Don't follow the sheep

As fixated as Amazon is on shipping times or Google on its search results, there exists a market of people that most people don't talk about: Developers! Developers! Developers! - Developers, developers, developers...

When most people think of tech products, they'll bring up watches, laptops, phones, and the like. To most people in the external world, these products keep companies afloat. When it comes to software however it becomes a different story. 

All the apps on the App Store or programs on Windows are made by developers. Developers, like other primates, only have a limited amount of time and skill which dictates how much work can be accomplished. Crazy I know. Thankfully, Apple, Microsoft, and friends can give it back in exchange for a developer's soul. Such companies host annual developer's conferences where they pitch to shareholders, "look how well we're doing," and to developers, "look how cool out platform is," through their software stack to make software. Should a developer decide to develop for a given platform, they bolt themselves to the tools that company has to offer, making it a one way street. Some companies make it easier to switch but not really. This picture features Craig Federighi, head of software at Apple.

Apple's tools for app development take the shape of XCode and one of two UI frameworks. Because Sal is built in Swift, I faced a critical choice for the UI framework: UIKit or SwiftUI. UIKit has been the default since 2007, maintaining its historical precedent as the framework for iOS apps. SwiftUI, on other hand, was released in 2019, and brings one UI framework to all of Apple's products. By embracing a declarative paradigm, SwiftUI code reads easily compared to the imperative counterparts from UIKit. Application state is handled in a more automatic way making code more minimal as well. 

Designing the App in SwiftUI has been a real treat. At this point the application has become quite large, yet at the same time, easy to iterate and improve upon. It is almost to the point has been almost too easy. Instead of leveraging Figma for app mockups, I've found myself going straight to code because it ends up saving time. SwiftUI is that cool. 

With all this convenience, I'm worried I'm becoming a sheep and locked in to Apple's ecosystem. Oh well. Its still cool.