I’ve been talking with folks on a Slack about refactoring today, and I thought I’d put some of my thoughts here. Maybe a little less polished than I’d like, but I wanted to get them out of my head and down on “paper.”

Pedro Piñera makes some important points in his article In a world…. There are a number of things in there, and you should go read it, but I want to focus on one part, which is the observation that the core “iOS speaker circle” is a fairly small group of people. Pedro notes:

There’s a huge difference when you compare a talk from someone that has been working a lot on the topic and from someone that studied the topic for giving a talk. Why do people do it then? Talks with a lot of value usually come from unknown people. From these people that from the anonymity worked on a topic and they achieved something that they were willing to share. … People don’t care about the company that person had worked for, or the newsletter that the person had written, but instead, what that person wants to share.

While I agree with Pedro’s concern, I disagree that this is the proper ideal.

I’m on my way back from try! Swift, which was fantastic. Of course it had those obvious things I’d hope for. Interesting talks, friendly people. Making new friends, and reuniting with old ones. But it also had some surprising delights and lessons.

I travel pretty well, but sometimes I make mistakes, and this was one of those times. The deodorant I thought I’d packed turned out to be body wash. Now there are a dozen reason that this shouldn’t really matter, and wouldn’t really matter given the A/C and the weather, etc., but I’m a product of my culture, and it was a bit stressful. I tried to find a drug store on the way to the conference, but I was afraid of being late and finally resigned myself to accepting things as they are and moving on.

And then, in the conference rest room, I discovered a small cache of toiletries under a try! Swift sign saying “if you need one, please take one.” I was dumbfounded. It was a very small kindness, but it mattered to me.

As a speaker, writer, and member of our community, Daniel Steinberg is my inspiration. That’s not a secret. If you and I have spent much time talking after a conference, I’ve probably mentioned it. It’s not the sort of thing you usually say to someone, and I don’t think I ever have, but I’ve learned a lot from his speaking style, and I constantly try to live up to his standard of kindness. I’m not by nature very kind, so if you see me behaving that way, I’m likely trying to do what I think Daniel might.

This isn’t to say we’re close. We see each other at conferences. We email and tweet. We’re members of a community. So of course I have some idealized picture of him in my mind, without all the this and that of a real person. Even so, he inspires me. When my wife, Janet, and I talk about what’s ahead for our future, we always talk about Daniel and his wife, Kim. I’ve seen them at conferences, traveling together, independent but a team, and I think, hey, we could pull that off when the kids go to school. And Janet and I talk about how to make that work. And we know we only have the shallowest understanding of their real lives, but they inspire us.

Kim died this week. I didn’t know her well. We’d met, and she was nice to me. She and Daniel always seemed so “together” even when they were apart most of the day. Hearing the news unmoored me and scared me and made me think about myself and my family and my plans. And then my heart broke for Daniel.

I’m not kind by nature. But I’m part of a community that is, and part of that is Daniel’s influence on us. Ellen Shapiro has been kind and set up a fund to let us support SmileTrain, where Daniel and his daughter Maggie have asked us to give in Kim’s name. I had never heard of SmileTrain, but it is so perfect. It is kind. And it is practical. It is literally the gift of a smile. It is Daniel and Kim.

Or… “How I learned to stop worrying, and love Foundation.”

Forgive me, NSData. I was running around with that flashy [UInt8], acting like you didn’t have everything I need. I’ve learned my lesson.

— Rob Napier (@cocoaphony) September 28, 2015

I did a lot of writing and rewriting of the Swift version of RNCryptor. I struggled especially with what type to use for data. I gravitated quickly to [UInt8] with all its apparent Swiftiness. But in the end, after many iterations, I refactored back to NSData, and I’m really glad I did.

This is the story of why.

When last we talked about type erasure, I described an easy way to build type erasures using closures. And I mentioned:

(While this works exactly like AnySequence, this isn’t how AnySequence is implemented. In my next post I’ll discuss why and how to implement type erasers like stdlib does.)

At the time I thought I’d pretty well nailed it down, but every time I dug into it I found another little thing I’d missed, and it never seemed to end. And with stdlib open sourcing soon, you’ll all just be able to read this yourselves, so why embarrass myself getting it all wrong? Over time I kind of hoped you all had forgotten that comment and planned to move on to other things. But then I was busted by Michael Welch, and so I had to finish the spelunking and here you go.

After months of writing and rewriting, I am happy to finally announce RNCryptor 4 beta 1 in Swift.

RNCryptor 4 is a complete rewrite of RNCryptor for Swift 2 with full bridging support to Objective-C. It has a streamlined API, simpler installation, and improved internals. It continues to use the v3 data format and is fully interoperable with other RNCryptor implementations.

Once upon a time, when Swift was young, there were a couple of types called SequenceOf and GeneratorOf, and they could type erase stuff. “Type erase?” you may ask. “I thought we loved types.” We do. Don’t worry. Our types aren’t going anywhere. But sometimes we want them to be a little less…precise.

In Swift 2, our little type erasers got a rename and some friends. Now they’re all named “Any”-something. So SequenceOf became AnySequence and GeneratorOf became AnyGenerator and there are a gaggle of indexes and collections from AnyForwardIndex to AnyRandomAccessCollection.

So what are these type erasers? Let’s start with how to use one and we’ll work backwards to why.

Forgive a slight divergence. I’ll bring it back to software development before the end.

A friend of mine is an arborist. He takes care of a large forest, trimming and culling trees. He’s quite good at it and enjoys it, but he’s worried about job security. He thinks cabinet making would be a good career move. He likes to work with wood, and high-end cabinets are very expensive so there’s clearly a lot of money there. I’m a hobbyist woodworker, so we were talking about it.

My dad has always been an engineer, but by the end of his career he had three-letter titles starting with “C”. And all my life he’s taught me lessons, but the most important ones to me professionally were never about technical matters; they were always the talks about how large companies work. Watching some of the reactions from devs to the recent Taylor Swift/Apple back-and-forth, I realized that one of my dad’s lessons might be helpful to others.