We’re still in review territory for me, in 100 Days of Swift UI, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Swift’s classes are incredibly similar to other object-oriented languages, and reviewing OOP terms and tech is always a good thing. But boy am I ready to start digging in.
Day 9 was focused on wrapping up structs, and the only new-ish thing I saw was the lazy keyword, allowing properties to be ignored until the first time they’re called. We’re getting closer to digging into the actual code, and let me say I’m itching for it. Just reading and parsing quick tests isn’t the best learning method, even though most of this is review or just minor syntax changes.
Today, the lessons covered things I already knew… mostly. One interesting thing I’d never seen before was the idea of property observers— didSet and willSet. Those seem particularly useful, and I’m wondering if previously I’ve done extra work to get around the lack of them. I must have, on at least one project.
Day 7 was part two of closures, and I truly think I’m benefiting from previous experience in development here. Closures seem a little bit complicated, but the syntax isn’t too bad once you wrap your head around it.
I am starting to get the feeling that a lot of this will be easier once I get my hands on some actual code. Or, rather, that when I get my hands on some actual code, I’ll learn where my gaps of knowledge are and fill them.
Day 6 is focused on closures, the first truly new info I’ve picked up so far. Not syntax changes, and not interesting plays on things I’ve seen before. Closures exist in C# but I’ve never used them, and only thought to look them up when I hit these lessons.
Closures still seem simple enough, but I can understand why they’d be hard for people learning Swift as their first go at development. What I don’t understand quite yet is why to use them. I’ll get there though.
We’re getting into things I haven’t seen before, or haven’t had to know previously, and it’s rather fun.
Having two names for a parameter seems genius, as does allowing parameters to not have a name if it’s self-explanatory. inout parameters seem useful as well.
I never had a term for variadic functions either; now I do. Lovely what you can learn from a few quick lessons.
Loops, loops, and more loops.
Again, the basics are the same here. Three stark differences I noticed. There’s no difference in Swift between for and foreach loops—it’s just for loops. Then there’s the delightful _ syntax for when you don’t need to use the variable defined. Lovely.
The second difference was being able to give loops names for nested loop scenarios. Seems genius to me, though I can’t remember the last time I needed a nested loop.
The third difference is in the infinite looping section. Before now, I would have done everything in my power to avoid infinite loops. Interesting. I’ll have to see what comes of this.
Anyway. It was a quick one today.
Lately, I’ve been fiddling with time-tracking my life. Mostly my work life so far, but I’m horribly inconsistent about it. I bought some NFC tag stickers to try to improve the consistency, but there’s only one tag I use, and only when I remember. It’s not yet a habit.
Speaking of which, I forgot to time-track this post. Sigh.
When I was talking about this with a group of productivity- & tech-minded people, someone reminded me of the Stream Deck. And I thought, Maybe.
Then, yesterday, someone else in the same group sent me a picture of theirs. We’re a lovely little group of enablers. I stepped closer to the edge. Over the next few hours, said person gave updates on some of the integrations they were able to set up, and some they weren’t.
The one that intrigued me was the Toggl integration, community built, buggy, and abandoned. Instead of turning me off of this StreamDeck time-tracking adventure, it did the opposite, and made me intrigued. So I may be buying a Stream Deck and building a plugin.
Down the rabbit hole I go; see you on the other side.
Today was a quick lesson, as all of Swift’s operators are pretty standard to all the languages I know. Learning the name of ternary operator was new, at least. That’s the var x = isTrue : "success" : "false" operator, if anyone was curious.
Day two was a bit more exciting than day one. More syntax differences, of course, but also some insight into a few quirks of Swift, like associated values in enums and an introduction to Sets, a data structure I’ve never used outside an advanced math course.
Most of it was still review of basic concepts, but, as they say, trust the process!