development

Developments in... development

in

I’m back! When last your intrepid hero checked in, I’d created a shell of an iOS app that could contact my server and retrieve some data to put on the screen. I’m here to inform you that I’ve made progress!

Mobile and web chat messages!

As you can see, I’ve also named the app GATHER, which was suggested by Mary. I’ve also taken the opportunity to make things in the iOS client a little prettier, though I’m not sure if I’ve settled on the color palette yet.

I’m also continuing the job search. I’ve had two first-round interviews, including a take-home tech assessment, and have a second-round interview scheduled for next week. Stay tuned!

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

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I’ve been an absentee landlord.

Letting this site languish. My bad.

So, update time! I’m unemployed! But it’s okay! For now!

It’s a trope when people in long-term relationships say they could never survive the dating landscape were they to be suddenly single again, and the job hunting landscape seems a lot like that, at least for someone who’d been in the same steady full-time job for 8 years. Tough sledding for the dumped.

Anyway, the literal day after, I essentially woke up with an idea for a project that I could use to both occupy my time, and put on my resumé, since essentially everything I have worked on for the last 8 years is locked in a private GitHub repo, and would only be visible to someone who was a customer of my former employer. NOT GREAT BOB DOT GIF. I’m not going to go into too much detail, not like I think you’re going to steal my idea, but it’s essentially a chat app. I’m starting with a web interface, since that’s what I know best, but I’m also hoping to spin up a mobile (iOS) app to see if I can flex some learning muscles. I’ve got a working prototype with a remote database and WebSocket server running!

Two windows side-by-side showing a chat conversation between two users.

Harry and Bob are chatting

This proves out that my server-side code works, so my next step is to start working on the iOS client. This might take a little longer, but in this new era of “vibe coding”, I for one appreciate our new AI overlords and look forward to working with Chatty G to write some code. What could possibly go wrong!

Continuous Learning

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At some point during the winter, I thought to myself, I wish I could do [x] on my phone, and, in a departure from norm, I didn’t go searching in the App Store, but rather thought, I bet I could make that. And so, for the past several months, I’ve been working my way through a course on SwiftUI development from the website Hacking With Swift (the misuse of the term “hacking” aside, the website is terrific!).

The course I’ve been following leads through programming fundamentals for iOS by building small sample apps, which not only is a great way to see how apps come together, but gives you a library of examples that you can quite literally copy-and-paste from when it comes time to build something new. I’m getting close to the end of the course, and I am champing at the bit to start building my idea. So I started.

I’m not gonna tell you what the whole idea is, but SPOILER ALERT it involves gathering data from Apple’s Health app - the place where various health and fitness related apps can read and share data. Apple provides a means of interacting with the Health app, an API in nerd-speak, called HealthKit. Over the weekend, I was finally able to send a request for data through HealthKit and received data in my app! This is a big deal for me!

Real, actual data!

Yeah, it’s ugly. But, it’s a major step, as workout information is at the core of what I want to do with this app. I don’t know if I will ever get to the point where I put this in the App Store for others to use, but if it proves to be functional and useful, I probably will! So, hopefully, much more to come!