Things I’ve overthought
Not into software? I also write about being endlessly curiousMy Phone Replaced a Brass Plug
I wanted to cook venison from scratch, which meant learning to shoot, which meant keeping track of my progress, which meant porting a 2012 OpenCV paper and training a state-of-the-art computer vision model, which meant the dinner took a bit longer than expected.
ReadThe Whole App is a Blob
I tried to prepare for life in French-speaking Canada by turning language drills into a Tamagotchi. It worked, as long as you don't ask me whether my coffee is for here or to go.
Apple's Problem with Bodies
I shipped a wellbeing journal and discovered the App Store still isn't sure whether the human body is health, lifestyle, or sin.
You can't cURL a Border
Country borders don't return JSON, they return judgment. So I built a state machine for travel when governments won't expose your state.
Designing Software for Things that Rot
How a £150 eBay fridge and a decision tree taught me to stop asking internet strangers if my salami would kill me - and why building for rot is nothing like building happy-path apps.
How I accidentally became PureGym's unofficial Apple Wallet developer
Tired of fumbling with the gym app every morning, I reverse-engineered their API to build an Apple Wallet pass that gets me in with a quick wrist scan and discovered a bizzare security theatre along the way.
Things I Learnt in 2023
For almost four years I have been sending out a weekly newsletter with things I learnt and read during the week. Some of those trivia are not trivial at all, so I decided to share the condensed crème de la crème of the Internet in this New Year special edition.
Things I Learnt in 2021
For almost two years I have been sending out a weekly newsletter with things I learnt and read during the week. Some of those trivia are not trivial at all, so I decided to share the condensed crème de la crème of the Internet in this New Year special edition.
Things I Learnt in 2020
For the past six months I have been sending out a weekly newsletter with things I learnt and read during the week. Some of those trivia are not trivial at all, so I decided to share the condensed crème de la crème of the Internet in this New Year special edition.
Verifying localisation in iOS apps with Github Actions: the reinvented wheel
By the end of this post we will build a Github Actions workflow to detect broken localisation keys in iOS projects; however this can be easily adapted to other cloud platforms (Travis, CircleCI, etc) and projects (Android, React, etc). Bonus: I will show how to quickly test that localisation files themselves are properly formatted or exist.
What I've learnt after sending 147 proposals to 36 conferences in a year
This year I sent out quite a few proposals to the majority of mobile conferences in Europe. Some ignored me, the others replied with automated rejections. However, some accepted and it was fun. Here is what I've learned on the way.
Keep using Fastlane with Apple's 2FA changes
Apple recently started to enforce 2FA for account holders and preventing uploading builds without 2FA. However, managing SMS codes is pretty hard when it comes to CI pipelines, so I've decided to share a few approaches I tried to overcome this inconvenience.
Text to Markdown on copy
Since I moved my Wordpress- and Medium-based blogs to this standalone platform, compiled by Eleventy and deployed by Netlify, I was wondering whether there is a way to persist original Markdown formatting even if someone copies the prerendered text from the browser. Initially I was considering two approaches...