This month's meeting will be on Thursday, August 9th at 6:30pm.

This week we have the pleasure to welcome Tom Brodhurst-Hill (all the way from Australia!) to speak about building UI for apps like Lego blocks – combining UIKit code and Interface Builder, storyboards, xibs, IBInspectable, and IBDesignable, in ways you probably haven’t seen before.

Here is a brief bio of Tom:

Tom Brodhurst-Hill runs a small consultancy called "BareFeetWare", based in Australia. He builds apps and leads teams at major enterprises and government departments. Tom runs workshops for designers and developers, showing them how to get the most of Xcode and Interface builder and build apps like Lego.

As a child, Tom saved his pocket money to buy Lego, and marvelled at how the blocks could be assembled and altered to create many different toys. He eventually sold his Lego to buy his first computer and years later started developing apps for iOS. Some things haven’t changed. He still likes building components that anyone can assemble like Lego blocks to make apps. He still doesn’t wear shoes.

Please be advised, we cannot get around pre-registering guests at the Facebook office, so you'll need to fill out your name and email address in this Google Form.

We'll go out for dinner afterwards, location TBD.

Thanks and see everyone there!

Join us on Thursday, March 8th at 6:30pm at Google for a demo of an app called FishSnap!  Dulio and Andrew wrote it in a weekend for an ecological hackathon, and it uses CoreML to identify species of fish from images.  Pretty cool, huh?

Call or text me (410 570 1555) if you have a hard time getting past security at the 9th Avenue entrance.

Pizza is afterward at Zia Maria's, on 23rd between 7th and 8th.

Please join us and bring a friend!

In lieu of a speaker last month, a group of us gathered wrote down some pieces of code-writing advice. Some of them were purely a New Year's Resolutions, as they're something we intend to stick with, and some other items were more like recommendations to a younger version of yourself. And some are things we keep telling ourselves but just can't hear enough!

1. Avoid side effects and unrelated actions
2. Keep the logic close in lines of code (so you don't have to go down the rabbit hole)
3. Stay focused on the task at hand
4. Leave good comments
5. Leave good in-line documentation
6. Write good commit messages! Links to a bug, or explains what's really happening in the change.
7. UI bugs are a big deal! If they bother you, they'll bother your users.
8. Follow the system that works for you. Maybe it's paper!
9. Don't be afraid to test a change, no matter how trivial it seems.
10. You're a pro: use Dash or a powerful document browser
11. Subscribe to helpful dev mailing lists (digests like iOS Weekly)
12. Spend 1 hour a week learning something
13. Take time AFK for non-code work
14. Take notes for yourself and leave breadcrumbs ("Left off on <technical error>")
15. Clean up prototypes and keep them for later!
16. Try not to hate Swift
17. Keep your timesheet better: improve bookkeeping
18. Avoid ill-defined projects
19. Document why you're doing something and why not something else
20. Remember: the best place for documentation is in the code
21. Automate UI Testing!
22. Don't forget your quarterly estimated taxes 🙁
23. Learn back-end best practices (logging, microservices, unit tests)
24. Test-driven development
25. Try out different frameworks and look for other solutions
26. Finish a side project
27. Keep editing your coding standards / pull request guidelines
28. Maybe the dice *are* loaded! (SceneKit life lesson: don't use die with divots.)

Also, we had a spirited conversation about obscure code involving John Carmack's algorithm for calculating the square root of a float in Quake 3. It's here if you're curious!

Hello, CocoaHeads folks!

Join us this Thursday, November 9th at 6:30 at Google for an important non-technical talk. Will Larche, who works at Google on the iOS Materials Team, is working on a book about equity and compensation for developers like us. He'll talk about negotiating salaries, evaluating offers, stock options and equity, and more.

Pizza is afterward at Zia Maria's, on 23rd between 7th and 8th.

Please join us and bring a friend!

Join us this month where Marc Van Olmen will share some detail around working on the Reuters tvOS app.

We'll begin 6:30pm at Google. Enter on the 9th Avenue side of the building (entrance is close to Starbucks), check in with Security, and head to the 4th floor.

Folks interested in Pizza afterward should join the crowd and head up to Zia Maria's, on 23rd between 7th and 8th.

Last month, we gathered over pizza to discuss Apple's September announcements. We shared our theories about the experience of face-unlocking the iPhone X, made plans to trade 1st Generation Apple Watches in for the new ones, and lamented the loss of scrollview insets set to zero by default. Now that we're nearly a month into iOS 11, I'm sure we'll have even more insights to share.

Join us Thursday, August 10, for two talks:

1. Isaac Schmidt from the Huffington Post will share how he's working on the transition of their app's push notifications from Urban Airship to Apple's CloudKit.
2. Mike Sanderson is going to discuss how he's been working to evolve the Swift API Guidelines and is interested in our input on a few examples.

We'll begin 6:30pm at Google. Enter on the 9th Avenue side of the building (entrance is close to Starbucks), check in with Security, and head to the 4th floor. We'll meet you at the elevators from there.

Afterward, it's pizza at Zia Maria's, on 23rd between 7th and 8th. Disclaimer: I cannot promise we won't discuss the latest episode of the Game of Thrones.

My fellow CocoaHeads, in honor of WWDC 2017, we are cancelling our monthly meeting for June. We will resume on July 13th with much to discuss!

Join us on Thursday, April 13 at 6:30 at Google for three more talks! Here's what's on the menu:

1. Demitri Muna & Adventures with CIFilters
2. Bob Clair with IBInspectables & IBDesignables
3. Data Flow or a Swift Webserver (!?) with Richard Adem

Same deal as last month: each talk is slated for less than 20 minutes so we're going to try to begin at 6:30 and leave for pizza no later than 7:45.

We'll begin 6:30pm at Google. Enter on the 9th Avenue side of the building (entrance is close to Starbucks), check in with Security, and head to the 4th floor. We'll meet you at the elevators from there.

Afterward, pizza at Zia Maria's, on 23rd between 7th and 8th, until we find something we like more!

Because of last month's snow, we will have not one — not two — but THREE speakers on March 9th!

1. Nina Baculinao is going to give a talk about using Snapshot Testing at Hopscotch.
2. Vadim Komisarchik will share his experiences with React Native in Swift
3. Frank Courville (visiting from Montreal!) will share how he uses NSOperations to supercharge his apps.

Each talk is slated for less than 20 minutes so we're going to try to begin at 6:30 and leave for pizza no later than 7:45.

We'll begin 6:30pm at Google. Enter on the 9th Avenue side of the building (entrance is close to Starbucks), check in with Security, and head to the 4th floor. We'll meet you at the elevators from there.

Afterward, pizza at Zia Maria's, on 23rd between 7th and 8th, until we find something we like more!

Join us on Thursday, February 9th for a double-header: Nina Baculinao is going to give a talk about using Snapshot Testing at Hopscotch, and Vadim Komisarchik will share his experiences with React Native in Swift!

Bring a friend and join us (promptly!) at 6:30pm at Google. Enter on the 9th Avenue side of the building (entrance is close to Starbucks), check in with Security, and head to the 4th floor. We'll meet you at the elevators from there.

Afterward, it's pizza at Zia Maria's, on 23rd between 7th and 8th, as usual.

Update 2/9/17

This month's meeting of CocoaHeads has been cancelled due to inclement weather. Both Nina and Vadim have agreed to give their talks next month on March 9th, so we will have a whopping three presentations that evening. Don't miss it!