CocoaHeads is a great thing. Once a month our local community gathers together to talk about Apple Development, be geeks, and even talk about the latest movies. I like to imagine it as mini-WWDCs happening once a month, all over the world. That was the one flaw though, I’d like to visit all the CocoaHeads and see what they are talking about too. I noticed a few other groups had recorded their meetings, so I started recording our sessions hoping that more groups would do the same.
It hasn’t happened yet – most groups don’t record their sessions. What if there was a site that aggregated videos from all CocoaHeads groups? Would creating a place specifically for CocoaHeads videos help?
I think it’s worth exploring, so a couple weeks ago I launched CocoaHeads TV. Right now we have videos from Australia, China, France, and the United States.
A few months ago I spent a weekend and built a small app for the show my friend and I do every week, The Bad Movie Podcast. Then I sat on it for several months, only tweaking it occasionally. Deep down I thought there was no way Apple would approve it due to the nature of the show. Thankfully, a few people informed me that I was silly and should “Roll the Dice”.
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I had the honor of being interviewed by ObjectiveSee which is a great site featuring Interviews with Apple iOS and Mac developers.
I really like what Justin Watt is doing with that site and it really is cool to be listed with the other developers there.
Some of the other cool interviews to check out are (to name just a few, because they are all good): Josh Abernathy, Loren Brichter, Mike Rundle, and Sam Soffes.
This weekend I traveled up to Washington D.C. to attend iOSDevCampDC - a one day, single track, conference for iOS developers. I was also able to meet a few people in the D.C. Cocoa community. I had a great time and came away with a few notes to highlight.
The Conference The organizers did a great job putting the conference together, supplying food, and even swag. The conference shirt might even be one of my new favorite shirts.
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Last year I wrote a post about how I was going to work without a clock. This was completely inspired by Cocoa developer Zach Waugh who wrote about the same topic. As part of this post, he also talked about his small Mac app called Clock.app which is an open source project. Since you sometimes need to know the time, the app provides a quick way to get the time using Alfred or Quicksilver to launch this simple app.
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Episode 61 of iDeveloper podcast has guest star Danny Greg from Github. Aside from reavealing he didn’t know who James Earl Jones was, he discussed how Github gets work done.
He mentioned that their whole environment is built on being asynchronous. Meaning that everything is driven off of web-based communications and no meetings. They also have no deadlines, and focus on shipping. They ship like crazy. The Mac app is shipped several times a week and the web app is deployed much much more.
My take away was that I really want to get our continuous integration server up and running. Maybe even attempt to use hubot like Github does. Being able to say hubot deploy [project] seems pretty awesome. I don’t know how to implement an async environment when doing client work, so I think focusing on automating as much as possible is a good start.
This is a new reusable metal filter. Supposedly lets more of the tasty coffee oils through. Looks really cool, I’ve already backed it.
I’m really excited about getting this filter. I don’t think I can taste the paper, but I really do like the aspect of not having to keep replacing paper filters.
I’m still really happy with the Aeropress. If you haven’t gotten one yet, one of the kickstarter backing plans will send you a new Aeropress with the metal filter.
This month at Triangle CocoaHeads in Durham, I stepped away from being just the organizer and did a talk on automated acceptance testing with Calabash. This is a topic I’m really excited to learn more about and am constantly trying to become a better tester.
I first learned about Calabash when seeing a video of one of the blitz talks from NSConference about it. I started using it on one project and it seemed to do a nice job.
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This week at NSCoder Night, another developer was trying to statically link the MySQL library. He had initially linked it as a dynamic library and couldn’t seem to get it working with Xcode. After working with it for a little while I figured out what needed to happen; and it wasn’t clear. Here I’ll discuss what process I went through to track down the problem and what tools I used.
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This weekend I was a speaker and attendee at CocoaConf; a 2-day conference series for Mac and iOS developers. It was a small conference that left time for people to actually meet each other and had many great sessions from great developers. Here I’ll review the conference, a selection of my favorite sessions, and a post-mortem of my sessions.
The Conference After having been to Autodesk University a couple years and then WWDC this year, it is refreshing to go to a conference where you can actually talk to every attendee.
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