I spent the last few days on vacation. We didn’t go anywhere (other than a soccer tournament - in the rain), the kids had school and my wife was working. So, what did I spend my time doing? Writing code. Obviously…
I’ve been working a big update to Beer Style Guidelines. The updates include a lot of “new” iOS features. These include:
- Diffable Data Sources
- Triple Column UISplitViewController (from Build for iPad)
- Lists in UICollectionView (find out the real name)
- Much more.
All of this and I’m still trying to learn (and use) Combine and SwiftUI. I was very excited when those technologies were announced (almost) 2 years ago. I just haven’t had the ability to use Combine or SwiftUI at work. I’ve used them here and there in my side-projects, but not enough to feel proficient in them.
So, why am I spending my vacation time learning about these features and implementing them? Honestly, I don’t get an opportunity to learn and work on this during my day job. At work, we need to support iOS 11/12+ (depending on the app). That means that I don’t get to use the new hotness at work. So I need to do this learning and implementing using my side-projects.
Using my vacation time to learn “new” (well, almost 1 and 2-year old) technologies isn’t ideal. But I feel like this is something I need to do. It’s either this or continue to feel like I’m always behind in iOS development.
I’ve made a lot of progress on my update to Beer Style Guidelines. I hope that I can get this latest update out into the App Store before WWDC. That will give me the opportunity to start learning the next set of iOS features I want to implement over the Summer.