Jon Reid

👋 Greetings, Bluesky! I've been a developer in the Apple ecosystem since Mac OS 7. Got test-infected. Wrote a book for iOS developers. I'm an Exvangelical (not a typo), originally from Japan, love music (especially prog and fusion).

Star Trek fans mourn the passing of Lieutenant Chekov. But I remember Walter Koenig most as Bester, the snarkiest of bad guys on Babylon 5. youtu.be/s72fJb7a-s8?...

Kind of weird: I used to work just down the street from Theranos.

How to Write SwiftUI Tests That Survive Redesigns https://qualitycoding.org/find-swiftui-views-unit-tests/

Starting your first SwiftUI test with TDD? Assert First gets fiddly when ViewInspector is involved. So outline the test as plain-English comments first, and you'll know where you're going before writing code. https://qualitycoding.org/describe-test-plain-english/

Last night, I used AI to help me assign date info and captions to some of my mother-in-law's scanned photos. Then I had it extract a skill. It even created several scripts. "grandma-photos" will be ready for the next batch of photos. So designing skills isn't just for work.

Would you write more SwiftUI tests if they didn't break every time the UI changed? https://qualitycoding.org/find-swiftui-views-unit-tests/

Type one word, tab through four placeholders, and you've got a robust view finder for your SwiftUI unit tests. Here's my findview snippet in action: https://qualitycoding.org/find-swiftui-views-unit-tests/

Our Honda Odyssey has passed 200,000 miles. What a trooper.

Most iOS developers never unit test their SwiftUI views. The usual excuse is "they'd be too brittle." That excuse has a fix. https://qualitycoding.org/find-swiftui-views-unit-tests/

From Fragile to Robust: Finding Views in SwiftUI Unit Tests https://qualitycoding.org/find-swiftui-views-unit-tests/

Find SwiftUI Views in Unit Tests, the Robust Way https://qualitycoding.org/find-swiftui-views-unit-tests/

Bringing back a classic post. Kent Beck's Decompose Run-On Tests. Updated for Swift Testing jaimzuber.com/testing/deco... Kent's original Facebook Note is the post I've shared the most when teaching devs to write maintainable test suites

RIP Margaret Hamilton https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007

How can you learn and practice Swift TDD, refactoring, or working with legacy code? With these Swift "code kata" exercises. Enter the dojo… https://qualitycoding.org/swift-code-kata/

LLMs frequently state that a test is “flaky” or “previously failing” as an excuse not to fix it. Is that the result of reinforcement learning, or have you all been doing that in the training data?

“It takes experiencing the fixed system to know that there was a problem that needed fixing.”

This is outstanding both as a piece of parody and as a more digestible explanation of what happened with the Hugging Face hack. https://www.frogandtoad.ai/

What if there were a way to get feedback on your code every time you compiled? Find problems in code more quickly by taking your Xcode warnings to the max. https://qualitycoding.org/xcode-warnings/

In my talk at try! Swift Tokyo, I explained how to make Swift mock objects. Unless we're careful, they can lead to fragile tests. Let's make them flexible. https://qualitycoding.org/try-swift-mock-objects/

Do you remember?

How can you increase confidence in your test code? Who tests the tests? Here are the techniques I depend on to enable bold refactoring of tests. https://qualitycoding.org/who-tests-the-tests/

When refactoring in small steps, sometimes you have to make a mess in order to clean a mess. Download the code and walk through these refactoring steps. https://qualitycoding.org/refactoring-cleaning-mess/

One of the weirder trends in Big Tech’s AI obsession is the idea that expertise is becoming less valuable. Imagine two arguments: 1. AI enables radiologists to review more scans. 2. AI enables anyone to be a radiologist. “Everyone is a builder” increasingly sounds like Big Tech embraced #2.

pragprog.com/titles/jrleg...

A faithful new rendition of the music of my youth, back when 20-minute pieces were the thing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUo5...

"My Big 5 takeaways from iOS Unit Testing by Example" book review by Dan Smith https://medium.com/kinandcartacreated/my-big-5-takeaways-from-ios-unit-testing-by-example-fea06fdad2a0

When you're starting TDD, the hardest part is knowing where to begin. What should the first test be? What even counts as a "first step"? https://qualitycoding.org/tdd-where-do-you-even-begin/

Enter /insights into Claude! The report it generated for me lists: - What's working - What's hindering you - Quick wins to try - Ambitious workflows

What a circus. 🤡

Speed up your Swift development with custom Xcode key bindings for automated refactoring. Learn which shortcuts I use, why they matter, and how to stay in flow. https://qualitycoding.org/xcode-key-bindings-refactoring/

A hospital at 100% bed capacity can't absorb demand, faster triage barely helps. Same trap when people are kept maximally busy: no slack means no ability to adapt or innovate. "No resource idle" is the biggest generator of waste, Eli Goldratt.

"Your GitHub Copilot access has been renewed" …Thanks? (For something I haven't used in a year.)

In TDD we're creating the test code and the production code in parallel. The 3 Laws of TDD come to our rescue, freeing us to focus on one thing at a time. https://qualitycoding.org/3-laws-tdd/

After all these years… the climax of the Utopia Theme still sends electricity through my body. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYWR...

How can we bypass the normal SwiftUI app launch sequence during testing? We've done this for app delegates, so let's also do it for SwiftUI apps. https://qualitycoding.org/bypass-swiftui-app-launch-unit-testing/

LLM coding assistants can free up brain cycles to concentrate on your customer's problems instead of the minutiae of code. But how do we get the best out of them? @iamleeg.bsky.social discusses "Patterns of AI-augmented software engineering" at iOSDevUK in Sept www.iosdevuk.com