2024 has literally flown by. Months spent on training and the practical application of newly acquired knowledge.
Skip.tools
It is the solution for iOS developers in situations that require producing applications for Android as well.
Thanks to a framework and a few initial setup steps on your Mac, your Xcode application is simultaneously translated into Kotlin, making development and testing (almost) instantaneous: I can launch an Android emulator and see my app (natively written in Swift) running on both Android and iOS.
To learn more: https://skip.tools
SwiftUI
I lived through the era of Objective-C and .Xib file-based UI design. After that phase—which, with its manual memory allocation, was reminiscent of 1990s C—I more than happily embraced Swift and its Storyboards. I followed SwiftUI without much enthusiasm at first, because visual (and imperative) programming seemed more immediate.
That is not the case: SwiftUI is a framework that redefines the approach to application UI, featuring methods that encapsulate and simplify interface creation and resource management.
Anyone who developed in the Apple ecosystem prior to 2019 knows just how much boilerplate code was required for tables, controllers, and views in general. SwiftUI streamlines development and reduces code volume, while offering superior portability compared to the old Auto Layout system.
Swift Evolution (6.0 and beyond)
How many sleepless nights were spent debugging and wrestling with nightmares over asynchronous code riddled with closures and delegates? The arrival of async/await and frameworks like Combine—with its Publishers and Subscribers—has made code much easier to understand, especially when dealing with nested closures.
Welcome, AI
“If you can’t beat them, join them”—that’s what people used to say about the stronger party... but today, I prefer a mantra we should all repeat to ourselves every morning.
“AI won't take your job,
but a designer who knows how to use AI to do work like yours”
I’ve studied the algorithms and tested a wide range of platforms as a user—quickly building landing pages, dashboards connected to Firebase or Supabase (or, worse, databases built directly into the no-code platform), and even cross-platform apps, complete with images and video. I’ve also followed various tutorials, including those where enthusiastic young creators—with almost no technical background—show you how to write code on a site, feed it into another portal to turn it into an app, and use yet another service to guide you through the publishing process.
I have thoroughly explored every aspect of this area—specifically regarding APIs and libraries that are not always readily available—just as a developer wishing to implement these resources in their projects would need to do.
There are two aspects to consider when enthusiastically embracing certain seemingly cheap offers:
- The platform that enables you to create is a service that requires an active subscription to use; if that service disappears, the code—which you cannot always download or truly own—won't be of much use to you, given that you don't know how to program.
- In 90% of cases, a platform that uses AI to provide services is essentially a storefront relying on major AI models (ChatGPT, Claude & Sonnet, Cursor, Gemini, DeepSeek, and a few others) that "resells" results to you while simplifying the prompt-building process.
Indeed, prompts... this is the most profitable activity I’ve delved into: knowing how to make requests of an AI is similar to managing a team and delegating tasks. If you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, you’ll know how to ask for it in the most effective and efficient way. That is what drives the results.
2025 will be an important year, because we are revisiting the community project that looks to the future of our cities: “DistrictHub, the citizenry becomes active again“
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