Issue #28

Hi there,

I hope you find something useful or interesting in today's collection ✨

Live-updating cells

Starting with iOS 15, there's a set of reconfigure methods that let you update a cell that's already on-screen. This allows us to make nice animations to views inside cells, which are not possible with reloadData - as it recreates cells from scratch.

In earlier iOS versions it was also possible to update existing cells, by getting on-screen cells with UITableView.cellForRow(at:) and updating the state manually. reconfigure can do that with less friction, and it can also update the height of the cell.

Check out Tyler's thread for a deeper dive into the new methods:

Approaches to mocking

Using the factory pattern is a common approach to mocking, but with Swift there are simpler approaches that work just as well: such as injecting values, injecting behaviour as closures (as opposed to injecting instances that perform a behaviour), or having factory methods as closures (as opposed to factory classes). In this thread Nick goes into different ways one can mock behaviour or values:

TL;DR:

On code readability

One comment from Nick's thread stood out to me - it really highlights the two extremes of code architecture: "hardcode everything" => no flexibility, changing one thing breaks other places; vs "mock everything" = code is not discoverable, no transparency in what to change code to achieve the goal. Balance is somewhere in the middle.

Technical debt is debt

Sometimes we say "there should be no technical debt". It's a really good aspiration, we've all been there. But as in life, going into debt can be beneficial:

but also:

Testing Codable initializers

A well-structured and understandable article on unit-testing custom Codable initializers. Lots of little gems in there - for one, the Difference library looks like a huge quality-of-life improvements for unit tests.

How to test custom Codable initializer | Danijela's blog

Sometimes, when parsing a JSON, you need to implement a custom Codable initializer. Because of that custom logic, you're no longer using the default implementation. It's a good idea to test your code.

🤘☮️

Alright, that’s it for today.

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