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Devlogs

Devlogs are a way for me to both record what I work on, but also dump things out of my brain so I can stop thinking about it.

Devlog: September 10, 2023Maybe just use a spreadsheet. September 10, 2023

Devlog: August 30, 2023Getting ready for some new blog content by updating my Blot theme. August 30, 2023

Devlog: August 23, 2023I submitted version 1.1 of ScreenCred for review this morning. It’s got a couple small updates: Shared with You! See ScreenCred links shared with August 23, 2023

Devlog: August 17, 2023I guess I’m working on ScreenCred. 2 things today. First I got Shared with You in a pretty good place. I was able to reuse my logic for parsing August 17, 2023

Devlog: August 16, 2023I spent the last couple of days trying to add Shared with You support. I followed a couple pretty straight forward guides: August 16, 2023

Devlog: August 8, 2023I’m spiraling out of control! In the past like 5 days I’ve started like 10 projects. To name a few: giving Neovim another shot, including starting August 8, 2023

ScreenCred: A RetrospectiveAs of July 24, 2023, ScreenCred is officially launched. I announced it on my Mastodon, Threads, and a Discord I belong to. I think at least four July 29, 2023

Devlog: July 22, 2023So it turns out it was a good thing I soft launched ScreenCred yesterday. I quickly found out that the App Clip did not work the way I wanted. When July 22, 2023

Devlog: July 21, 2023Sort of a big day. I decided to be not patient and soft launched ScreenCred! Don’t tell anyone yet 🤫. I wanted to make sure things like the App July 21, 2023

ScreenCred in App ReviewIt’s been a bit of a rollercoaster of few days. I submitted ScreenCred for review on Sunday. On Monday, it was rejected. I was expecting some sort July 19, 2023

Devlog: July 17, 2023I submitted ScreenCred for review yesterday. After listening to the latest ATP today, I’m expecting some rejections around my use of movie and show July 17, 2023

Devlog: July 13, 2023Needed some easy wins today. So I worked on adding some simple pages to screencred.app for support, press kit, and terms. Press kit still needs July 13, 2023

Devlog: July 11, 2023I knew I had seen. Feature in Swift strings that could automatically pluralize words depending on a value. Took me a while to find the actual thing July 11, 2023

Devlog: June 24, 2023As part of my efforts to improve accessibility in ScreenCred, I’ve been working at improving layouts for large Dynamic Type sizes. To help with June 24, 2023

Devlog: June 21, 2023Not sure what happened, but I was no longer able to access https://screencred.app. I’m hosting it on fly.io, and using Cloudflare in front of it. June 21, 2023

Devlog: June 15, 2023Quick report. Been going through ScreenCred with Voice Over and on an iPhone 13 mini simulator with Accessibility Extra Extra Extra Large Dynamic June 15, 2023

Devlog: June 15, 2023Worked on adding a tip jar to ScreenCred. I followed this YouTube tutorial which was pretty great. I went with the new nice round numbers $1.00, June 15, 2023

Devlog: June 13, 2023I’ve heard that friends don’t let friends ship an app without adding a request for reviews. So I added that. I followed two apple guides—the Human June 13, 2023

Devlog: June 11, 2023While at the beach yesterday, I had an idea for an interaction—a folded piece of paper. “A screen recording of a SwiftUI app showing a small piece June 11, 2023

Devlog: June 7, 2023Taking a little break from ScreenCred to work on a new idea. It’s summer break now and my daughter is home from school. My wife made a few jars with June 7, 2023

Devlog: May 31, 2023I worked on dark mode a bit today. I’ve written about it a bit before, but my eyes have a really hard with pure black dark modes with black May 31, 2023

Devlog: May 29, 2023So far in ScreenCred, you can only compare movies and shows. I wanted to add a missing category—people. I was already using TMDb’s multi search May 29, 2023

Devlog: May 28, 2023Been busy starting a new job this week, but I’ve also managed to get a couple things done in ScreenCred. This one was pretty straightforward, but I May 28, 2023

Devlog: May 11, 2023It’s apparently been a little bit since I’ve posted. My family and I have been sick for about the last 3 weeks straight. Has not been fun. Took me May 11, 2023

Devlog: April 27, 2023I decided to do the themes or color collections or whatever. I like this. Gets rid of a lot of the issues I had before. I started with the basic April 27, 2023

Devlog: April 20, 2023As part of the redesign, I wanted to add the ability to select an accent color. But I also got it in my mind to have a random option where the April 20, 2023

Devlog: April 8, 2023I decided to go full force into the redesign. I’d like to give credit to the inspiration for this design, but I can’t remember where I saw it. I April 8, 2023

Devlog: April 3, 2023I’m experimenting with a new style: Not sure if I’m going to stick with it or not. But I like it. I want my apps to feel a little more custom. I April 3, 2023

Devlog: March 28, 2023Mostly just screenshots today. I was working on making my suggested searches less boring. This is where I started: The alignment bothered me. Too March 28, 2023

Devlog: March 22, 2023Finally made myself work on ScreenCred! I’m trying to get things polished up to release someday “soon”—or at least a public TestFlight. So, crossing March 22, 2023

Devlog: March 14, 2023I switched the web portion of ScreenCred to Astro and hosted on fly.io. Using this post, I was able to put Cloudflare in front of it. We’ll see how March 14, 2023

Devlog: March 8, 2023I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve been working on the ScreenCred website. It’s pretty simple—homepage, privacy policy, changelog, etc. Oh. And I March 8, 2023

Devlog: March 3, 2023I’m starting on iPad support for ScreenCred. It may not be quite as difficult as I originally thought. It doesn’t look too bad out of the box, but March 3, 2023

Devlog: February 24, 2023Finally got a couple things done on ScreenCred. Fixed a couple bugs that were…bugging me. I updated the search sorting a bit. I was finding TMDb’s February 24, 2023

Devlog: February 22, 2023I’ve lost my groove. Been a busy week, so I haven’t been able to work on anything. I was going to work on things today, but then some urgent things February 22, 2023

Devlog: February 17, 2023Got too many things going on right now. Trying to do some redesigns to ScreenCred, but not feeling very inspired. So thought I’d switch to trying February 17, 2023

Devlog: February 14, 2023I woke up around 2am and couldn’t sleep. So decided to finish up some work on adding an App Clip to ScreenCred. Since the app is fairly limited in February 14, 2023

Devlog: February 11, 2023I went down the rabbit-hole. I got an idea in my head that I want my app to have a share feature. Send a link to a friend, and they can open it in February 11, 2023

Devlog: February 7, 2023Today was a bit of a chores day. I’m working on a Swift package to hold all the common extension, helpers, components etc. between my apps. Cleverly February 7, 2023

Devlog: February 3, 2023Today’s feature is sorting. Initially, I hardcoded it to sort by number of credits, most to least. Thought it might be nice to let you wort the February 3, 2023

Devlog: February 2, 2023My family has been sick for a bit, so I’ve been mostly working on taking care of them and trying to not get sick myself. Finally starting to get February 2, 2023

Devlog: January 25, 2023I’ll be brief because kids are crying and we need to eat dinner soon. I did a small revamp of history. I was storing each time a comparison ran, January 25, 2023

Devlog: January 24, 2023Went the ZStack route. Things seem to be working well now! I also added the poster images behind the thick material background. I think this gives January 24, 2023

Devlog: January 23, 2023Was kinda in a funk today. Took on a task that was maybe a bit beyond my energy level today. I’m trying to make the images shrink as you scroll up. January 23, 2023

Devlog: January 18, 2023I don’t know what got into me. Basically, I nerd sniped myself. I thought, “sure would be nice if I could get a notification if it looks like it’s January 18, 2023

Devlog: January 16, 2023Today I implemented history. Building off of my recent selections work, I created a new little model and store and save each comparison that is run. January 16, 2023

Devlog: January 12, 2023Two small features today. Sorting the credits by number of roles. So you see the person with the most credits at the top and the least at the January 12, 2023

Devlog: January 11, 2023I wrote a unit test. 😱 I wanted to test my algorithm for storing recent selections—make sure it limits to the correct number, reorders duplicates, January 11, 2023

Devlog: January 9, 2023I was having trouble figuring out Boutique. I had used it in a test project and had no issues getting the store initialized. But this time, I kept January 9, 2023

Devlog: January 5, 2023I did a little refactoring to get ready for the search results view to handle recent selections. I thought about using some fancy Environment January 5, 2023

Devlog: January 2, 2023Well, got myself in weird pickle yesterday. All I wanted to do was fix lilyandsam.show. It wasn’t showing all the recent episodes. I guess it was January 2, 2023

Devlog: December 29, 2022With the holidays, my routines have been all messed up. So it’s been over a week since I last worked on anything. Today I finally woke up December 29, 2022

Devlog: December 23, 2022Spent some time setting up my own Mastodon instance. Mostly just to try it out. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it going—managing a server I don’t really December 23, 2022

Devlog: December 21, 2022I was having trouble with one of my algorithms. I would make changes to objects in an array, but those changes would not stick. It took me a long December 21, 2022

Devlog: December 16, 2022Today I actually got to the UI. How exciting! I wanted to start with search, because I’ve never really done anything like that in SwiftUI before. I December 16, 2022

Devlog: December 15, 2022Was having a hard time with decoding some JSON. Was banging my head for like 30 mins. Turns out, I was simply trying to decode it as the wrong December 15, 2022

Devlog: December 12, 2022I’m already stretching the limits of my Swift knowledge. I’m looking at the multi search endpoint. It can return a Movie, TV Show, or Person, all December 12, 2022

Devlog: December 8, 2022Okay. I think I figured out what I’m going to work on. I’m going to make an app that will let me find common cast and crew between two movies or December 8, 2022

Devlog: Dec 5, 2022I’m still spinning my wheels. Haven’t settled on a project I want to dig into yet. So nothing that exciting going on. I toyed around with maybe December 5, 2022

Devlog: Dec 1, 2022Been doing these devlogs for a month now. So far, I’m liking it! Did a little work on my different version of Lightbulbs—focusing on the prompts December 1, 2022

Devlog: Nov 30, 2022Dealing with some self-imposed scope creep. I’ve got it in my head that I want my app to have multiple themes. And I’m not just talking dark/light November 30, 2022

Devlog: Nov 17, 2022Just been working on some small polish things. Like real small things—make sure the buttons have the right color. So I over-engineered it! I always November 17, 2022

Devlog: Nov 16, 2022I’m still procrastinating and thinking about stuff. So I decided to tinker with a couple things I’ve never done. I was playing around with Federico November 16, 2022

Devlog: Nov 15, 2022I started off with some general puttering around. Still deciding what direction I want to take things. I decided I might like to have a package to November 15, 2022

Devlog: Nov 14, 2022I meant to work on Lightbulbs today, but then I started having an existential crisis of sorts. I’ve long struggled with working on projects in a November 14, 2022

Devlog: Nov 10, 2022Lightbulbs is intended to be an app for collecting ideas. But I think I got too caught up on implementing the UI that it’s headed towards becoming a November 10, 2022

Devlog: Nov 7, 2022So I’ve got a bug. You select a collection and then add a new idea. Problem is, new idea does not show up. And I have no idea why. The value November 7, 2022

Devlog: Nov 3, 2022Did two things on Lightbulbs today. Added a simple empty state to collections. Tap the button to add a new idea. Easy! Recording of empty state The November 3, 2022

Devlog: Nov 2, 2022Spent some time making my Blot blog look more like my current blog. I think it turned out nicely. I couldn’t get the Blot local environment running, November 2, 2022

Devlog: Nov 1, 2022Taking a little break from dev work. Should get back to it tomorrow though. Today, I decided to take a look at Blot. My current website is pretty November 1, 2022

More Devlogs →

Everything Else

Review of Amazon Basics 3 Hole Punch, Semi-Adjustable, 30 Sheet Capacity, BlackFor reasons I don’t want to get into now, I need a 3 hole punch for A5 sized paper. The Amazon Basics 3 Hole Punch, Semi-Adjustable, 30 Sheet August 24, 2023

Working SlowlyI was watching a video from Shawn Hickman about his first week of being full-time indie. He said that he likes to take his time and work slowly, and August 19, 2023

Why I Like iOS DevelopmentI realized the other day why I think I like iOS development so much. It cuts down on the number of decisions I have to make. For me, that’s huge. August 9, 2023

A Disappointing TrainingA few weeks ago, I went out of my comfort zone and volunteered to do a training at work. Historically, I don’t do well talking to groups. I’m much August 2, 2023

I’m Not Ready for visionOS and Spatial ComputingvisionOS and the idea of spatial computing are pretty exciting. But as a mostly hobbyist iOS developer, I’m already a bit exhausted thinking about a June 12, 2023

I Tried AlpineAs part of my little Frosthaven calculator, I gave Alpine.js a try. I think I like it. If you look at the PR for the switch, you can see that using June 6, 2023

PicoCSSI’ve been using PicoCSS on a couple small projects. I (mostly) really like it! Easy to add to a project. Makes things look nice out of the box, June 5, 2023

Is Vanilla JavaScript Better?The other day, I made a little calculator for my brother’s Frosthaven group. To make it simple, I just did an index.html with some pure, vanilla June 5, 2023

Do NothingI’m currently at the end of a break between jobs. I took one week off. I had grand schemes of working on my app, maybe starting some other new May 21, 2023

I Think I Regret Buying the Studio DisplayWhen rumors of the Studio Display started coming out, I started saving money to buy one just in case. When it was announced in 2022, I immediately May 16, 2023

The Millionaire Fastlane, by Mj DeMarcoI saw this book recommended on YouTube and for whatever reason, I thought I would read it before I watched the video. While this book was rambling April 3, 2023

Re: You’re Not LazySomeone shared this video on Mastodon the other day. It really got me thinking. Basically, I’m trying to figure out if I’m working with or against April 2, 2023

Year of Discipline Update—FinancesAt the start of 2023, my wife and I had been feeling a bit stressed about money. We knew we should have plenty, but it always kinda felt like the April 1, 2023

Year of Discipline Update—Writing and DevelopmentI haven’t finished writing the book I started for my daughter. Still need to do that… But, I’ve been writing for my blog pretty regularly. Mostly March 31, 2023

Year of Discipline Update—Health and FitnessOne of the big areas I wanted to focus on in 2023 was my health and fitness. So far, I have mainly focused on running and losing some weight. My March 30, 2023

DrainedI feel drained. It’s been difficult to get myself to work on ScreenCred and other projects. It’s a combination of all sorts of things—poor sleep, March 21, 2023

Pocket SnacksI’ve been putting a little notebook in my shirt pocket lately. I like having something around that I can take notes, write out tasks, etc. without March 13, 2023

Creating a File From RaycastI was procrastinating today, so I made a bash script. I had been using Espanso to make creating my develogs a bit easier with some text replacement. March 3, 2023

Push Notifications With GoI had never sent a push notification in my life. I wanted to try it out. Writing my server in Go, I used the sideshow/apns2 library. Being a Go January 18, 2023

Using WeatherKit in GoI haven’t had a chance to use WeatherKit yet, and I’ve barely used Go. So for some reason I decided to give both a go at the same time. WeatherKit January 18, 2023

Is CloudKit Good for the Ecosystem?I use Day One for journaling. The other day I was checking about another journaling app made by an indie dev. It looks nicer, feels faster, and has January 6, 2023

Why Do We Scroll to the Top?I’ve been trying a lot of Mastodon apps lately and I’ve tried a few Twitter apps in the past. For the ones I’ve tried, they all have one thing in January 3, 2023

2023 and the Year of DisciplineI thought I knew what I was going to be writing about here, then I started looking back through my previous yearly themes and whoops, sorry 2022. January 1, 2023

Vacation RoutinesLast week was Thanksgiving and I took some time off. My family went to a beach house for the week. I brought my journal, my laptop, and running November 28, 2022

What Can Replace Twitter for Me?With everything going on with Twitter, I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do. I’ve been thinking about what I get from Twitter. I mostly November 10, 2022

Finding What SticksI think one of the most common posts on my blog is about switching to a new blog system. Ghost to Jekyll and GitHub pages to Nuxt on Netlify to 11ty November 2, 2022

Some Thoughts on EditorsI’ve been messing around with my workflow and trying different code editors. I know IntelliJ kinda has a bad rap and often feels slow compared the July 10, 2022

Giving up on Notes AppsOver the years, I think I’ve tried pretty much every note taking app there is. I’ve tried using Apple Notes, Evernote, GoodNotes, Notability, Bear, June 30, 2022

Re: Demo to Demo LoopI really enjoyed this post from Dave Rupert. I like what Dave said: Demos improve meetings. I’ve found “Demo First” meetings are life-giving June 23, 2022

Changing the Direction of a SwiftUI Color GradientSwiftUI added a pretty cool new property to Color to easily create subtle gradients. Now, all colors, even custom colors, come with a standard June 22, 2022

Wwdc 2022 WishlistHere’s some things I’m hoping for this year at WWDC: Multiple user support in iPadOS. Password sharing. My wife and I share passwords for various June 2, 2022

My Supposed Dream JobI think that my dream job would be an indie developer. But I’m not sure. I wish I could try it. I don’t have enough money saved up to just quit my May 18, 2022

Re: RssChris Coyier blogged about RSS. Talking about how RSS can be social, he wrote: How is all this social? It’s just slow social. If you want to May 3, 2022

Go One Level DeeperWhen I was in college, I was a teaching assistant in a computer science class. A lot of our job was helping students read errors. “Your program May 3, 2022

My New Favorite FontThe YouTube algorithm got me today and suggested a video about a font called Comic Code by Toshi Omagari. I was immediately intrigued. As I was just April 27, 2022

Turning It Off and on AgainMy AirPods weren’t charging beyond 72% for some reason. So I factory reset them, and now they are charging again. It’s comical how often the answer April 8, 2022

Living SoftwareAs I’ve been working through my thoughts on creating apps and software, I’ve realized that software is pretty unique. Most software feels so fluid March 29, 2022

Trying to Find Balance in Side ProjectsI just removed my two iOS apps from sale on the App Store. I hadn’t updated either of them in over a year. It felt bad having them hanging out March 28, 2022

How I JournalI recently hit a 365 day streak in Day One. I’ve never been very good at keep a journal, so it felt pretty good! I found a couple things that helped March 21, 2022

Bookmarks in ObsidianFor a while, I tried to utilize Twitter’s bookmark feature to save interesting links, helpful tidbits, and whatnot. I quickly realized that it was March 11, 2022

Finishing What We StartI was listening to a podcast this morning and they talked briefly about how so many of us start way more projects than we finish. It got me March 2, 2022

Adventures With Templater for ObsidianI’ve been experimenting more with how I can handle managing my small side projects in Obsidian. More on that another time, but one piece I wanted February 24, 2022

My Photography WorkflowI’m a casual photographer; hobbyist at best. A little over a year ago, in preparation for our second daughter arriving, I got a Sony A7C. I wanted a February 20, 2022

An Itch to BlogFor whatever reason, about once a year, I get an itch to blog. I’m feeling it now. Maybe it’s because there’s more light in the day and I feel like February 18, 2022

This Is My First Micropub PostI’m sure there are lots of bugs I need to work out February 13, 2022

Father’s DayI love being a dad. I even like being a dad most of the time. After 4 years though, I sometimes still wonder what in the world I have gotten myself June 20, 2021

Fresh StartsWith years, months, weeks, days, our calendar continually gives us chances to reset, restart, adjust, or whatever else we need to do. As silly as it June 11, 2021

Shut Your Brain DownLast night, I finished building the new LEGO World Map set. With over 11,000 pieces, it took me around 12 hours to complete. Some of that time was June 7, 2021

Thoughts on Steal Like an ArtistI have long believed that I have never and will never come up with an original idea. Nothing is truly original. Every ideas has been had before. In May 28, 2021

The GridWhen I need to get down to business and get some serious programming done, I put on the TRON: Legacy soundtrack. That is all. Thank you for coming February 9, 2021

The Year of Momentum and the Season of SurvivalLike I said in Wrapping Up the Year of Groundwork, after 2020, I don’t feel like I have much gas left in the tank. That’s why I’ve decided to make January 4, 2021

Wrapping up the Year of Groundwork2020 has been a hard year for everyone. But I have been very fortunate. I was already working from home, my company does well in good and bad January 4, 2021

Digital Minimalism, by Cal NewportUsing my phone less has been on my mind for quite a while now. For no good reason, I’m 100% addicted to Twitter. I always have my phone on me, just December 14, 2020

Farewell, MorningsI like routines and planning. Routines is one of my ways of managing anxiety and stress. I like to feel like I know what’s going on and what’s December 8, 2020

Steve Jobs, by Walter IssacsonOverall, I liked this book. I give it a thumbs up 👍🏻. I can’t remember when I really became aware of Steve Jobs. I was aware of Apple growing up, July 4, 2020

Focuses RoadmapI had to cut myself off on adding new features to Focuses pretty early on. If I let myself keep going, I probably never would’ve released. Here’s a March 26, 2020

Using SwiftUI for FocusesI think I mentioned it briefly, but Focuses is built mostly with SwiftUI. Overall, I’m very impressed with SwiftUI. I don’t think I would’ve been March 25, 2020

Focuses by the NumbersHere are a few numbers related to making Focuses that may or may not be interesting. This is the first project I have time tracked. The first commit March 24, 2020

Introducing FocusesFocuses is my take on goal and habit tracking. It is inspired by Myke Hurley’s daily themes and Marshall Goldsmith’s daily active questions. The March 23, 2020

Podcasting With a ToddlerFor about the last year and a half, my daughter and I have made a podcast. My daughter is currently a toddler. It’s not always easy to produce a September 11, 2019

Am I Becoming a Better Developer?”I’ve been working full-time as a software developer for almost 2 years now. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve messed a bunch of stuff up too. The question January 17, 2019

Prefers-Color-Scheme Media QueryWith Safari Technology Preview 68, there is a new media query, prefers-color-scheme. I’ve used it on this site like the following: Digging around in October 25, 2018

Thoughts on Writing Good CodeAt ng-conf, John Papa gave a talk on writing readable code. You can watch the video here. I recommend it. Writing clean, readable code seems like an May 24, 2018

Angular Template ReferencesA template reference (I’ll call it a template ref) is basically a tag you put on an element in your template so that you can easily reference that May 3, 2018

Ng-Conf 2018Last week, I was able to attend ng-conf in Salt Lake City, UT. ng-conf is a conference dedicated to Angular, and this was their fifth year. I’ve had April 24, 2018

Moving My Blog to GitHub PagesMy blog has moved around a lot. Most recently (and only for a couple months), I was using a self-hosted Ghost instance on DigitalOcean. As much as I October 28, 2017

Making Send to NowhereFor me, making Send To Nowhere was a fun process. I like making things. Send To Nowhere was a dumb and simple enough idea to experiment with some April 19, 2017

Css Variables?I just found out, I think two days ago, that CSS has native “variables”. I discovered this while looking through some generated code from Zeplin. July 28, 2016

Hello, World! July 23, 2016

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Picture of Sam Warnick

As my daughter says, I'm just a tired dad, with a tired name, Sam Warnick. I'm a software developer in Beaufort, SC.

Some things I do