I seem to spend at least half of my programming life transferring values between an object or structure and some sort of dictionary format.

Swift’s Codable support is really great for doing this when you’ve got JSON or a Plist, but not all dictionary data ultimately lives in a file.

I spent a bit of time over the last couple of days looking into the options for Swift without Xcode, aka Swift on Linux.

What it seems to boil down to is: there’s not a lot out there for free.

I expect you’re wondering what I’ve been up to. I don’t blame you, I’ve been wondering too.

In order that we can all sleep easy at night, I think I’m going to blog a bit of a developer diary.

I’m not sure I’ll manage a post every day, but I’ll try to keep a regular commentary.

In all seriousness I don’t expect it to be of great interest to anyone else, but in the past I’ve found it a useful discipline to keep a log of what I’ve been doing each day, and I may as well do it here.

Since finishing with Sketch I’ve been playing with a few very small new projects, but I’ve also spent a lot of time catching up on a large backlog of boring admin tasks.

I’ve no doubt that I’ll talk about some of my own projects in the future, but actually the thing I’ve been working on most over the last couple of weeks is the open source project Safari-FIDO-U2F.

For the first time in a long while - possibly ever - I have the time, the space, and the funds to work exclusively on my own software.

It may not last forever, but whilst it does it is fantastic, and I’m really relishing the chance to start with as much of a blank slate as I can manage.

As part of this process, I’ve recently been examining some basic assumptions, and thinking the unthinkable: maybe I shouldn’t be working in the Apple ecosystem?

When I originally created this site, it had a “news” section, which over time mutated into a blog.

At a later date I realised that personal things and work things were getting a bit muddled up, so I split off the personal stuff to Born Sleepy. In doing so, I envisaged this blog going back to essentially just being a “news” service, and most of the posts were just announcements about software releases.

At the moment there aren’t really any software releases, however. In addition, Born Sleepy, which was supposed to be my personal blog, still ended up carrying a lot of technical posts, as well as completely non-technical ones.

So I’ve decided to re-organise things once again. It’ll keep you all on your toes, if nothing else.

As a result I’ve moved back most of the technical posts to this blog, and henceforth decree this as the place I’ll write about the technical things I’m doing. Born Sleepy will very much remain active, but will be restricted to non-technical things.

I expect I’ll end up changing it all again in a while, but let’s see how long this plan remains in force!