I've made some good progress with Python this week, and made a few more adjustments to my workflow.

Here's what I've been up to:

This week I've been doing a lot of fiddly work, as we've had some other stuff going on around the house. This kind of work is easier to pick and put down when reacting to what's happening during the day, as it doesn't require as much focus as regular work. And it's stuff that I wanted to get done to improve my setup and process for proper development work.

2020 review.

Highlights of 2021

A few months ago I released a new app called Hello Meds. It's a medication tracker for iOS. I drafted this post when the app was in beta but never got around to finishing it up, so here's a quick intro to why I built Hello Meds.

There are plenty of medication tracking apps available for iOS already, but most of them are based around the idea of taking the same medication, at the same dose, at the same times every day. While this is obviously a common use-case, my needs are different. My medication dosages and timings change often, depending on other variables in my life. Hello Meds is designed around this use-case in particular, where you want to keep track of the medications and dosages you take, but don't want or need to adhere to a pre-set schedule.

2019 review.

Highlights of 2020

It's a bit late, but I'm settled into my planner setup for 2020, so I thought I'd share what I've picked this year.

This is my first Jibun Techo-free year since 2017 and I miss it! I picked a Hobonichi Cousin Avec, which has very similar weekly pages, but next year I'll switch back to the Jibun. I've used the Cousin for logging meals, workouts, medications, health symptoms, events, and small notes about my day. For the first half of the year I used the daily pages to stick in photos and ephemera, but the book got really fat by the end of June (as my Jibun usually does, too). The Cousin Avec comes in two books, one for each half of the year, so when I switched to the second book in July I stopped sticking stuff into the daily pages. I'm using some of the daily pages for journalling, but some pages will end up empty and I'm okay with that.

I'm obsessed with

Mike Lowery's drawings. Poring over Mike's drawings recently encouraged me to draw on paper again, after exclusively drawing on my iPad Pro for the last few months.

I'm obsessed with

Austin Kleon's blog again. Once or twice every year I go through a phase of reading through his archives and immersing myself in his ideas. I may even re-read his books this time around, too.

I'm obsessed with

Planners! I've got a Hobonichi Cousin Avec this year, which is split into two books, one for each half of the year. I only have a month to go before it's time to swap them out, so I'm spending lots of time thinking about how I might want to change things up for the second half of the year.

I'm obsessed with

My health. I've been doing telehealth calls with my doctor recently to figure out some bothersome-but-not-serious issues I noticed around the start of lockdown. It's a nice bonus that telehealth calls are all bulk billed, since I've had a few follow ups.

I'm obsessed with

Workouts! I've finally started to get back into going to the gym consistently after a lot of disruption to the start of the year. I've started using the GZCL method for my lifting program, and I'm really enjoying having a bit more structure to my weights routine.

I was struggling with something recently in SwiftUI and thought I'd share the solution I came up with. Here's a simple example to demonstrate what I was stuck on:

struct ContentView: View {
  var tasks: [Task]

  var body: some View {
    List(self.tasks) { task in
      TaskView(task: task)
    }
  }
}

Over time I've developed a list of open-source iOS libraries that I use in almost all my projects. These are my favourite, go-to libraries:

TableKit

I'm obsessed with

Social events! Early in the month I decided to double down on my goal of getting more social in 2020 and threw myself into a bunch of new social events and activities. The upsides were that I got a lot more exercise from being out and about more, which helped me sleep better, and I also found that string a lot of events together without big gaps in-between helped me capitalise on the buzz of each one to be more confident going into the next. On the other hand, it quickly became exhausting, and I felt like I had no big blocks of time to focus on work, or housework, or anything else. Swings and roundabouts, I guess.

My review's a bit late this month—oops! I'm also experimenting with a different format since there's very little to my reviews normally. So let's start with a few things I've been into lately:

I'm obsessed with

I've been thinking a lot lately about how personal values, interests, and hobbies often clash. Pick any value or interest you have and you'll probably find a group of people talking about it online. For most of my own average, mainstream, privileged interests, there are people on every social media platform talking about them, teaching others what they know, even trying to make money from others with the same interests.

2018 review.

(Side note: every year as soon as I publish my annual review, I start a new Markdown file for my review of the next year. Throughout the year I add achievements, details about goals I've accomplished, and favourite media, so getting the review ready to publish is much easier. I definitely recommend this approach!)

I tried writing a couple of updates for my blog as I worked on my 2019 learning project, but once I'd written them they didn't seem worth sharing; there just wasn't a lot worth saying about the process. Now that I'm done, I wanted to share a few thoughts on how it went.

But first, a quick recap:

Two years ago I learned Swift during the holiday break across Christmas and New Year's. I'd dabbled in Swift but had never really got my head around it (previously I'd taught myself Objective-C as my first ever programming language, and that was all I knew). I read Apple's official Swift book and a bunch of other books and articles, and finally it all seemed to click. I started writing some new code in Swift during that holiday period, and once I got back to work I started incorporating Swift into my work more and more. These days my main iOS project has evolved from 100% Objective-C to 60% Swift, and all new code I write is in Swift.