aren’t doing enough.

By leaving diversity to chance, you assume and expect a uniform distribution of people with different race, age, gender and social status to arrive at your doorstep.

This is not the case. Take tech as an example.

Source: WOMEN AND MINORITIES IN TECH, Wired

As this chart shows, white men dominate college computer science departments. By a lot. One of the reasons for this may be the way companies try to recruit talent. Stanford researchers observed more than 75 recruiting sessions held by more than 60 companies and identified countless seemingly obvious ways the recruiters might be alienating female recruits, from sexist jokes to presentations displaying only slides of men.

I encourage you to read the whole article on Wired which is an excellent piece, on how the use of words, access to resources (e.g. computers at home) and salary inequality play a role.

Start by measuring the distribution among your current hires. One way to do this is by creating an anonymous, optional questionary. It’s important that you have a discussion first. Make sure everyone understands what the intent is and buys into it.

ustwo, a London agency, has gone a step further and created a public Diversity Dashboard to, as far as I can see, demonstrate commitment, raise awareness and to be held accountable.

Keep in mind that those numbers may also reveal a bias in hiring, while you believe you are merely focusing on merit.

A 2015 study followed up on this, and found that candidates with black-sounding names from elite universities did only as well as those with white-sounding names from less-selective schools.
Source: Is Blind Hiring the Best Hiring?, The New York Times

It may be possible that you are unknowingly exhibiting bias during your hiring process by expecting people to “fit in” rather than to “come as they are”. Feeding into a cultural conformity as opposed to diversity.

Who is present at an interview and how people express or respond can equally discourage people to come forward or be allowed to proceed. Having a diverse representation when you start from a non diverse background can be challenging.

Once again, ustwo has created a Head of Diversity role to tackle lack of equal representation head on and drive change.

We are completely overhauling our hiring process. This will include standardised questions and mixed interview groups. We will seek ways to ensure we are meeting a diverse range of candidates which we hope will lead to an increase in hiring of underrepresented candidates.
Whitney Berry, Head of Diversity, ustwo

Below I am only suggesting a list of actions that you could take, across different areas to help diversity flourish.

Education

• Work with local authorities to provide training to unemployed young people that have dropped out of education (NEET).
• Work with Universities to provide internships/placements to minority groups.

Hiring

• Take action to avoid discrimination based on gender/age/race when screening candidates.
• Involve a diverse group of people in the hiring process.
• Actively seek to hire minorities for head/management/leadership roles.

Support

• Support meetups and groups that give a voice to under represented people (e.g. LGBT) and invite them to talk in house to raise awareness.
• Fund people in need either directly or via a matching contribution to employees; KIVA.
• Fund charities and institutions that defend people’s rights to education and employment.
• Fund diversity tickets at conferences.
• Give people time off to volunteer in causes that have a social impact.

Day to day operations

• Be open, encourage and support ideas and views that challenge norms.
• Measure, track and have visibility on data that shows how diverse the company is.
• Provide parental leave as a work benefit.

Further Reading

1. Should universities give preference to applicants from poor backgrounds?
2. Tokyo medical school admits changing results to exclude women

Windmill thus far has been devoid of the concept of a user account. There hasn’t been a need since Windmill has been a standalone macOS app. With the arrival of Windmill on the iPhone the requirement to have a “user” account becomes more apparent.

On the iPhone, a user should be able to view the IPA file for each app that has been exported. There are two parts in enabling this functionality.

• Publish an export for a given “user”.
• Return a list of exports for a given “user”.

Both to be supported by a server that provides a REST API.

Requirements

The simplest thing would be to have a user create an account using a username and a password. I take a few issues with this approach.

No passwords.

First and foremost I consider asking a user for a password a compromise in security for the following reasons.

• Users tend to reuse passwords across services.
• Database leaks expose user accounts across services.
• Security is effectively weakened by using email to authenticate a user via password resets.

Cross device, platform support.

Windmill is a native macOS app. Windmill on the iPhone will be a native iOS app. A user should be able to use Windmill from macOS, iOS and possibly the web.

A solution needs to be able to work, potentially, for every Apple platform as well as the web.

Anonymous.

Ideally, I would like to take user accounts a step further and provide this functionality without even asking for an email. An email can be used to identify an individual and is data that can be exploited by a malicious third party should it become compromised.

In Summary

• No password. The server should be able to authenticate a user without the need of a password.
• Cross device/platform support. The user should be able to use Windmill from a different device and/or platform. e.g. Safari on the Mac, Windmill macOS, Windmill iOS.
• Anonymous. User shouldn’t have to enter an email to identify with the service.

Plus, it should be as seamless as possible with very little friction and overhead.

After some research and discussion¹, it looks like CloudKit might be able to check all the boxes.

I will have to investigate further.

See also

• What’s New with CloudKit - WWDC 2016 - Session 226 - iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS
• CloudKit Authentication
• CloudKit Web Services Reference

Some database operations require that users sign in using their Apple ID. Your web app will need to handle these authentication errors and present the user with a dialog to sign in. Apple will present the actual sign-in page through a redirect URL so that the user’s credentials remain confidential. If the user chooses to sign in, the response contains a web authentication token that you use in the subpath of subsequent requests. - “CloudKit Web Services Reference, 2016-06-13”

Yesterday I felt like having a conversation. I wanted to talk about user authentication on iOS. How to implement it without asking the user for a password. I wanted to do even better and have anonymous user accounts.

I was excited! Like a little kid that comes home from school and wants to talk to his parents about something new. Then, I stumbled. Who do I talk to about this? I am not at an office. I am not sitting at a co-working space. I am not attending a developers’ conference. Suddenly, I paused. Where is everybody? How do I reach out?

I thought of Twitter first. One reason I love Twitter is how it makes everyone accessible. You can direct your message at anyone and everyone. So I did, knowing full well that the chances of someone coming back are slim.

Twitter is more about sharing your thoughts, talking about what’s happening now. Twitter is async by nature. It’s not a way to have a discussion. Let alone getting a reply to jump on a call to have a conversation.

Then I thought of Slack. I am a member of some channels and occasionally spend some time on Athens iOS Meetups. I also decided to visit the Seattle Xcoders channel. Surely these are the places you can find iOS developers to have a chat with.

Not really. Just because people can be found there, doesn’t mean they are available. When you step into the room people don’t have to greet you. In fact, such a behaviour is not netiquette. Saying “g’day”, “καλημέρα”, “bonjour” messages is just noise¹. Asking a question doesn’t mean it will get acknowledged. At best, what you will have is an async, robotic chat. With any form of expression narrowed down to written dialog. No eye-popping dialogue, no raising eyebrows, no gesticulations, nodding, human interaction.²

Finally, I thought of email. I will admit this was getting silly. Still, I looked around on people’s websites that I felt I wanted to talk to. Not much. No email information. No contact me. No happy to talk. Nothing. In fact, I’m guilty of that too!

Huh? In an online world, where we are all connected and accessible, where is everybody?

With social media focusing on individual expression and ways to satisfy our need for external validation where do we gather to exchange thoughts, ideas, knowledge?

In a world filled with co-working spaces and open plans offices why do we wait for lunch or a coffee break to converse? How accessible are these spaces to the public?

Are we all too busy working, driven by numbers maximising output that both our willpower and availability have diminished?

Where are our public gathering spaces used for civil discourse?

In an effort to make this site cookie free, have now completely removed Google Analytics, converted any Twitter embed links to quotes with a link to the original tweet and enabled “Privacy-enchanced mode” for embed YouTube

Privacy Enhanced Mode allows you to embed YouTube videos without using cookies that track viewing behavior. This means viewing inbox isn’t collected to personalize the viewing experience. Instead, video recommendations are contextual and related to the currently played video. Videos playing in a Privacy Enhanced Mode embedded player won’t influence the viewer’s browsing experience on YouTube.

To use Privacy Enhanced Mode, change the domain for the embed URL in your HTML from https://www.youtube.com to https://www.youtube-nocookie.com as shown in the following example:

Embed videos & playlists, YouTube Help

Make sure to clear any existing cookies for this website. Here is how to Manage cookies and website data in Safari on Mac.

If you notice any cookies on this website, please let me know by sending me the URL and the type of cookie you see.

Good riddance I say!

.-

In 2017 I decided to leave London. I was suffering with anxiety and that feeling of not belonging had come to haunt me once again. Regardless, I was hopeful, positive, optimistic and was looking forward to the future. A future I very much had romanticised. I wanted to believe. That innate need to find my calling was still burning strong after all. That’s not to say the decision to leave was irrational or not weighted. To this day I believe it was the best decision I could have made given the circumstances. At the time it felt possible. In hindsight the chances of that future materialising were really really slim.

After years of disappointment with the software industry I wanted to take a different path. A path to personal growth, doing good, generating value and bringing positive change in this world. A way to find my place in the universe.

I love to create. I love that software development gives me the power to create. I don’t love software development in and of itself. I love software development that is purposeful. I love software development that satisfies a need. I love software development in the service of the people.

I also need to be able to make a living. Given that software development as a skill has the potential to earn you money I decided Windmill could help me with that. It was important that the two came hand in hand, doing something purposeful while also making a living.

Since I wasn’t looking for employment, I had to minimise expenses while living off my savings. I also wanted to eliminate distractions. I gave away, donated most of my personal belongings and went on my way with a suitcase, a carry on bag, my laptop and around £15k of savings heading east to Australia.

I travelled on a tourist visa, which granted me access for 3 months into the country. Once there, I would apply for a “Skilled independent visa”, which by the way takes 7-8 months to be granted from the application date. Effectively this visa gives you permanent stay and the right to work. In order to be invited to apply you need to accumulate a certain number of points. You get points based on your age, education, work experience, English language etc.

To prove knowledge of the English language I had to take a test on reading, writing, listening, speaking. This is a test that, even as a native speaker, you can’t just walk in and out expecting to get an almost perfect score. You have to study and prepare so that you are familiar with what will be asked of you. I didn’t and my anxiety got the better of me.

There is a quota on the number of visas issued each year. Everyone is sorted, descending, based on the number of points. Invitations are sent out starting from the top. If the number of applicants is high, someone that has even the minimum required of points may never get an invite. At the time, the effective minimum required me to score an almost perfect score on every subject in the English language. On top of that, the number of applicants was only getting higher which meant that no matter what, there was no way to accumulate the number of points required.

Now this created a very real situation that had to be dealt with. There was a high chance that sooner or later I had to leave the country. Suffering from what I would call mild depression at the time wasn’t helping either.

There was one more thing. The decision to visit Australia from the UK had to do with the fact that my partner has a dual citizenship. She too was on a path of self discovery and needed some time off to figure what she wanted to do next. It was also an opportunity for her to spend more time with family and friends after many years away. Having a home to stay while going through this transition in our lives was really really important. It provided stability and safety, gave us peace of mind.

Suffice to say it didn’t play out the way we both expected. By that time, it had been 3 months since we moved to Australia and 6 since we had left London. Yet again forced to make a decision not under the best of terms, with anxiety and depression looming.

We could stay in Australia, where the cost of living wouldn’t be significantly cheaper than London, where only my partner had the right to a full time job and a high risk of having to deal with a situation where I’ll be forced to leave the country.

Or retreat back to London, a city that I love dearly, but demands your full attention, with Brexit incoming, give up on our dreams, ignore the reasons that lead to our departure.

Lastly, move to Athens with lower cost of living, doubling down on our dreams, using the remaining savings we had left to rent and fully furnish an apartment.

Bruised and scarred, we opted to move to Athens.

Within 4 weeks we flew out of Australia and into a rented apartment. It turns out you can’t outrun anxiety and depression.-

For a very, very, very long time, I have been suffering primarily from anxiety and on separate occasions with depression. It may appear as is if comes and goes though I would describe it as dormant, lingering under the surface. About 6 months ago it slowly creeped up on me. This time it hit the hardest. It was crippling, unbearable and nasty.

Since about 6 weeks ago it feels like I am on a path of recovery. If you have been suffering from anxiety and depression I want to tell you that I feel you. It is not your fault. Take your time; hang in there; don’t be hard on yourself. You are not alone.

For everyone else who is close to someone with anxiety and depression as a friend, family, a co-worker, a boss, a member of society; this one is for you.

I know it is hard for you too. It is tough dealing with someone who looks into the void, seemingly unable to make even minimum effort, show any signs of care for the world. Who wishes to die. Who can be abrupt, angry and bitter. They don’t choose to be that way. They don’t want to live this way. They are drowning, screaming for help.

I want to share this with you. It comes from a personal experience while dealing with anxiety and depression. How I reacted and perceived behaviours and attitudes. What worked and didn’t work for me. It is not for the faint of heart.

Be gracious.

During that time, I was at my most vulnerable. Feeling exposed, hyper sensitive and on alert. The slightest form of confrontation felt like a warrant for a fight or flight response. An innocent joke, being judgemental, a comment on what I did, did not, had to or should not do, had a negative, disproportional impact on my mood and emotional state. Often I would shy away from discussions, events, situations in order to avoid it all.

I did not enjoy it when people picked on my behaviour, forced me to engage, asked me repeatedly how I was feeling, how long is “this” going to last, confronting me, coercing me to deal with “it”, man-up.

As long as people accepted that I wasn’t feeling good, were calm in their demeanour when I was upset and angry, game me space to breathe and didn’t force their expectations on me, they didn’t make things worse.

Be patient.

Everything was meaningless, worthless, a downward spiral into a well where there is absolutely zero joy and nothing worth doing.

Pushing me to get moving, asking me to do things, even more so on your time isn’t helping. Having an opinion as to what is meaningful or what I should be doing, isn’t good either.

Instead, it helped me cope when I was told to take as much time as I needed, was re-assured and was just let be.

Be loving.

There were times where a daunting feeling would weigh upon me in just a split second. A feeling of imminent doom. A darkness consuming me for no reason. I would start feeling terrified, especially in a crowd.

There are absolutely zero ways to reason about this.

A hug, a holding hand, telling me everything will be ok, taking me somewhere where I felt safe was the best way to handle it.

Be caring.

I was in no mood to cook, clean the house, make the bed or anything really. For reference, I have had a relatively high degree of independence since I was little (less than 10 years old) and have learned to live far and away from home, on my own, being self-sufficient since I turned 18.

Cooking a nice meal, cleaning and tidying up not only removed the worry but also created a nice environment to be living in. It may seem like it didn’t make a difference but it helped.

I would wake up in the middle of the night with panic attacks, gasping for air, feeling like I was dying.

Even though I rarely asked, I am much too proud and considerate, it made me feel better when someone woke up alongside to provide comfort, help me with breathing and calm me down.

Be fearless.

I wanted to die.

Even though I never made any attempts, I did have suicidal thoughts. It is a tough thing to hear. Even writing about it gives me the chills and makes me emotional.

Telling me to snap out of it only put more pressure on me. Telling me to take control made me think people weren’t listening. Downplaying it made me feel insignificant. Asking me how is this going to solve anything made me feel even more trapped and didn’t really present me with a way out.

Whoever was on the receiving end had to be fearless and calm. I needed empathy. I needed to hear how important I was to them.

Be level-headed.

There were days where I was willing to have a conversation about it and be more open. Still, talking about it would make me feel really uncomfortable, shaking, filled with adrenaline.

Pulling the rug from under my feet was not good. Presenting me with what-ifs’ or making me face reality wasn’t cool. “What if you get fired?”, “What if your partner leaves you?”, “You won’t have money to pay rent”, “You can’t keep doing this for long”.

All these only served to amplify my anxiety and fear. At times it would also make me angry and upset.

In this case, I am the one being moody with irrational fears. You need to be thinking clearly. Don’t take it personally. Don’t feel like you are being attacked. Do not take away whatever emotional support I am hanging on to. As hard as this situation may be, remember, this is not about you.

Ask people before you do anything that could upset them. e.g. like turning up on their doorstep unexpected or worse sending a public servant.

Be there.

I felt alone and at times I even felt abandoned. People were busy with work, their kids and family, their significant other or just needed time for themselves.

Not having people there for me to the extend that I needed them was the hardest to cope with. It wasn’t enough to just go to the movies once every month, to meet again after 2 weeks, to give me a 5 minute call to check on me or to talk via social media.

Being there regularly and often would have helped tremendously. Having somebody present was really important. Even when they did absolutely nothing but sit there on the same room as me. It gave me comfort.

People coming and going didn’t help either. It made me feel unworthy and made me think people didn’t care enough. Sending me a message of “Hey, is everything ok?” after weeks/months was not enough.

Having said all that, keep in mind that no matter of your good intentions chances are you alone can’t treat someone that suffers from anxiety and depression. It is not your job anyway so don’t feel the pressure to do so.

Each of you plays a different role, whether a childhood friend, a sibling, a partner, a parent. Being gracious, patient, loving, caring, fearless, level-headed and present will go a long way.

Final words.

This experience has given me the impression that overall we have no idea how to deal with people that suffer from depression and anxiety. Even worse, our behaviour at times can be detrimental to those suffering.

It also appears to me there is a real lack of knowledge on what depression or anxiety really is. People thought I was just having a bad day or I was just being bombastic.

It does not help that we don’t talk about it more. There seems to be a stigma and a taboo associated with mental illnesses that makes people want to shut down. Living in a fast paced, demanding, increasingly isolating world does not help either.

Dealing with anxiety and depression requires us to be accommodating, supportive and empathetic towards each other or else we risk stretching the social fabric that connects us too thin.-

While writing this post, I kept thinking of people suffering with anxiety and depression. Some that I know of, had the courage to come forward, write, share and be open about their struggle. At the time, it made me realise I am not alone, gave me hope. I also can’t help but think of the people that didn’t make it. How this post might have given them a voice. A lifeline.

In the US, 18.1% of the population every year suffers from anxiety disorder. Facts & Statistics, Anxiety and Depression Association of America

In Europe, 25% of the population suffer from depression or anxiety each year. Depression in Europe: facts and figures, World Health Organisation

I love software development. I believe technology is an enabler.
I am also getting tired of this industry.

At the age of 36, beginning to feel tired about the lack of principles, lack of professionalism and education in the software industry.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX 128K +2. I remember writing a few lines of BASIC but that was about it when it comes to programming. Owning an AMIGA didn’t make any difference as I would mostly play games on it. With a PC, I started tinkering with DOS, editing config.sys and autoexec.bat files, primarily to manage memory to, guess what, run games. With the arrival of Windows 95 I spent a lot of time understanding how hardware and software worked together, albeit at a high level. I would format the hard drive almost every week due to messing up the OS. The back of the PC never had its screws tight as I would open the case, move cards around PCI slots, change PATA cables, overlock the CPU, install better RAM, etc. Come to think of it, I was constantly optimising.

Have felt really bad in the past for not having a CompSci degree or for not being that good with algorithms. Please don’t fall for this.

In 1998 I went to study at the University of Sunderland towards a BEng Computer System Engineering degree. After the 1st year, I switched over to a BSc Information Technology. I believe I did it with a career prospect in mind.

"qnoid" is the name of a demo game that wrote in VB back in 1999 as a first year student at Sunderland University.

One of my first software development assignments was to build an application using Visual Basic. I wrote a simple loop to move a “spaceship” left and right while deflecting a ball within the window. I wasn’t given a high mark because the tutor assumed previous programming experience, hence the handicap. Funny.

Did you notice the sound effect when the game ends?

In 2001, I was offered a work placement at CERN. This is where I got my first real world experience in building software. I was thrown into Java EE, databases, XML and the web. I had no prior knowledge of any of these technologies whatsoever.

Had to read a lot, practice even more, write code, take notes, repeat.

My office at CERN. Books and notes all over the desk.

The following year, I went back to University to finish my studies. That year I was taught Java as a programming language. I remember the whole class (100+ students) struggling to understand basic principles. What is an object, what is a class, what makes it abstract, what is an interface, where and how are applicable. Even though I knew what the tutor was talking about, I too had trouble forming a well rounded understanding. Hell, I remember myself at the end of the year (“2 years” into Java), during the exam telling my tutor “I finally understand what an interface is”. Still, I was ignorant of the how, the where and the why.

I finished University and got a job as a “Java Web Developer” at an Internet Service Provider working mostly for projects related to the tourism industry (don’t ask). There was a project manager and a single developer. That would be me. A database admin was generally available to ask questions but not attached to a project. Same for a system admin. Also senior developers, colleagues working on other projects, willing to answer my ignorant questions.

Tho @Macropoulos is an amazing macro photographer, most knowledge that have of bash originates from him way back in 2004. Thank you Stavro.

I had no idea how to build software.

I knew how to hack code. Did I understand anything about software design? No. How to manage a growing codebase? No. How to deal with technical debt? No. Why I had seemingly decided to opt for design X, decided on Y or go with approach Z? Of course not.

My critical thinking in software development had developed very little all these years at University.

I remember constantly re-writing the codebase as I was going along in an effort to get a better understanding of how code fits together including trade-offs. I would print Java articles off the Internet to read every day.

Notice the printed article to my right. Yeap. Had a stack of these.

I discovered ORM, faced the “N+1 selects” problem and learned about caching. I had an urge to understand how things work, take them apart, examine, put it all back together.

I fondly remember the “Head First Design Patterns” book with its “There are no dumb questions” section. That book developed my critical thinking even more. Same goes for Effective Java.

I stayed for almost 4 years on that job, learning and practicing constantly. Around 2008, I also started teaching Java to final year University students. They were utterly lost, drawing parallels to my time at University 5 years ago, damn!

When started the iPhone Stanford course in 2009 didnt imagine giving a talk on a iOS conference right after @edog1203

I held 3 more roles as a Java Developer, until 2011, working in academia and research, the media industry, finance.

In the meantime, in September 2009, I started attending the iPhone Stanford course on iTunes and a year later started building verylargebox.

I went to work as an iOS Developer at NCR, lead the technical delivery of Tesco Bank’s Mobile Banking app for the iPhone and just recently as Head of Mobile at Soldo.

Throughout my career, every time I went into a new work environment, I’d come across a different mindset. Whether that was from developers, managers, directors; technical or not, involved in the software delivery process none the less.

Some didn’t believe in the merits of software testing or any software engineering principles, others in database normalisation or denormalization for that matter.

Thrown in there, arguments of the “tab vs spaces” type.

Some felt strongly about procedural programming with very little structure, others fixating on functional and reactive programming.

If you come from an OO background and want to get a grasp on FP, one of my favourite talks from this year's @nsconf https://t.co/ej9p9NMqOV

Software development processes varying from non existing to very inefficient. Long discussion meetings, ad hoc phone calls, emails. No planning, no management, no roles, no ownership. It’s like watching amateur football where everyone chases the ball.

Learned a lot on project management and software delivery by working alongside @mattfarrugia in the past. Thank you Matt!

Why do so many people involved in the software industry believe that software development is subjective?

FWIW, this is what it's like to hire for a Lead iOS developer. Worse than the worse customer acquisition strategy.

The bar is low. As far as I can tell and see, education (higher education, online courses, training, schools) falls short in all of these below.

• Academics are detached from the software industry.
• Professionals who do know, do not necessarily make good teachers/mentors.
• Not enough practicing your craft.
• Teaching how to write code rather software development as a discipline.
• Failing to develop critical thinking.

Whether they come from language, platform, hardware, network, interaction. Know the fundamentals, use critical judgment. Should be enough.

It does not help that the industry is still evolving. There are new paradigms, languages, platforms and challenges all the time. Still, by now we should have a solid foundation on which to start from and agree upon. People have very little interest in studying history when the technology always stays fresh and exciting. Repeating the same mistakes in the process, debating on issues that have already been settled, going down the same path in a different language, platform, domain.

The software industry is growing, without any signs of stopping any time soon, generating an unsatisfied demand for people. On top of that, there is money and there is plenty to go around.

Private investments, government funding or simply because software is driving businesses everywhere that are profitable there is very little understanding of how wasteful a software development process is, concern about the quality of people through the door, incentive to invest in the people.