As an iOS developer, I was married to the API singleton. Making something along the lines of NetworkingManager or APIManager was second nature to me. This was the object which all networking calls would go through. The gatekeeper of sorts. But as your application grows in complexity, this gatekeeper’s responsibility starts growing vast and its reach wide which makes your code less maintainable and harder to test. It also may be the case that you need to bypass the gatekeeper for some special request. You start sprinkling these requests that talk directly with your API that, for some reason, slip by your networking manager. The role of our manager becomes unclear now…

Apps have become the foundation on which we live our digital lives. They connect us with the people we aren’t physically near, they give us any piece of information we want in the blink of an eye, and they make giving in to our vices way easier now than ever before. But what powers all of this? Most people know about “the cloud” and a subset of those people know that it’s just a big room (or rooms) full of computers somewhere. People also know that the apps they use are connected to said cloud. That’s how Snapchat remembers pictures people sent you and how Twitter shows you tweets. Those apps are connected to some other, bigger computer which feeds that data to your device. Lets go one step deeper though. How does that app actually run? What’s going on to make your experience seamless (or not)? There are some things that are unavoidable that we as developers need to account for to make your lives awesome which, in turn, can make our lives miserable.

Everyone has a phone. I don’t mean a Motorola Razr either… (even though those were pretty sweet back in the day). People have devices more powerful than the computer that landed us on the moon for the first time (and they could also stream our music while doing it!). We live in a fast paced world where people have grown impatient and will pay large sums of money for the convenience of being able to find any piece of information they want, when they want it and without moving a finger. That’s the world we live in today. Apps are at the center of it all. They act as a gateway to this vast ocean of information and make our lives easier to live. Today I’ll be going over the code in the iOS Starter Kit I’ve made to help you make the lives of others easier.

Everyone wants to know. It’s one of those questions everyone yearns to know the answer to, and when someone finally find out they don’t know how to explain it. They just say “it’s like… love. You know?” Actually, funny you should ask. I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. It’s a question like “where are all of the sour patch parents?”. Do you know? (and, no, I don’t want the Yahoo answer… even though it is pretty likely). In any case, it’s a difficult question to answer and it’s a questions that’s asked and pertains to many parts of our lives. What is love between two or many people? What is love in terms of work? Love is something that touches almost every aspect of our lives and we’re sitting here like “well WTF is it?”. And that’s totally ok. Hopefully I can shed some light on the question.

A brief history about who I am first… I don’t come from a technological background. My mom works in HR and my dad is an occupational therapist. Computers and gadgets weren’t a commonplace item in my house growing up. We still had a computer growing up and I fondly remember the dial up days, but it was never introduced to me as something more than a machine that’ll run Backyard Baseball. If it worked it was ok in my book. I spent most of my days drawing as a kid. Reading wasn’t up my alley, so you can imagine when the summer came around and I had to do summer reading I only had feelings of excitement. I was passionate about art and wanted to be an artist one day (circa 2000).