There have been a few blogs recently about people finding their true vocation and discovering that it’s not developing software. This is not a “me too” post. I do still develop software for a living and I don’t intend becoming a writer or anything else any time soon. But like most people (I assume) my career has taken turns that I never would have imagined when I started out.

In fact when I was at school I took quite some time trying very hard not to be a software developer for a living. I took geography rather than the rather more obvious (if you know me) chemistry because I wanted to be a pilot. I was so determined to keep programming computers as a hobby that I almost took woodwork instead of computer studies when I was fourteen.

Yet another long gap between entries to PhotoFriday, but when I saw that the theme was “Structures” I immediately thought about, first, the Sagrada Família. But I didn’t have any pictures of the outside that I liked so second thought was the Oslo Opera House. I think this picture of the inside shows the structures better than any image of the outside.

Since I wrote about iTunes Match nearly eighteen months ago I thought it was worth revisiting and seeing how things have changed in that time.

Oddly, the short answer is “not very much.”

The problems that I identified last year are still very much present. Indeed there are some new examples. This is my favourite: when listening to “Man Machine” by Kraftwerk, iTunes Match seems to have decided that track four, which should be “The Model,” is really “Wouldn’t it be nice” by the Beach Boys. I don’t even own a copy of “Wouldn’t it be nice.”

I went to the north of Spain twice in the early nineties and visited Barcelona for a day each time. I only remember bits and pieces — walking down the Ramblas and how weird the Gaudi cathedral was — and can’t find any pictures from either trip, so it made sense to make it the first city break of 2013 and the first time we’ve done something like this since the birth of Junior¹

It’s been a while since I’ve entered the PhotoFriday challenge, but I liked this weeks theme — “Body of Water” — and thought I had a good image for it. This was taken a couple of years ago in Lake Tahoe, California.

I recently moved a code base from using AQGridView — a third party library — to UICollectionView. I have nothing against third party components but I’m a big fan of minimising dependencies and reducing the amount of code that need to be understood. In this case I managed to remove about 5000 lines of code from the project. Switching to the UIKit version made sense on both counts.

Both components do more or less the same thing and their APIs fortunately look pretty similar. (UICollectionView can be coerced into doing a lot more but we just need it for a simple grid.) Most of the changes are just renaming methods; I was surprised how little new code needed to be written.

This week I did a presentation at the London iPhone Developer Group meeting. Given my experience with using lots of APIs, I thought it might be a good, if dry, topic. I tried to spice it up by complaining about lots of them and trying to condense that negativity into some useful lessons to take away.

Most of the other discussions of this subject that I’ve seen focus on designing libraries but I thought the same lessons could be applied to all kinds of interfaces, from Objective C libraries to REST API’s for connecting to web services. (I don’t mean to suggest that the focus of the two articles I link to is wrong. They’re both very much worth reading.)

I found this while (mis)typing the caption to yesterdays photo competition. Is it any wonder that those meerkats have to keep telling the world about their website to avoid confusion with a comparison shopping site? Even the Mac’s spell checker gets it wrong.