A lot of people are asking me about how I feel – now that I’m retired. I feel good, indeed. As expected, I’m spending way too much time on my laptop fiddling around with technologies of interest to me (LLMs, Swift, iOS etc.)
And I can afford to read books (is this old-fashioned or what?) Here are some of them:
Playing around with Xcode / SwiftUI. Swift still is unfamiliar territory for me, but with the help of ChatGBT Codex I’m making some progress understanding how some of the underpinnings work. Still no agents, just asking Codex to create a plan for a feature and yours truly trying to understand the Swift code Codex suggests.
Don’t worry, you’re looking at some test data 😉
WM 2026 – Erweiterung auf 48 Mannschaften betrachte ich als Gewinn, sowohl sportlich als auch sportpolitisch. Wir auf dem hohen Roß sitzenden Europäer können gar nicht mehr einschätzen, welche Bedeutung es für neu hinzugekommenen Länder hat, sich bei der WM präsentieren und nicht zuletzt sportlich mithalten zu können.
(If the post is in German, it’s most likely about sports – please ignore)
Getting somewhat tired of watching tutorials. So how about building a really simple iOS app tracking a stock portfolio? Wasted the afternoon (and will waste tomorrow morning) on getting the view layout right in SwiftUI. Just the layout & sizing of the views, mind you, nothing fancy so far.
Using the free Claude AI tier to get my questions answered. Pretty cool. No vibe-coding, no agents yet.
Worked through the Welcome to SwiftUI tutorials. As expected I’m struggling with the Swift syntax (no semicolons, lots of “less typing” optimizations). Decades of muscle and brain memory down the drain.
SwiftUI Code to define / layout View hierarchies – No XML, no binaries, just moldable Swift code – That’s how it should be. Having worked with a strict Model-View-Viewmodel-Presenter architecture for a looooong time, I’m struggling with the concept of states and bindings, but this will fade, I’m sure.
Nothing substantial to see here yet…
Worked through the Swift Tour.
Some syntactical sugar is different from C++, but generally speaking, Swift looks quite nice. Lot’s of stuff “built-in” like arrays and dictionaries, comparison operators get synthesized, enumerations with methods, optionals, generics, memory management.
I guess the next stop will be the official Swift tutorials.
Grumpy old C++ programmer here trying to make sense of all the new technologies and languages out there. Oh, and artificial intelligence, of course. And natural stupidity. And agents. And all the other brand-spanking new technologies out there.
