This is a continuation of Notes on ML basics and the pursuit of understanding LLMs deeper. Tokenization Machine learning centers on learning a function from data by building a model that approximates the relationship between input and output. Modern systems typically use a neural network to represent this function. A neural network is a layered structure made of simple computational units that transform the input step by step, allowing the model to learn complex patterns that would be impossible to define with hand-written rules. The challenge is that a neural network doesn’t work with characters or words, but instead processes… Read more

This week, I began reading “The Hundred-Page Language Models Book by Andriy Burkov to gain a foundational understanding of large language models and modern machine learning. I only have a vague comprehension of various ML-related terms that I keep seeing, and it’s time to build up that understanding. Read more

I continue to pay attention to material that motivates me to learn and helps me improve my technical expertise. On the surface, it could seem that a lot of that is no longer necessary if AI can do it. Read more

Today, I watched a brilliant conversation between Chris Lattner and Jeremy Howard about software engineering craftsmanship and the challenges that AI-generated code and tools bring to its future. I viewed it through the lens of my own day-to-day development experience. AI tools constantly leave me astonished by their capabilities, yet at the same time somewhat underwhelmed, especially when compared to the workflows some developers on X showcase when orchestrating multiple agents and dramatically boosting their productivity. Watching Chris and Jeremy talk about craftsmanship clarified something I had been feeling. AI tools often amaze me, yet I keep wondering if the… Read more

During WWDC20 Apple is introducing new App Clips feature. As it’s described in the landing page: An app clip is a small part of your app that’s discoverable at the moment it’s needed. Apple already suggested some possible use cases such as ordering from a take-out restaurant or renting a scooter. And App Clips will be discovered and invoked by using new App Clip Codes, NFC Tags, QR Codes, Messages, or as place cards in Maps. It looks like a great move forward in reducing friction and getting an app into users’ hands as fast as possible. We’ll take a… Read more

Publish is a static site generator built for Swift developers. We’ll be migrating a static blog generation from Jekyll to Publish. The previous version of a blog was generated using Jekyll and a provided theme without putting too much effort in understanding the whole creation process. This time I decided to dig deeper into understanding Publish and remembering long forgotten HTML and CSS skills. We’ll be trying to create a similar style blog that was created using Jekyll. It should remain adaptable for bigger or smaller screen sizes: Previous desktop version Previous mobile version Getting Started After running the steps… Read more

When starting to develop any application it’s beneficial to think early about the way code can be testable and whether it would be scalable or maintainable. Many iOS applications have suffered from what is called Massive View Controller problem. By putting all the code that fetches, maps, presents and styles into one ViewController it very quickly overgrows in size and complexity. A lot of solutions where introduced to tackle this problem such as MVVM, MVVM + ReactiveCocoa or VIPER. In this application we’ll be using Clean Swift approach for breaking up massive view controllers into testable and maintainable parts. Data… Read more

User experience (UX) and design is an integral part of any application. As a developer, I don’t have much knowledge or “feeling” towards good looking designs. Moreover, truly great user experience requires many iterations of development and feedback. In this part we’ll see how we can take example from Apple’s mobile apps and design guidelines to create a familiar looking application. Colors We’ll begin to design by choosing the color palette of our application. One of the best ways to ensure familiarity and simplicity of the app is to have consistent colors throughout the application. I found it a great… Read more

In the previous part we discovered a way to separate our application into frameworks and setup the architecture of our app to support dependency injection. In this part of the series we’ll be fetching and parsing data from the backend using Alamofire and Codable. API Client Although in the scope of this tutorial we’ll be using mocked data, the application will be completely ready to support calls to REST APIs. Protocol We define our APIClient protocol that serves as a lean interface between data fetching classes and actual implementation. It returns Observable which is a part of RxSwift. We won’t… Read more

In this part of the series we’ll overview how to properly setup the application. Creating Frameworks As we talked in the previous part, we’ll begin the creation of the project by creating 3 separate frameworks inside our XCode project (TravelKit, TravelDataKit, TravelFeatureKit). An article on raywenderlich.com has a thorough explanation of the whole process. After creating frameworks, project navigator should look something like in the picture below. Setting up CocoaPods We’ll be using CocoaPods for managing dependencies in our project. Although setting up CocoaPods is fairly straightforward, there can be some difficulties when having local frameworks involved. The configuration is… Read more

When learning any new technology I find it beneficial to follow a real world example. In this tutorial series we’ll be creating and releasing an iOS application. The application will be created by showing a real thinking process, going through essential steps and providing the motivation behind them. Although every single line of code won’t be covered, all of it will be always available on GitHub. Prerequisites Prior knowledge of iOS development and Swift syntax is needed. Introduction Our Project We’ll be creating a flight discovery application. The users of our application should be able to: In the scope of… Read more