Some years ago, I would say that this job title might have come under Middleware or Integration Engineer, or something like that, especially in big banks or firms like IBM. You might also try looking at job listings at a messaging vendor (e.g. Confluent).
Fascinated to read this post as I’m doing almost exactly the same thing. Just started using Xcode for the first time, a month ago. I’m not inexperienced with software development, but having to rely mostly on Xcode, Apple’s Developer documentation, information embedded inside WWDC videos, and random forum posts, has been a pretty rough experience.
So Claude has been a massive help, to get to a working app quickly. I am using it in a similar style to the author. Discuss in the UI, try really hard to cherry-pick from the code it generates, while trying to understand what it’s doing. Claude is not clever enough to realise it’s selling you out-of-date APIs, so i feel I need to be super vigilant, which chimes with what folk are saying here about the iOS upgrade treadmill. I’ve supplemented with a couple of technical ebooks as backup.
But the feeling of having your own app, that does something which improves your own life, running on that computer you’ve been carrying in your pocket for years, is extremely rewarding! (In my use case it needs to be an app not a PWA because it needs to integrate with device APIs.)
How does one find out more about this scene, and more importantly does it actually provide you with enough income to live on? (Rent is expensive in cities)
I wonder if this is aimed at elderly folk or people with elderly relatives. It looks like a device (with dubious reviews!) that you can give to them, which they just plug in to their laptop. That seems more convenient than setting up some software, especially if they live far away.
I’ve had an X1 Carbon for almost 2 years now as a development machine, and I really like it. My previous laptop was a 13” MBP.
The X1 is light and fast. I run Fedora, and work often in containers. I have the likes of Podman, VS Code, IntelliJ and Atom running and many Firefox tabs open, all without any problems.
Other good points are the 2xUSB ports, HDMI, and good battery life.
The main downside is the 256GB HDD, which fills up far too quickly, so I end up having to do a bit of housekeeping quite often. But as a dev machine, I can recommend it.
If you want to work in a RHEL-like environment (use a similar package manager, configuration, and so on), then you could look at Fedora (Workstation edition), which is in the same branch of the Linux family tree as RHEL.
Fedora/RHEL uses RPMs to install software, so you can check in advance whether your favourite application offers an RPM. Most of the major dev tools do, including VS Code, etc.
But whichever distro you choose for your desktop OS, you can still try out other distros by running them inside a container.
It took them a while to wake up, but I think Argos is better now. You can collect from stores, get it delivered, sometimes even same-day delivery. I value having a store nearby. I trust them far more for commodity products (chargers, accessories, etc) than venturing into the Wild West of Amazon sellers and reviews. I also feel I have more recourse if something goes wrong.
A mini-tripod for a camera phone. It is one of the cheapest things I've bought (<£20 I think), but I've got way more value out of it than most purchases. It can hold a phone vertically or horizontally, and the head and feet are very adjustable. Perfect for joining work/social video calls, recording videos, or taking photos, I just love it.
I wrote a book and chose Asciidoctor, because it's got a lot of built-in features for writing technical docs, such as 'admonitions' (the "tip", "warning", "info" blocks, etc.), 'sidebars' (the boxed Q&A/ancillary blocks you often see in technical books) and code syntax highlighting, with per-line 'callouts' (i.e. you can write explanations of what each line in a sample code block is doing). It can also generate images from ASCII diagrams, but I didn't get amazing results, so I created my own diagrams as SVGs in draw.io.
It's easy to render PDF and EPUB, and Asciidoc syntax is not much of a jump from Markdown either. The biggest challenge is learning the correct name of the typesetting feature that you need, so you know what to look for in the Asciidoctor reference. :-)
So my process was as follows:
1. 1 "parent" Asciidoc manuscript, with individual chapters written in separate files and included with "include::"
2. Write sample code, marking each code block with Asciidoctor fencing, and then reference each code block from the manuscript. Asciidoctor will then include the code and add syntax highlighting etc. I also try to write the example code inside unit tests, so it can be tested every time the book is built.
3. Wrap the process in some sort of build tool. I chose Maven (there's an Asciidoctor plugin for Maven). The process builds the book PDF/EPUB, tests the book sample code, and builds any associated artifacts (like an example .zip file).
Now I'm writing a new short book, and this time I'm trying out Pandoc->PDF (via LaTeX). The learning curve is pretty steep, and the LaTeX errors are a bit WTF, but the eisvogel template (as also recommended by asicsp in this thread) is a great way to have something presentable very quickly.
> I'm also confused... who reads blogs but doesn't read the docs?
I’d say lots of people. Most people are searching for a specific solution to a technical problem. If they see a how-to blog that fits their use case in the results, many people will prefer it over the official docs.