I recently finished a fairly long-running contract with Formation Games, working on Club.

It was a fun project and a really great team who I loved working with. The one thing I perhaps didn’t love was that I was mostly using Flutter & Dart, with some Go thrown in. I’m not a Flutter hater, but I couldn’t honestly say that I loved it. Nor am I am Go hater, but I really did not get on well with the idioms that seem to be prevalent. Maybe I’m just too old and set in my ways :)

At the moment I’m taking a bit of time to recharge my batteries, and to think about what I want to do next.

The furore surrounding Github Copilot interesting.

I’m no lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), but my feeling is that it may expose a flaw in the FLOSS community’s ideas about ownership of code.

For the last few years, the default setting for all of the Swift code I write has been open source.

As a result, I’ve accumulated a vast number of Github repositories and Swift Package Manager packages.

However, I’ve been really bad at telling people that they exist!

This post is an attempt to start to fix that, by talking about one small package I’ve recently created: Matchable.

I can only explain it as lock-down madness, but a couple of weeks ago I decided to have a little play around with Vapor.

What I wanted to do, initially, was just make a simple website that did user authentication. You could register, login, and logout. If you were logged in, it knew who you were. If you were logged out, there were things you couldn’t see.

Now I’m no web developer. Admittedly I did write a WYSIWYG html editor in Hypercard, in about 1994, but I’m no web developer.

Ok, I might have also written a complete CMS using Hypercard as a CGI engine for MacHTTP, also around that kind of time, but honestly, I’m no web developer.

If really pressed, I might admit to having had a job creating the first interactive shopping basket for Robert Fripp’s DGM record label’s website in about 1998¹ - a job which I had to learn Perl for² - but if that goes to prove anything, it is that I really am not a web developer.

Still, how hard could it be, right?

I have been accused (by myself, mostly), of being a bit too much of a purist sometimes. It’s true that I do like things to have an intellectual rigour to them, but it’s mostly about being honest and clear with ourselves about what we’re doing and why. I welcome the application of common sense, and I’m fine with taking shortcuts as long as they’re consciously chosen for a good reason.

I’d like to think that I’m a pragmatist…