Last year, I wrote about the joy sparked by side projects. This year, I wanted to write another small recap of what I have accomplished in 2023. I kept iterating on my projects but, more importantly, I kept consolidating the packages that I use to share code between projects: swift-blocks and swift-hoods. They are open-sourced and I wanted to formally introduce them to the world. Here we are.

🧱 Welcome to my blocks

For the last 2 years, I have been building swift-blocks, a dependency-free library of tools and patterns I use repeatedly on all my Swift projects.

It is not my first attempt to build such a library but it is the first time I feel really satisfied about its usefulness. What was different this time? Two factors:

  1. For one, Swift Package Manager provides a much more convenient way to share code between projects than anything else in the past (Cocoapods, static libraries, etc.);
  2. And then, I had a much better discipline to be consistent about using/iterating/adding things to the library over time.

Today, I released version 0.2.0 of the library. Here are the release notes. Help yourself.

  • 🌐 Transport. Added a tinier version of objcio’s tiny-networking for concise endpoint description, combining URL requests and response parsing. Introduced URLRequestHeaderItem struct mimicking Foundation’s URLQueryItem.
  • 📅 Calendar. Improved internal architecture and developer experience using result builders.
  • 🔐 Security. Introduced support for PKCE and associated helpers.
  • 🛟 Error Management. Introduced SimpleMessageError for convenient error handling, eliminating the need for forced unwrapping. Ideal for scenarios where a full error domain is not necessary.
  • 🎨 SwiftUI. Introduced TaskStateButton interface components, for representing asynchronous task states. Supports four states: not started, running, completed (success), or failed.

The documentation for this package is now hosted on the Swift Package Index.

🏘️ Welcome to my ’hood

In 2023 though, I have been using The Composable Architecture a lot. And I built things that were depending on it. So in addition to swift-blocks, I started building another library, swift-hoods1, which has a slightly bigger footprint in a project but is starting to turn out very useful as well.

Today, it is still in the early stages, but it already provides two useful items:

  • A keychain TCA dependency for easy testing of code that uses keychain items;
  • A processor for markdown files that include YAML front-matters.

I will detail how these work in the future.

🎄 Have a happy holiday and happy new year 🥂.

  1. Hood standing for neighborhood… ie a larger version of a block. Get it? Kudos to my lovely wife for helping me find a good name. ↩