Blog
I'm Robin, a software engineer who's been building iOS apps since 2016. I ramble about things I've been working on, or just thinking about (mainly Swift, sometimes not).
2026
Leaving Alfred: Teaching Spotlight to Spell
I’ve been a paying Alfred user since 2016, and I can’t even remember how long ago I downloaded the free version. Back then, it felt like a cornerstone of using...
Swift DSLs and a Union Type Macro
Last month, I wrote about trying out Factor, and then settling on Ruby, to build a new generator for this blog. I’m an iOS engineer, so… why not Swift? Well...
Hamiltonian Path Puzzles
How an unhealthy relationship with shiny gadgets, Pokémon Ruby's ice puzzles, and a Ruby REPL turned into a book of Hamiltonian path puzzles.
To Factor and Back Again
Warning: bad Factor code contained within...
2019
SwiftUI OMDb search experiment
SwiftUI, announced yesterday at WWDC, is very cool 🤓. Allowing you to create your UI with a declarative style it seems to reduce a lot of boiler plate code. And...
Custom ‘tab bar controller’ for two child VCs
The 1.1.1.1 App uses an interesting way of navigating to and from its settings menu. It performs the role of a tab bar, but possibly looks a lot cleaner than...
Flutter Experiment
With all the buzz around flutter at the moment, especially among the android developers at work I find, I thought I’d have a go at making a simple app. So...
2018
PowerCLI: Reset VM to Current Snapshot
One thing I often found myself doing with the VMWare vSphere client is resetting VMs to their previous snapshot, therefore ‘cleaning’ them. I’ve since started using PowerCLI for almost everything...
GoLang GUI Libraries
At work, I’ve recently had the need to create simple desktop programs for Windows to provide more effective user interfaces to configure and launch a number of scripts. And, mainly...
PowerShell User Interaction
With a lot of scripts, automating repetitive tasks is the goal, and therefore user interaction should be minimal. That being said, PowerShell is rich in ways to handle it...
PowerShell with Vim
Using Vim with and to write PowerShell...
PowerShell Notes Gist
Just for the sake of writing a Github Gist I decided to post some of the notes I made when first learning PowerShell...
2017
PowerShell XAML GUI
Hello! Today I wanted to write a bit about creating GUIs/forms as part of PowerShell scripts. Sometimes having a GUI rather than just a command line interface for scripts can...
PowerShell git branch GridView
Hello! Today, I needed a way to easily input a branch name into a PowerShell script. To do this, I decided to use what is easily the most fun cmdlet...
PowerShell File Versions
Today, as part of a larger script, I needed to write a PowerShell function to check that an assembly’s version number had been properly bumped between two builds of a...
Research Project (GraphBox iOS App)
As my final project at the University of Leeds I built an educational app for iOS using the multi-paradigm programming language swift and Xcode. The app’s purpose is to aid...