Dev on The Final Artefact

Using Xcode Pre- and Post-actions to Observe Changes to Defaults

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:01:56 +0000

Because UserDefaults persistence is opportunistic, it’s often hard to tell when values truly flush and what changed between runs. In the article I set up an app group prefs watcher with fswatch, convert the binary plist to XML via plutil, and log a timestamped diff for every write—no breakpoints, no in-app logging. If you’ve ever wondered “what did my app really persist?”, this workflow makes it obvious.

Automatically Refreshing NVim plugins

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of the key benefits of modern editors like NVim, Vim, or Emacs is the rich plugin ecosystem. After years with Vim, I switched to NVim and was immediately impressed by its plugin landscape. The Lazy plugin manager—available for NVim > 0.8—quickly became my favourite. Lazy simplifies plugin discovery and management. It offers an intuitive interface and powerful commands that make it easy to add, remove, or update plugins.

On Structuring Python Projects

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Types of Projects

The term Python project can be somewhat misleading. While languages like Swift are designed for specific purposes such as generating macOS/iOS apps, components, and frameworks, Python is used in a much more versatile manner. A Python project might range from an analytical solution developed across multiple Jupyter notebooks to a standalone script querying a database API and extracting results to an application or package facilitating the deployment of models. Each of these projects has its own key usability requirements. For instance, if end-users will utilize our project through a command-line interface, we will focus on argument parsing and other elements facilitating user-friendly execution.

Poor Man's Robust Shiny App Deployment (Part II)

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This article draws on the past post concerned with utilisation of golem for robust deployment of analytical and reporting solutions. For this article, we will assume that we are working with defined working requirements that utilise some of the Labour Market Statistics disseminated through the nomis portal.

Change Plan

What we have

Reporting requirements
Past scriptts we used to create reports with accompanying instructions

What we want

Stronger business continuity - we want to be able to give some access to this project and don’t be concerned with missing files, outdated unavailable documentation and questions on how to produce updated reports. We want self-encompassing entity that takes of care of its technical requirements and user-interaction^[Good parallel can be drawn between this approach and manuals available with life-saving equipment. Equipment delivers technical capacity and manual ensures operational capacity. In case of an inexperienced user one is not useful without the other. We want to ensure that user with minimum required capacity can use the tools correctly.]
Better reproducibility - Easier way to re-run reports on custom parameters
Improved efficiency - We want to have a possibility of quickly creating updated and re-running past reports using the app.
Better development:
- We want to ensure that any change requests to our reporting/analytical stack won’t break crucial functionalities.
- We want to modularise development so new corporate branding or visualisation requirements can be applied with no (or minimal) integration in analytical function

Framework

Package

Future robust development owes a lot to solid foundations. As the aim is to capitalise on the robust R package architecture, we will look to leverage available supporting packages. As a first step, we will construct a new Shiny/R package infrastructure using golem.

Three-Way Operator in R

Fri, 08 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Is there a merit for a three-way operator in R?

Background

In C++20 revision added “spaceship operator”, which is defined as follows:

1
2
3


(a <=> b) < 0 # if lhs < rhs
(a <=> b) > 0 # if lhs > rhs
(a <=> b) == 0 # if lhs and rhs are equal/equivalent.

R implementation

The behaviour can be achieved in R in multiple ways. A one straightforward approach would involve making use of the ifelse statement

`ifelse` implementation

Basic approach would involve comparing the two figures and respectively returning -1 or 1 consistently with the definition above.