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Ole Begemann
Personal blog · oleb.netprogramming
Ole Begemann's personal blog at oleb.net covers programming. Since 2011, 77 different Hacker News readers have linked it 131 times, most often “Remote View Controllers in iOS 6”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Remote View Controllers in iOS 611 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2012-10-01
- How Dropbox Uses C++ for Cross-Platform iOS and Android Development5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-05-23
- Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-06-30
- Understanding the iPhone 6 Plus Screen3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-20
- Making illegal states unrepresentable: Types as compiler-enforced documentation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-26
- Apple Has (Partly) Lifted the NDA for Beta Releases3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-06-04
- Roy Fielding’s REST Dissertation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-11-26
- EU VAT changes for app developers2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-07-29
- What Is Structured Concurrency?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-07-08
- Passing an Array of Strings from Swift to C2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-27
What Hacker News says?
It's a big company, and there will certainly be diversity in experiences. But he's not the first person to talk about such situations: http://oleb.net/blog/2014/09/work-habits-at-apple/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389238 ) It does happen.
Comment linking /blog/2014/09/work-habits-at-apple/
on “I Quit: What really goes on at Apple”Submitted Understanding the iPhone 6 Plus Screen as a story · 170 points
HN discussionFor iOS/Mac development, Ole Begemann's http://oleb.net/ is invaluable, especially for the monthly link roundups.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted Work Habits at Apple as a story · 154 points
HN discussionCall it a database if you wish. In fact it is probably sqlite running behind the scenes. It is a relational model, a different way of organizing things compared to the hierarchical model of the filesystem. There is probably enough literature about that to fill your ebook library ;) I suppose that the "library" model is what most people prefer since most modern media apps use that in some form or another. Or maybe it…
Comment linking /blog/2012/06/steve-jobs-on-the-file-system/
on “Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader”Submitted My Favorite Books 2020 as a story · 129 points
HN discussionThis website actually crashes my macbook pro. No really. I have this bug (verified by genius tech) http://oleb.net/blog/2012/05/15-inch-mbp-mid-2010-crashing-t... which I haven't given to them for repair yet. The Product button's visual transition repeatedly crashes my box. Otherwise, looks pretty cool :)
Comment linking /blog/2012/05/15-inch-mbp-mid-2010-crashing-to-black-screen/
on “Show HN: Webflow - Design responsive websites visually”Submitted Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel as a story · 121 points
HN discussionThe web (HTTP + HTML + JS) intentionally fits the definition of a REST API. https://oleb.net/2018/rest/ In particular: > The central idea behind HATEOAS is that RESTful servers and clients shouldn’t rely on a hardcoded interface (that they agreed upon through a separate channel). Instead, the server is supposed to send the set of URIs representing possible state transitions with each response, from which the client…
Comment linking /2018/rest/
on “How to Design Better APIs”Submitted Chris Lattner on the Origins of Swift as a story · 120 points
HN discussion> iOS 6 already has infrastructure in place to allow for remote view controllers that (in theory) should allow any application to register itself to handle certain data and events. For those who want more information on that, http://oleb.net/blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-... (note: it's a 3-part series). As far as I understand, it doesn't provide for an application "register[ing] itself to handler cert…
Comment linking /blog/2012/09/the-state-of-sharing-in-ios-6/
on “An iPhone lover’s confession: I switched to the Nexus 4”Submitted Ranges and Intervals in Swift as a story · 61 points
HN discussionWell, actually they are aware of this and they might introduce an interesting concept in iOS7: http://oleb.net/blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-...
Comment linking /blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-6/
on “Forstall Out; Ive Up”Submitted Compiler Warnings for Objective-C Developers as a story · 58 points
HN discussionStrings and Unicode are a lot more complicated than they first appear. I like the way this article puts it: > Swift’s string implementation goes to heroic efforts to be as Unicode-correct as possible. […] This is great for correctness, but it comes at a price, mostly in terms of unfamiliarity; if you’re used to manipulating strings with integer indices in other languages, Swift’s design will seem unwieldy at first,…
Comment linking /blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/
on “Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups”Submitted Steve Jobs on the File System as a story · 58 points
HN discussionHere is a great article about strings in Swift: http://oleb.net/blog/2014/07/swift-strings/ Short story: “number of characters” and “nth character” are more complicated questions than you might think when you deal with full Unicode text.
Comment linking /blog/2014/07/swift-strings/
on “Swift Blog”Submitted Xcode 14.0 generates wrong concurrency code for macOS targets as a story · 37 points
HN discussionApple is at least providing some tools to help with this - for instance, you can specify a storyboard whose initial view controller will then be used as the app’s launch screen; this avoids the problem of separate launch images for all screen sizes, resolutions and orientations their app supported. http://oleb.net/blog/2014/08/replacing-launch-images-with-st... I seem to recall Marco Arment took a bit of pride in ha…
Comment linking /blog/2014/08/replacing-launch-images-with-storyboards/
on “Understanding the iPhone 6 Plus Screen”Submitted Deleting RSS Feed Items as a story · 32 points
HN discussionThey might be moving towards some kind of XPC service so you can talk to a JIT through a Mach port. Speculation is my own, derived from: http://oleb.net/blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-...
Comment linking /blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-6/
on “Apple's new Objective-C to Javascript Bridge”Submitted Swift: Lazy Properties in Structs as a story · 22 points
HN discussionHere's what Chris Lattner said about Kotlin this past June: "Lattner: Swift and Kotlin evolved at about the same point in time with the same contemporary languages around them. And so the surface-level syntax does look very similar. … But if you go one level down below the syntax, the semantics are quite different. Kotlin is very reference semantics, it’s a thin layer on top of Java, and so it perpetuates through a…
Comment linking /blog/2017/06/chris-lattner-wwdc-swift-panel/
on “Rise and fall of JVM languages”Submitted How Dropbox Uses C++ for Cross-Platform iOS and Android Development as a story · 16 points
HN discussionXPC[1][2] is a private framework in iOS. I am hoping it will be made accessible before iOS 8 (unlikely). [1] http://oleb.net/blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-... [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/MacOSX...
Comment linking /blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-6/
on “Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won”Submitted Google+ Circles Not Compatible with Asymmetric Follower Model as a story · 14 points
HN discussionThe capability has been used since iOS6: http://oleb.net/blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-...
Comment linking /blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-6/
on “There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014”Submitted My Favorite Cocoa Programming Blogs as a story · 11 points
HN discussionA companion piece to this idea (previously at Oleb’s “making illegal states unrepresentable: https://oleb.net/blog/2018/03/making-illegal-states-unrepres... ) is “parse, don’t validate”: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-va... A third piece / concept I often circle back to is a lot more subtle and difficult to grok: “Names are not type safety” ( https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2020/11/01/n…
Comment linking /blog/2018/03/making-illegal-states-unrepresentable/
on “Make invalid states unrepresentable (2023)”Submitted Where Apple would stand without the iPhone and iPad – Ole Begemann as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
