Max Desiatov @maxd@mastodon.social

Anyone else using the SourceKit-LSP extension for VSCode here for Swift? How do you install it and what do you think should be the preferred way to install it (especially for beginners)?

https://forums.swift.org/t/status-of-the-sourcekit-lsp-extension-for-visual-studio-code/38028

What’s the best term for things that don’t include assistive tech (VoiceOver, color adjustments, font legibility etc), but related to accessibility in its literal sense? Can we call something accessible if it has assistive tech, but requires a 10 GB download to simply use it?

Selected quotes:

"this website I think cost about two hundred million dollars so far to make"

"government sites exist on a different, worse internet than everything else, http://sam.gov is the jewel of his collection [...and] it’s like the government’s front door."

Example of how not to do govtech is the US with https://sam.gov, ancient website with nine circles of forms hell for government procurement. Most of the time you need to hire a consultant to fill in the form, Reply All had a great episode about it: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/49hr93/34-dmv-nation

This would also be yet another excuse to do more international collaboration, why does every country have to reinvent the wheel, building unmaintainable services using outdated tech, with no proper public audit? Surely, laws are different, but certainly feasible within say EU

An opinion I don't see discussed much (if at all, lmk if you know someone advocating for this): all software made for government services should be open-source. What's the point of keeping it closed-source, spending our tax money on contractors to keep it maintained? #opensource

I hope this is going to be a huge leap for security, especially for consumers. Great that it's all based on an open standard 👍 Fingers crossed that 3rd-party browsers are allowed to support it (and they totally should if so)

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21301509/apple-safari-14-browser-face-touch-id-logins-webauthn-fido2

When it comes to COVID news, a lot of actionable and useful info comes directly from virologists and "This Week in Virology" is my go-to podcast for that. Straight from the last episode: symptoms may last up to 12 weeks, with 7 weeks of fever 🥺 Stay safe! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/twiv-626-ralph-baric-and-fancy-ferrets/id300973784?i=1000477895740

One more reason to stop using Slack (as if consuming more memory than the rest of the active apps on your system combined wasn't enough): turns out you can't delete your account from a workspace ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/360000360443-Delete-profile-information-from-Slack

The most thrilling part:

"When combined with llbuild2 support for Bazel's Remote Execution API, this should allow us to start exploring fully distributed/cached builds for SwiftPM packages (when a suitable backend is available)".

Thanks to Daniel Dunbar and the llbuild team! 👏

"llbuild2 is an experimental, Swift native, fully async, NIO futures-based low level build system. Started as the cevobuild experiment in llbuild, this repository aims to continue that exploration".

https://github.com/apple/swift-llbuild2

(More details here: https://forums.swift.org/t/llbuild2/36896)

This virus 3D model video is eerie and mind-blowing 😱 https://vimeo.com/417208044

Super excited to see more Swift projects coming from Google! https://github.com/google/swift-benchmark

Well, that was quick, just one week later here's XMLCoder 0.11 with a bugfix for CDATA decoding, support for Combine's TopLevelEncoder protocol, and also a new rootAttributes argument for the encode function. The latter was implemented by Luís Portela Afonso 👏

https://github.com/MaxDesiatov/XMLCoder/releases

Every time I want to do anything non-trivial with Package.swift it takes a ton of time to find any official documentation for it. Turns out, there are nicely rendered doc comments here, I'm perplexed that this link is not featured anywhere prominently 🤨

https://docs.swift.org/package-manager/PackageDescription/index.html

Things are progressing really well here at SwiftWasm! With JavaScript/DOM bindings and SwiftPM more or less working, Yuta Saito created a simple Conway’s Game of Life demo here:

(wait for it to load, binary size is still something we’re working on)

https://github.com/kateinoigakukun/life-game-with-swiftwasm

If any of my projects or blog articles saved you time/money, please consider sponsoring my work. I currently work full-time on open-source projects, with full focus on porting Swift libraries to WebAssembly w/ swiftwasm.org, more exciting stuff coming soon!

https://github.com/sponsors/MaxDesiatov

New day, new release. This one is CoreXLSX 0.10, a new version of the Excel spreadsheet format parser written in Swift. As usual, thanks to everyone who made it possible, seeing feedback and contributions is always inspiring 🤩

https://github.com/MaxDesiatov/CoreXLSX/releases

0.10 release of the library for easy XML parsing using the Codable protocol in Swift is out. Except for a few breaking changes, it's mostly a bugfix release. Thanks to everyone who contributed and thanks to all the users, you're amazing! 👏

https://github.com/MaxDesiatov/XMLCoder/releases