Bit by Bit #2
First of all, thanks to every one of you / my super cool 75 subscribers. It's funny, but even so, 75 people took the time to enter their email and subscribe to my newsletter. I'm so happy about that, and it motivates me even more to write the second edition of Bit by Bit.
This week was really tough at Techzy. We shipped our first-ever arcade gamification game, written in Swift and SpriteKit, and started a new one. But suddenly, some players found a collision bug and hit the max score limit soon after. Basically, it was our failure, but it taught us a lot and gave us plenty to learn and improve upon. So, this week, I'm going to write specific tests for SpriteKit games to avoid such crazy issues.
Also, I worked a LOT on Swiftlings.
Swiftlings is a CLI tool inspired by the brilliant rustlings, designed to help you learn Swift practically by fixing lot of small broken Swift programs!
Currently, I've created 88 exercises, organized into 19 categories, covering everything from basics like variables and functions, all the way to advanced topics such as generics, concurrency, and complex types.
Each category has each own README where you will learn the concepts and theory, alongside links for resources you need to read. After that the idea is simple.
You open your editor and terminal, fix the exercises, and instantly see your results. File watcher will trigger CLI to automatically compile and run tests for your edited exercise. If your code compiles and passes the tests, you can move on to the next challenge.
I will create first release of it and will open source in this week 🙏
This filled my heart with warmth. You never know who's reading your publication or article, the internet is a crazy place. You can inspire and help people without even realizing it, and that really makes me want to write more! Tweet!
We recorded Devtherapy #22 episode with safareli and he shared a very interesting talk with us. I always love these types of talks, they push you to think differently, out of the box, because our minds quickly learn certain patterns, and if you don't make an effort, they always end up thinking in the same way. Programming with nothing and I don’t know why I have not watched it before.
From September, I seriously want to invest my time in learning about language designs, compilers, and interpreters. So, I found this book one of the best-known in the industry. I've already read a couple of chapters and paragraphs, and it caught my attention and hyped me up so hard. I can’t wait for my vacation to start so I can lie down on the beach in Spain and read this masterpiece. Crafting interpreters
As much as I'm gaining and improving as an engineer, I've always encountered and mentioned that object-oriented programming makes everything more complex than it actually is. This talk really opens your mind and provides some great insights. Even if you still love OOP after watching this video, trust me it will help you understand the biology of OOP in a far better way than you think. And that's the irony of great talks. Object oriented programming is bad
I've also chosen this book to be part of my vacation/summer reading list, and I don't know how to put it, but I've even read the first 30 pages and feel like they've already started rewiring my brain in a positive way. It's incredible how smart people can push you to become a better thinker. "The three concepts of complexity" at the beginning resonated so much with me and the projects I've worked on during my career. The only thing slowing me down in reading this book is that the advice is so good, I spend time on every other page thinking about how to fix some of my programs. :D Philosophy of software design
This is great article with arguments to understand why in Apple/iOS words AI is just terrible and not even close what it is in Javascript world. How Apple’s Closed-Source Approach Is Losing Out to AI App Builders
When you start engineering and writing code, you're always hunting for best practices. When you don't know the answer to something, you ask questions like, “What is the best practice for doing X in Y?” But as you grow as an engineer especially if you love critical thinking you gradually learn that all those best practices you read about are just perspectives from one viewpoint. In reality, most of them may or may not be useful for your specific case, domain, or team. So, you should think for yourself. This article proves that point very well. Do best practices really matter?
Every one of us creates and writes hundreds of functions daily, but do we really think about how we can make them better? Maybe you and I are just doing it on autopilot, without thinking deeply. Even though the examples are in Lisp, I haven't read a better article that describes how to create high-quality, good, simple functions. The Function Design Recipe
Last week's thing of interest for all AI enthusiasts is Qwen3 Coder, which seems to be surprisingly good. Here's a good article about trying it out and analyzing it. Trying out Qwen3 Coder Flash using LM Studio and Open WebUI and LLM
There are a lot of programming books that are great to read, but there are also some that deserve anti-recommendations instead of praise. This article highlights one of the best books on the market even though the article itself is quite old, some books are just top-class timeless classics. Programming book recommendations and anti-recommendations