Learning SwiftUI - Day 22 of 100

Well, today was the review day for the second project — Guess the Flag. The challenges were fun, adding a score tracker, and teaching the player when they hit the wrong answer. I decided, as I’m wont to do, to even make a lose-condition—score going down below 0—and a game-over alert & process. I had to figure out how to do 2 alerts instead of one, which was its own little adventure, then made a way for the user to see their highest score from the game.

Anyway, I’ve been having fun. Knowing logic from other languages is making the pace feel a little slow on the non-challenge days, but I know I’m picking up little tidbits that’ll make my life easier in the future.

25 March 2021 100-days-of-swiftui development

Learning SwiftUI - Day 21 of 100

I nearly forgot to write this up today. It was just another day on the guessing the flag game for project two. Generally a quick, easy project, but I got thrown off by some changes—or perhaps I was doing something wrong—between when the tutorial was written and presently. The assets wouldn’t work until I specifically imported them—it was odd. Anyway. On to the review of the project tomorrow.

24 March 2021 100-days-of-swiftui development

Learning SwiftUI - Day 20 of 100

Project two was introduced today, along with some fun UI elements — buttons, stacks, gradients, alerts. It was a quick session, just focused on playing with those elements to get used to them.

I’m starting to get the feeling that as I continue learning, I’m going to start getting annoyed at apps for not using these elements correctly…

Such is the life of a dev.

23 March 2021 100-days-of-swiftui development

Learning SwiftUI - Day 19 of 100

Challenge day! Love this. Being thrown into the deep end is truly an amazing way to learn a language.

The challenge, to build a conversion app between different units of the same measurement type (ex. converting temperatures or converting length units), is relatively simple, and used a bunch of ideas from the previous day.

I, naturally, decided to make it a bit hard on myself, and decided to try to account for all the conversions. Why do I do this to myself. 🙄 I could have just done one, but no, had to do them all.

Anyway, I stopped for the day, having only implemented one, but may go back to finish it, because I’ve already learned a few extra things, like HStacks and that the Segmented Picker Style doesn’t show the picker title. Why? We’ll never know. C’mon Apple. Other things to figure out—how to hide UI features until a boolean is flipped somewhere and looking at the Measurement & related classes to make this even easier.

22 March 2021 100-days-of-swiftui development

Resistance Evaluation

I had a pretty rough week with regards to how I felt about my productivity. Now, I completed some tasks, and that feels good, but overall, I barely scraped through my must-dos. In the past, I would have just shrugged and moved on, but I thought I might try to figure out what had happened, and see if I could prevent it in the future. Or, barring that, keep noticing it until I can train myself out of it.

That in mind, I thought up a simple little review to help me figure out what went wrong—or, not quite right. I’m calling it the Resistance Evaluation. I took the list of all the things I said I wanted to do Monday and broke them into tasks I made progress on and tasks I didn’t.

For the things I didn’t, I asked myself “Why didn’t I want to do the things I planned?” For the things I made progress on, but not as much as I hoped, I asked “What would help me do better?” And then I asked both questions in general.

Some of them were really interesting and I’d thought I’d share.

Why Didn’t I Want to Do the Things I Planned?

In General:

The daylight-savings time-change made me exhausted. Not just for one day—for the whole week. I’m still feeling it now!
I wanted to read a good book instead. This one, I’m deeming perfectly wonderful. Reading is good, y’all. I have no problems with it.

Specifics:

Didn’t want to gather supplies and tools to start.
Needed to take measurements
Didn’t quite know all the end-requirements of the task (put another way, didn’t know what I actually needed to do). This came up multiple times for multiple tasks.
Rain. Rain all week.
The work area was messy. Yes really.
I was frustrated and needed a break longer than I gave myself. For the record, this one is also perfectly fine.
I was overwhelmed by what needed to be done to finish this task.
(Re: starting a new self-care related project) Felt as though I’ve already got a lot on my plate, and wouldn’t know how to fit it into my life.

What Would Help Me Do Better?

In General:

Less phone time. My screen crimes were bad this week. Bad.
More mono-tasking. I was bouncing all over. Usually because of my phone. 🙃
Building stronger habits and routines so I know what I’m doing and when.

Specifics

No phones at the writing desk. I repeat: No phones at the writing desk!
Moving a routine into the afternoons and make sure I’m mono-tasking.
Move a separate routine into the time before my daily standup meeting. Otherwise I delay.

The conclusions are easy once I have a list. First thing’s first: catch up on sleep this weekend. I’m not sure how much longer the time-change will affect me, but I’m hoping a little sleeping in may solve the problem. Second, my phone needs to be less attached to my hand. It is the culprit in a lot of scenarios because it’s easier to check social media or read an article than it is to face something hard.

Other things of note: I need to remember that if I’m avoiding a task over and over, it’s probably because there’s a prerequisite or I don’t know what I need to do to be able to say I’m done. A mind map or other brainstorming tool would help, as would making “gather all the tools” or “clean up work area” sub-step one.

The one that worries me is feeling as though I’m too busy for a self-care project. There are two things at play here. One, I am critical to all of these tasks, so I must take care of myself. Two, I’m not that busy. If I worked through my must-dos every day (without my phone and mono-tasking), they would only take about an hour and a half. There are so many more hours in the day! So what’s stopping me? That one is going to take more thought.

19 March 2021 productivity resistance

Learning SwiftUI - Day 18 of 100

Well, reviewing what I’d learned yesterday was just a quick quiz. That went well. The interesting bit was the challenge section. It was three simple exercises—adding a heading to a section, creating my own section, and change the way value was entered. All very simple, but effective teaching tools for picking up the syntax of a language.

Anyway, beyond that, the app doesn’t interest me. Probably because I haven’t left the house much this year. Wonder why 🙃

19 March 2021 100-days-of-swiftui development

Learning SwiftUI - Day 17 of 100

Well, the first project is finished, a simple check splitting app with a few pickers and text fields. Simple, from start to finish. It was a lovely first dive into the world of SwiftUI.

Tomorrow I’m meant to review some of the things I learned, which seems like a bit of overkill for me, but I’m going to anyway, because I want to make sure I’m not missing anything. There’s an additional challenge to dive deeper into this little one-pager and to modify it as I wish. That should be fun, though I’ll have to restrain myself from fiddling with it for the full day.

18 March 2021 100-days-of-swiftui development

Learning SwiftUI - Day 16 of 100

Or should I say 13 of 97? I skipped three review days, don’t be alarmed.

Day 16 of the program, day 13 for me, was about getting a quick overview of the basics of an iOS app project, and the very basics of Views, Forms, etc and State variables. Rather quick and easy. I had the urge to keep going and restrained myself.

One step at a time, and all that!

17 March 2021 100-days-of-swiftui development

Learning SwiftUI - Day 12 of 100

Well, we’ve made it to last day of the non-project-based lessons (exempting the review days scheduled for the next 3 days). Optionals, or nullables as I knew them previously, have a few quirks in Swift, but nothing shocking. if let and guard let are new to me, as are the simpler force-unwrapping operators, though there are ways to perform the same types of things in C#… you just have to work for it. Failable initializers are new as well, but then I can’t really think of a usecase for them yet.

Anyway, I’ve made up my mind. I am skipping the three review days. I think I’d just drag my feet through them, and I learn best when my fingers are on the keys. See you tomorrow!

16 March 2021 100-days-of-swiftui development

Learning SwiftUI - Day 11 of 100

Protocols and extensions, more review! Well, technically. Protocols don’t exist in C# by name, but you can do the same sort of thing with interfaces. Extensions exist as well, so no surprises there, beyond the usual syntax changes.

Looks like day 12 is one more day of reviewing concepts for the sake of syntax, but days 13 through 15 are literally another round of reviewing everything I just reviewed. So… I may skip to Day 16 on Wednesday. I wanted to be very deliberate with this learning process, but I already feel as if I’m going at a snail’s pace (and I likely only feel like this because I am already a developer. If you are new, this course seems great). So I think I will … deliberately… skip a few lessons.

Plus, learning syntax is easier when I’m typing, not reading.

15 March 2021 100-days-of-swiftui development