Hello there, my sweet fellow developers,
Disclaimer: I must be honest with you. I’ve just named the post like that to try and make it a clickbait on Medium. But, if you’ve been reading me, I don’t actually give a shit, if anyone reads me, I just want to share the knowledge I have in the way I am. So, this not a top, there much more, than 10 blogs. If that’s too much text for you, because you wanted to get something on a silver plate, go read someone else.
There are loads of thought leaders in iOS development. I’m more than sure, that you heard of Ray Wenderlich, Natasha the Robot, Bob Lee, Roy Marmelstein and other renowned guys and gals that talk about simple things, that all the newbies in the world tend to read. The real problem in here is that those guys mostly write tutorials, which, while showing concepts, don’t talk about anything interesting, that could actually expand the depth of your knowledge (neither do I, in case you already want to start crying about it like the crybaby you are). They tend to duplicate code, avoid the best practices in order to show something you could actually find in the Apple doc. Usually, people after reading their blogs tend to use StackOverflow driven development approach with the total negligence of the architecture, coding practices and staying DRY with massive view controllers spilled all over the place.
So, I propose some good reads in no particular order, that you could or could not know about, that would improve you. I, personally, totally love these guys (although, sometimes I could disagree with their approaches) and have the deepest respect for what they do, so I recommend you to at least try them out:
PURE GOLD
1. Mike Ash
That one guy is awesome. He talks about the low level stuff in Swift and iOS. I’ve been reading him for the past 10 years and the count of times I was dissatisfied with the time spent could be presented using fingers on a single hand. Sadly, he doesn’t publish his articles that often as of now, but previously he was a rocket creating a wonderful read every week or two. And even now, you have a lot of material he previously wrote, that you should definitely grit your teeth in.
2. Peter Steinberger
The design of blog is nearly as bad, as of mine. But materials are pure gold. The guy talks runtime, is the author of an awesome core library PSPDFKit and gives some bloody iOS internals details you were always craving for, but were just too shy to confess. Sadly, he doesn’t write any more, but there are thousands of lines goodness to digest.
3. Graham Lee – Sicpers
Well, this guy is something else. Tech and life thoughts, weird-ass stuff in Swift and iOS, JS, Ruby, static vs dynamic, general coding approaches, you name it. Pick any topic and you could find something in that blog for you.
4. Brent Simmons – Inessential
This guy, as any other good dev, despises static typing while still using it, same as Orta Therox or Graham Lee. He is a leftist, though, but I think, because of how good he is, you should ignore that shameless fact of his biography. Definitely a good read, if you want to know more about app development, as he tells a whole lot about his apps and the problems he had.
5. Artsy
If you read any of my previous articles, you know, that I’m a big fan of these awesome guys behind cocoapods. I just can’t recommend you reading that blog enough, cool decisions, like open-source be default, switching to ReactNative, which I never saw coming, thoughts on architecture and the influence of choices they make. And yeah, they have tutorials. Sorta.
If you like the blog, don’t forget to read those two guys as well, as they are Artsy. At least from my humble perspective: Orta Therox, his Rebase and Ash Furrow. They are quite well-known in the community, but that’s the rare case, when thought leaders are actually worth the hype they generate.
P.S. While Ash is great and is a nice guy all around, Orta is still my favorite iOS dev out there. Intelligent, interesting, professional.
6. Mike Abdullah
He writes a lot about both iOS and Mac libraries. He has snippets, he has a lot of radar reports. Sometimes he digs deep. I used reading the blog, as the source of potential problems inside my projects. Perhaps, that was my luck, but there were numerous occasions, when Mike wrote about some problem and I would stumble in the same problem in several days. A simpler blog in vein with Natasha the Robot. The blog is dead as of now.
7. Michael Tsai
I dunno, how this guy does that, but he gathers a lot of thoughts from other people discussions in github, mailing lists, twitter, articles, you name it. This blog keeps you up to date on the hot shit storms between the heavy weights in Apple world.
8. Rob Rix – Intersections
Rob is a functional guy. You can learn a lot from him, as he talks simply about difficult concepts. The weird thing is that he has 2 blogs, one of which has only 1 article, the other one is unmaintained, some of his articles are on github, with one perfect example being Postmodern Programming.
9. Cocoa Manifest
A blog dead long ago with a list of articles you must read. And by must I mean, that its obligatory. If you don’t read them quick enough some fat guy with a rose hat would shit in front of your front doors. I warned you…
10. Pedro Piñera
Reactive approaches and concepts by this guy are good for newbies, as sometimes if you aren’t used to reactive, your brain just stalls and begs you to add some state to the code, that doesn’t need it. And Pedro would be your saving grace.
11. Landon Fuller
Once again, the blog is dead, but there is a lot to read in there, especially, the low level stuff, that would help understand, how iOS works under the hood. Another blog, that he was writing to is Plausible, which is dead as well.
12. Soroush Khanlou
Simple concepts well explained. The guy just bursts with ideas and his vision of how to fix the things he dislikes. Can’t say I agree to even the half of the ideas he provides, but it’s always great to read opposite end of idea spectra to either reinforce your thinking or adapt. He is pro-dynamism as well. Try him, you won’t regret.
13. Paul Graham
That’s a mammoth here. Unlike Rob C. Martin, whom I don’t really like (there will be a separate article about him later on), Paul is a great developer and thinker. He gives valuable thoughts and insights to how actually become a better programmer without ever talking about the code itself.
14. Alex Denisov
You wanna LLVM? You wanna reverse engineer? You wanna ObjC a bit? You do this here. Not only this guy writes interesting shit no one else even risks to tackle, he sometimes even bothers explaining the basics. Not to mention, he is Ukrainian, same, as yours truly.
15. Greg Parker – Hamster Emporium
His articles are old. His information is outdated. But you want to know, how most of the iOS/Mac standard library works? You get the introduction here.
16. Chris Eidhof
Functional swift, clever thoughts, good command of the code. Be warned, though, my eyes started to bleed, when he presented his functional view controllers. The only other thing I despise about him is that he is pro-static typing.
17. Matt Galagher – Cocoa with Love
Great ideas, odd stuff, deep stuff, outdated stuff, time spent on research, architecture. You get a lot out of him, just take his posts with a grain of salt, it would be better for your mental health.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
1. Rob Napier
Functional swift, general thoughts, iOS security related stuff. Writes rarely as of now.
2. Alexandros Salazar
This guy shares some good ideas, goes a bit in-depth and gives good Swifty explanations in case you are not ready to read the Apple doc. He started like crazy with loads of articles, but then just disappeared.
3. Gwynne Raskind
Writes rarely, rants a lot, has problems with https certs.
OUTTRO
You know, what’s weird? I’m not that old, but the blogs I loved and read a lot are dead now and there is nothing equally good on the horizon. Perhaps, anyone of you, who actually read till the end, could recommend something deep, explaining the basic low level stuff or some cool concepts, that could speed the development up and improve the code quality?
That’s all, folks. Have a great day and stay DRY, no matter, where you are.
P.S. I lied, when I told, that these blogs are not well known.
P.P.S. I didn’t lie, when I told, that most of the newbies don’t read them.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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