OrchardNest

Stanford has shared the Spring 2020 course online for free. You can find lecture videos, presentation slides and assignments that will teach you the basics and guide you on your way to becoming an iPhone developer. This is how I started as...

In May of 2015 I visited a long time friend in Israel. It was my first time there. Our friendship dates back to the late 90s where we studied together at University. All these years, he kept asking me to visit. I was nervous. Israel had a...

Overview Swift provides a Foundation API to serialise from and to JSON “by implementing the Encodable and Decodable protocols on your custom types". The team at Apple has also written a great article about Encoding and Decoding...

I watched a few documentaries on the history of video games and the rise of an industry. Insert Coin by Joshua Tsui. From Bedrooms to Billions: The Playstation Revolution by Nicola and Anthony Caulfield. From Bedrooms to Billions: The...

Bravery is looking despair in the eye. Feeling hopeless yet not letting fear overcome you. Knowing that there is nothing you can do for the people you love and care about yet still facing that fear head on. Even if that is merely not...

The music that YANNI produces has this amazing quality of moving me to tears, getting me pumped, making me melancholic and inspiring me. I have been listening to his music since the 90s and it still has the same effect on me. Just recently...

One of the things I remember being told that has stood the test of time, goes back to my University years. It is about what is expected of you at each stage of your higher-level education and where the knowledge you achieve leads...

Between listening to Poolside FM1 and watching the PlayStation Revolution documentary it felt good to escape the constant news cycle, twitter2 and coping with my mental struggle. Everyone at Poolside FM, know that joining you at the pool...

Paraphrasing The App Store is not simply a marketplace – it is part of a larger bundle of tools, technologies and services that Apple makes available to developers to develop and create great applications for iPhone, iPad and other...

At some point in the last few weeks the ability to run code on both an iPhone and an Apple TV I own has not been possible. In Apple Developer terms, Xcode fails to codesign with an error “Signing for [project name] requires a...

Yesterday, I watched live a session by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on “Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law | Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and...

A dear friend lost his father recently. On the day of the service, I went by his house early morning as we had to drive for about an hour to attend the funeral. In that hour long drive, there were moments of laughter, quietness,...

I felt like learning something new. This time web related. Eventually, I arrived at Kotlin. Between my background experience as a Java Web Developer and an Apple Developer, I thought Kotlin sounded like a good investment and fun to play...

I have been trying for weeks to write this one technical blog post on how Windmill secured over-the-air downloads on iOS. I just can’t. My brain just tells me no, it refuses. It tells me I need to spend more time looking for a job. I...

Brent Simmons writing about coding challenges as part of an interview process. I’ve read a bunch of the advice on this, and the advice says things like: “Start talking. Restate the problem. Talk out an approach. Consider how much...

I miss London. I miss walking around. I miss the night sky. I miss walking around Fitzrovia, past that little chapel hidden away in a residential block where apartments have full glass windows. I miss walking up Primrose Hill, turning...

I have made the decision to release the source code of Windmill. Windmill on the Mac Windmill on the Mac is a native macOS application written in Swift 5 on Xcode 10 targetting macOS 10.14. The codebase is about 16k LOC. Windmill on...

I have been using Jekyll for quite some time. Quite possibly since the beginning of this blog. I have now migrated to Hugo. There wasn’t a strong reason to do so. Jekyll was serving me just fine up until now. I even used Jekyll for...

What’s the point in life? To have fun? I’ve certainly had fun with this Next and that is good enough for me. But if you want the wider story, then I think there are several avenues. For some, this could simply be a programming...

I want to evolve this website to something more than just a blog. A website that is deeply personal yet it’s not about me. A website that is about forming relationships, removing barriers, breaking taboos. A website that raises...

BScIT (aka Biscuit) class of 2003 at the University of Sunderland. There is a whole story of how I ended up working at CERN but that’s for another day. What’s relevant is that at CERN, in 2001, I was “christened” a...

I am not sure what to make of open-source software anymore. I am not referring to free and open-source software nor open-source with a commercial license. There is also open-source, like NetNewsWire and Homebrew which are free and...

This is it. I am officially ending Windmill. The writing has been on the wall for some time now. I will begin by dismantling the infrastructure that supports Windmill on the iPhone. I will also make a public announcement on the Windmill...

I watched The Game Awards last night. The whole show was oozing with talent, creativity and positivity. I came away feeling inspired. Special shoutout to Lual Mayen who from refugee became a game developer. Fereshteh Forough for founding...

I mentioned in the past how the MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013 would randomly shutdown and shared my experience with an Apple Premium Service Provider in Athens, Greece. I have been running RealMacMods, NoCrashMBP for over 3 weeks...

There is no official Apple presence1 in Greece. As a result, there are no mail orders, no mail-in option to repair and you have to rely to a 3rd party to service your Apple Hardware. About 2 months ago, I noticed that the battery on the...

I own a MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013. At the time I bought it, April 2014, I maxed out both the RAM at 16GB and HD at 512GB SSD. About 2 months ago, I noticed the battery had swollen, so I had it replaced at a cost of ~€340....

The last update on Windmill was really the news about Windmill on the iPhone getting rejected. I have yet to put any more work on Windmill. Windmill on the Mac is a standalone, native, macOS app1 that has always been free to download and...

It has been about 3 months since I have deleted my Twitter account. I had been an avid user for 10 years. I don’t miss it and I am happier. At the time it felt important. I could reach out to others and others could reach out. I was...

This is a deeply personal post. It is a way for me to process, come to terms with, move forward and take back control of my life. I don’t have any advice to offer or lessons to teach yet. I am still caught into this. I don’t...