After just one year at Microsoft working on the Yammer iOS app, I’m ready for a new adventure.

I’m super excited to announce that I have accepted a job at !!!
Before you ask: yes I will stay in London and no I won’t start writing Java anytime soon :)

I literally can’t wait to join the team and build cool products used by millions of people (pretty scary, I know!).

Last week I gave a talk at NSLondon.

@marcosero kicks off #NSLondon with his talk on Legacy Apps @TheAppBusiness pic.twitter.com/7eAfttcgjI

— Shaps  (@shaps) August 27, 2015

It was actually the first time I did any kind of public speaking and the reason is simple: I never felt I knew anything that most other people didn’t already know or that was worth sharing. But then I realized that I worked at Yammer for almost a year and I did something that most other iOS developers don’t usually do: working on a legacy app. And so that was the topic for my talk.

I really enjoyed the experience and I’m happy that I got a very positive feedback, both in person and on Twitter.

You can find the slides on Speaker Deck and embedded below. The talk was recorded, so I will update this post as soon as the video is out.

EDIT: The video is up!

I have finally managed to find some time to put my dotfiles under source control and publish them on GitHub.

I tweaked them a lot until I found a configuration that I liked, but they are not perfect of course and they often change as soon as I learn a new trick.

I think there are some nice little gems in there (this is my favorite) so I hope you can find something useful.

The big difference in watchOS 2 is that the code in the watchOS Extension now runs on the actual watch, as opposite as running on the iPhone like it used to. That means a new CPU with a different architecture.
It would be nice testing that code on an actual device before shipping it, right?

Well, we are out of luck since it seems XCTest does not support watchOS yet. There’s no XCTest framework in the watchOS SDK and trying to use it causes compiler errors, since the headers only support either UIKit or AppKit (and watchOS has none).

I duped rdar://21760513. You should probably do that too!

So I made a HackerNews app. That means I joined the very crowded circle of iOS developers building their own HackerNews app “because all the existing ones suck” (there is some irony right there).

The app is finally live on the App Store and open source on GitHub.

I built the first prototype during the Easter weekend because I was excited to play with the just announced ComponentKit.

Sneak peak of the Hacker News app I wrote during the Easter weekend. The front-end it’s all @componentkit 👌 pic.twitter.com/Rw5P6fv3o4

— Marco Sero (@marcosero) April 6, 2015

Then of all a sudden one of the best designers I know and that I had the pleasure to work with came on board to help me make an actual app.

@marcosero Nice one. Need a designer? ; ]

— Cai Cardenas (@caicardenas) April 7, 2015

The app has been a playground to learn ComponentKit and ReactiveCocoa (although I feel that I have just scratched the surface), and obviously an excuse to use Swift.
By open sourcing it, I hope to help other developers familiarize with these frameworks and at the same time being helped to solve some problems that I still haven’t been able to figure out by myself.

I decided to price it at $0.99 so that hopefully will pay out the $99 yearly Apple developer fee.

I’m planning to find some time to work a bit more on it on the side and hopefully release a major update adding user login, upvotes and submissions. But let’s see, I don’t like to make promises :)

Go get it while it’s hot!