Pietro Rea's Blog
VS Code Insiders & Settings Sync
30 March, 2020Like many developers, I often do my work on multiple machines. While I do not own a day phone and a night phone, I do have three Macs that I could get work on: an iMac that I share with the family, a personal laptop and a work laptop. This is usually not a problem when it comes…
Try out NetNewsWire 5
24 March, 2020I’m currently on paternity leave for our second child. At the same time, the world is going through an unprecedented global pandemic, which requires everyone to practice social distancing. That means lots of time at home. Between bursts of child care I sometimes have some…
My favorite bug of 2018
10 December, 2018The last days of 2018 are upon us! It’s a time for introspection, new resolutions and bugs. Someone reported a curious bug in an iOS date picker that I help maintain. When selecting one of the last days of 2018, the date picker would incorrectly think the date was in 2019. For…
New Blogging Platform: Gatsby.js
31 May, 2018You know you’re a developer when you’ve spent more time moving your blog from platform to platform instead of actually writing blog posts. Until recently, this blog was hosted on Squarespace, which I still recommend to anyone who wants to host a website with minimum hassle. In…
99 [r]eddits v2.8.3 is now available
28 November, 2017For the past month, I’ve been working on an updated version of 99 reddits for iOS with Aman. 99 reddits is a lightweight Reddit client that lets you quickly explore images and (some) animated GIFs from any subreddit. 99 reddits was first launched back in 2012. Up to this point…
Radar: UIToolBar pinned to bottom of the safe area broken on iPhone X
18 November, 2017Update 2017-12-04: “Engineering has determined that your bug report (35633289) is a duplicate of 34404165 and will be closed.” For the 99 reddits app, I updated the UI to respect the “safe area” in iOS 11. One of the view controllers made use of a UIToolBar, which doesn’t look…
Core Data by Tutorials (Fourth Edition) Now Available
12 October, 2017I’m happy to announce that there’s a new edition of Core Data by Tutorials available today, fully updated for iOS 11, Swift 4 and Xcode 9. How time flies! I still remember working on the original version of the book back in 2013 and it doesn’t seem that long ago. That’s the same…
“No Man Is an Island” or “Building Complex Systems at Sweetpea”
19 August, 2016One of the first things I noticed after striking out on my own is how much my old employer did on my behalf. I’m not talking about the obvious things like pay and benefits. Instead, I’m talking about the (sometimes invisible) support structure in mid-size to large companies…
Starting a New Journey
25 July, 2016Two months ago I left my full time software engineering job at Quidsi/Amazon to move to Washington D.C. This move was primarily a personal decision to be closer to family. At the same time, I also wanted the opportunity to focus full-time on software development consulting. I…
Tools of the Trade for iOS Development
08 November, 2015During the past few years of doing mobile development I’ve found a number of tools that have saved me time and frustration. This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the tools out there, but rather the small set that I’ve found helpful. They are also not all limited to iOS…
Core Data by Tutorials updated for Xcode 6.1
31 October, 2014We’ve updated Core Data by Tutorials for Xcode 6.1. The update includes a number of small Swift changes and some fixes for errata that readers pointed out. Here’s the official announcement. If you played with Swift while it was still in beta, you probably realized that your…
Core Data by Tutorials Now Available
16 October, 2014Good news — Core Data by Tutorials launched yesterday in PDF format. The book is written in Swift and it covers everything from the fundamentals up to the new iOS 8 APIs. The whole process was a great team effort and I’m very happy that it’s finally out in the world. Personally I…
WWDC 2014: A Strategy of Great Work
25 July, 2014I just finished watching a WWDC talk titled A Strategy of Great Work. It’s a beautiful talk by Ken Kocienda, a software engineer who’s worked at Apple for more than a decade.. He goes through 8 stories and 11 lessons that he learned during his tenure at Apple. The last lesson is…