If you have been following my blog since my first post, you may notice that I have made some substantial improvements to my site to help bring a better experience to my followers and new visitors. While I could make a blog post dedicated to explaining why I made these changes, I figured it would be boring, and perhaps the information would become out dated as time went on. However, I will write about some of the changes I made that you can implement on your blog or website right now.
If your new to mobile application development, one topic you should learn early on, is the concept of threading. Threading is a computer science term that handles the order of execution of tasks on the CPU. Threads are usually handled by the operating system. However there might be some tasks that can only be carried out on specialized threads created by the OS. To put things in context, consider the following example. Lets say I create an iOS application that uses a REST API to fetch data about upcoming concerts using location data. When you launch this application, the app freezes, takes a long time to load, and you see a white screen for more than 3 seconds. This is a common example of an app thats not optimized for the use of threads. As a result, you might receive complaints from your users saying that the app is slow or they delete your application all together. After a while, you decide to make some changes.
Upon inspection of your code, you find that your REST call is causing this slow down inside the ViewDidLoad method. you have to remember that in this case your code is being executed line by line. This means when your REST call is carried out, the CPU must finish getting your data before displaying it on screen. After reading this, you may be asking why does this happen? This happens because by default your application business logic and UI are loaded on the same thread called the main thread. Quick operations like simple math and string manipulation are perfectly fine on the main thread, but time consuming tasks like REST calls are not the best option. So how do we fix this? The simplest thing we could do is move this time consuming task to what is called the Background Thread. The Background Thread is a thread designed for complex operations. In return you leave the Main Thread open for UI changes. Here is some example code on how to make this happen.
At the time of writing this post, its currently New Years Day. I figured today would be the perfect day to layout my vision for this site, and talk about some goals for my software development career in 2018. For easier reading purposes, I have broke down each of my goals into sections.
Why start a Blog?
This past summer, I read a book called ‘Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual’ by John Sonmez. This book has changed my perspective on life, In return I begin to start the journey to take back my time and try to work for myself. This book explains how important it is to market skills as a software developer in order to get new clients and maybe a higher paying job. This book also mentions multiple times that a blog is a perfect medium to market my skill sets through blog posts and links to previous work. However with that being said, This isn’t my first time blogging. I’ve been trying to blog about various topics ranging from programming, tech news and video games for many years, but at the time I was very young and was not thinking about a long term career goal. This time it is a completely different perspective, I really want to be able to turn my skills into a sustainable business where I can be happy with the work I’m doing while taking back my time. Blogging into 2018 should help me do that while being able to market myself.
What are you going to be blogging about?
This is a very good question. While I was building this site, I often thought about what I’m going to write about. After some thinking I came up with the following ideas.
Documenting the progress on my side projects: At the time of writing this, I’m currently working on two side projects. Both of these projects I’m extremely passionate about and generally enjoy working on them. However, I think writing about these projects will help potential job recruiters and new developers some perspective on what technologies I know and use.
Documenting my experiences learning Swift again: It is no secret that I love Apple and the iPhone. When the Swift Programming language was announced in 2014. I was hooked. The announcement couldn’t not have come at a better time either, I was just about to graduate high school and start my first year of community college. With that in mind, I stayed up late reading Swift tutorials, watching Swift YouTube videos and reading the official Swift iBook. I made a few apps and submitted them on the App Store during that summer. The apps were not very good, but I was proud of them. However, I also wrote a lot of Swift code. (most of which I lost due to a hard disk failure :/). Since I started working full time, I haven’t had a chance to use Swift, Most of my day is spent in Visual Studio and C#. Don’t get me wrong, C# is one my personal favorite languages and tools like Xamarin make it possible to develop mobile apps in C#. However, through my experience, these tools are hard to use and I have ran into problems with them. With that being said, I can’t wait to start learning Swift again and to create better apps.
Software Development tips and tutorials: This is a pretty generic topic but I figured since developing software is a learning process. I figured I would create some content on how to accomplish certain tasks, tutorials on certain frameworks and languages and good tips for newer developers.
How often are you going to post?
This is a easy one! My goal is to post one blog post a week on any of the following topics outlined above.
If your still reading this, congratulations you have made it through my first blog post. Its only going to get better from here. If you have questions, comments and concerns please use the contact section of the home page or email me if you want to get a hold of me.
Blogging 
