Vadim Drobinin

iOS consultant and software engineer

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.


Tuesday Triage

Every week, I sift through thousands of articles, posts, tweets, videos, facts, and trivia to bring you the crème de la crème in technology, arts, cooking, mixology.

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    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 quikly test that localisation files themselves are properly formatted or exist.

    What I've learned 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...

    2018 Summary

    Writing is hard. Writing in a foreign language is even more perplexing. Writing in a foreign language on an obscure manual typewriter from the 1950s while drinking Bronx with bitters is what I am doing right now, so thou shalt forgive me the old-fashioned style I let to slip through, purely unintentionally of course. Stories don’t end with the writers, however many started the race...

    You can not go back to square one

    Our lives are beautiful in their difference. We think different thoughts, we love different stuff, we feel different sensations, we expect different things to happen, we spend our time very different from each other and we have different goals in life. However, there is at least one flaw most of us have...

    Let me caution you

    Dear Vadim, Every day I spend my time drinking wine, feeling fine, reading books and cooking something cool whenever I want. I travel quite a lot, check my Twitter feed at Business lounges and use Priority Pass in case of noisy children somewhere near the queue...

    You are here, alive and present

    Not so long ago I would have started my morning routine with social networks. Those days, as soon as I lift my head off the pillow to the ringing of alarm clock in my mobile phone, I press the “Dismiss” button and by force of habit open the list of notifications about unread mail, photos on Instagram liked during the night, published on Facebook posts of my friends, dozens of new messages on Telegram and burn the first half an hour of my morning in the name of procrastination...

    Something is Coming

    My life in the water began when I was 6 and joined a swimming team in the city where I was born. Starting from those days I hardly can recall a week I have spent without visiting a swimming pool. During this time I have learned a lot about patience, being a part of the team, and probably the most important were lessons about both winning and losing. I swimmed in rivers, seas, oceans and thought I knew a lot about water. Everything changed this February...