Mobile Couch

It’s the final episode of Mobile Couch, so Jake MacMullin returns to the couch, and they discuss how they got started as developers, as well as how they feel about starting new projects.

Ben takes Jelly on a journey through his favourite points from the book Pragmatic Programming: From Journeyman to Master, which details points that you’ll want to learn if you want to be a better developer. Along the way they discuss everything from philosophy to buying dishwashers, and maybe even a little actual code here and there.

Jelly recounts his experience with interviewing for a developer position within a big tech company. He and Ben reveal a little insight into what the process is like, what you should know going in, and what you can take from the process to apply to the interviews at your own company.

Ben and Jelly run through a quick and dirty primary of Git, one of the most popular version control systems around today. Starting from the very basics, they run through all the things you need to know to use it in your day to day work, why you should be using some method of version control, and the clients they use to make things nice and easy to manage.

Once again, the Apple developer community has been host to scandal! Not a pair to leave this opportunity behind, Ben and Jelly discuss how developers can learn from this, looking at the mistakes that were made, how to avoid them, and what you need to remember when things go bad.

With Ben in London, Casey Liss rejoins Jelly on the couch to talk about leaving .Net behind for a career in the Apple ecosystem, his experience with RxSwift, and wrapping your brain around new things. Meanwhile, Jelly reflects on his recent GIFwrapped update and his approach when migrating it from Objective-C to Swift.

How do you lay out your views? Ben and Jelly look over the different methods available on both iOS and Android, and compare their experiences with each. Together they uncover some of the oddities that can pop up in various circumstances, how to get around them, and which approach rules them all.

User notifications have had a big makeover in iOS 10, so Ben and Jelly walk through how notifications work on iOS. Along the way, they highlight some of the newer features available in the new framework, look at when you might choose local notifications over remote notifications, and discuss the two new extension points to use for customising notifications.

If you’re lucky, you’ll never need to work on an app that has to manage files, but just in case you ever do, Jelly’s got you covered with a basic overview of file management on iOS. He walks Ben through the basics, covering coordination of access to files between processes, reading parts of files, and displaying a localised version of a file path.

Dependency injection is a simple programming technique with a bit of a scary name, but it turns out that it’s excellent for highlighting the connections between classes within an app. Ben walks Jelly through the basics of using dependency injection, why singletons are bad, and places you might already be using this techique without even knowing it.