Topics: APIs + Core Data, Authentication, Multithreading

Mistakes and Lessons

Symptom: API calls don’t tell you a lot when they don’t work. I wasn’t getting anything out of an internet request. Debugging API calls can feel like a text based adventure.

Mistake: Errors in strings are hard to debug. Apparently, when I had made the url, there was an extra “%”.

Lesson: Copy and paste urls that work from Postman, or use an encoder to convert strings to urls.

Symptom: When I changed the colors in my bocce game, the logic for choosing the next team to go broke.

Mistake: I had changed my colors away from the default colors (e.x. blueColor) to RGB values and had used == to compare the objects. The correct way to compare the objects is using an isEqual. Turns out that when you use [UIColor colorName] using == to compare is ok because they are at the same memory location.

Lesson: Use isEqual with objects and == with primitives.

Notes to Self

There are some times when I just have to slow down and plan out how something works. I was making a tableView that updated an API and a Core Data store. This very quickly got too complicated to keep in memory and I had to write down the interactions step by stem.

My partner and I decided to divide and conquer a lab. It became very hard for me to test along the way, because I was dependent on his piece to make mine work.

“If You Want To Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want To Go Far, Go Together”