This Week in Swift  August 3rd 2015

Genericizing Code

I LOVE these simple guidelines from @ericasadun on when to use protocols and generics in your Swift code. One big thing here is to do it as the need comes up vs over-genericizing your code right away just because it's the cool thing to do (remember YAGNI!).

My personal favorite tip (maybe because I keep forgetting this with Swift) has to do with conforming at the highest possible level:

"When adding protocol conformance and default implementations, do so at the highest possible abstraction that still makes sense. Instead of adding separate adoptions for, for example, Int and String, check whether there is a unifying concept that can be introduced at a common protocol they both already adopt."

Defeating the Anti-Pattern Bully 💥 Singletons

I posted @allonsykraken's initial blog post on Singletons - The Right Way to Write a Singleton - when it came out, and some of the feedback was very similar to @ashfurrow's reaction: "I was expecting an empty page with NO in giant letters".

While that's funny, and of course Singletons are an anti-pattern that shouldn't be over-used, unfortunately, the Cocoa framework itself suggests we use Singletons for some things - as in the case of expensive NSFormatters. This post covers when it's ok / necessary to use a singleton and how to refactor your code to NOT use common singletons we think we can't live without. A great balance!