I'm an iOS Engineer working in London startups. Every 2 weeks, I'll send you ludicrously in-depth articles about iOS, Swift, tech, & indie projects. My primary niche is mobile engineering, but there’s something for everyone in my repertoire: including CPU architecture, job interviews, accessibility, compilers, hacking, startup fundraising, and memes.
Argues for playful loading screens and demonstrates building a simple 2D game engine in SwiftUI. Explains what a game engine is and its moving parts, then wires them up to ship Flappy‑style minigames in a real loading screen. Includes open‑source engine and sample app.
Explains how Swift actors work under the hood: the compiler synthesizes a serial executor and enforces async boundaries on every access. It inspects SIL to show compile-time wiring, then the runtime executor’s isolation, task switching, enqueuing, and thread-pool draining.
A solo tech cofounder reflects on shipping a gamified climate‑action app: starting with a bare‑bones MVP backend, then overengineering a “scalable” system post‑funding, and what he should’ve done instead. A cautionary lesson on right‑sizing architecture and avoiding premature complexity.
Hands-on guide to cutting iOS app launch time. Shows a real-world case and three tactics—offload work to background threads, maximize CPU at launch, and resolve dependencies smartly—plus production monitoring and pre-main tuning. Covers deadlock/race pitfalls.
Swift scripting has long been painful. This post introduces swift-subprocess—a brand‑new Swift package—for automating tasks by running system commands from Swift. It outlines why scripting hurt and how this tool helps. Takeaway for iOS devs: Swift is becoming viable for CLI automation.
Deep dive into Data's swift-foundation implementation reveals sophisticated memory optimizations. Data uses four representations (Empty, InlineData, InlineSlice, LargeSlice) based on size, avoiding heap allocation for small data via stack-based tuples. Core approach: wrap heap pointers in __DataStorage with copy-on-write semantics. Key optimization keeps enum representations ≤16 bytes to stay inline. Performance critical: heap slow, stack fast principle drives design choices throughout.
A historical tour of Apple concurrency from 1977 to today, with runnable examples: primitive scheduling on Apple ][, Macintosh multitasking, NeXTSTEP POSIX threads, OS X Grand Central Dispatch, and modern Swift Concurrency (async/await). Traces the evolution toward ergonomic parallelism.
Demonstrates building real-time iOS systems using Combine with WebSockets through three examples: connected thermostat, live auction, and gaming. Uses URLSessionWebSocketTask with Combine operators like decode, throttle, buffer, and scan. Shows PassthroughSubject for broadcasting data, type erasure with AnyPublisher, and performance optimization techniques. Includes testing strategies with mock services and SwiftUI previews. Key challenge is managing high-frequency updates and back-pressure in real-time scenarios.
Guide to building offline, client-side AI on iOS with Apple’s MobileCLIP (CLIP) Core ML models: pick/download a model, customize via Python to make text embeddings, embed in your app, and classify images using Vision. Notes B(LT) works best but ~173MB. Enables zero-shot search/categories.
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Building a trading card app using client-side AI, combining MobileCLIP for zero-shot image classification to generate personalized stats/titles, Vision framework for foreground masking, Metal shaders for holographic effects, SwiftUI for UI, and SwiftData for persistence. Uses CLIP embeddings for deterministic stat generation from photos, applies different rarity levels, and creates shareable trading cards with custom graphics effects.
Explores Swift's lesser-known, advanced features including unowned(unsafe) references, withoutActuallyEscaping for escaping closures, dlopen() for dynamic library loading, malloc/free with withUnsafeTemporaryAllocation for manual memory management, _modify accessor for in-place mutations, and autoreleasepool for Objective-C memory management. These "forbidden" Swift features offer powerful capabilities but require careful handling due to unsafe operations and potential crashes. Most are niche tools for performance optimization or low-level system programming rather than everyday development.
Practical guide to AsyncStream/AsyncThrowingStream: build async sequences to bridge delegate/callback APIs. Examples: CoreLocation heading stream with .bufferingNewest(1), download progress via URLSessionDownloadDelegate, and CADisplayLink FPS tracking with onTermination cleanup. Use for-await-in; continuations are Sendable.
An indie founder recounts Apple trapping his app in App Review for 170 days, starving a startup at launch. He shares how they ultimately got unstuck by invoking Apple’s biggest fear, offering takeaways on navigating App Store review power dynamics as an iOS developer.
Announcement: Jacob’s Tech Tavern is raising paid subscription prices 60% on May 15, 2025. Subscribe before to lock in $7.50/month forever. New price: $12/month ($110/year). Existing subscribers keep current rates. Options: 14‑day trial, concessions, and 40% group discount/L&D template.