I've become accustomed to using yearly themes – rather than New Years resolution – thanks to CGP Grey, who has a very good summary of yearly themes.

It took me a while to home in on it but this year the title of my theme will be "Year of Small."

I'll be focusing on all things small:

• Small people: spending time with and giving the best life to my now 9-month-old son.
• Small home improvements: finally doing those small tasks and improvements, such as buying a bedside table and getting rid of things I no longer use.
• Small work: I want to focus on releasing smaller updates for existing project, alongside a higher quantity of smaller projects that serve as proof of concepts and methods of learning new technology.
• Small activities: small hobbies I can with my wife, such as new board games and outside activities.

At the end of the year I'll post a "year in review," although I hope to revisit this every 3 months to make sure I'm still focusing on the right things.

Anything related to this theme will be posted under the year-of-small tag.

Swift Packages are JSON files that describe a collection of packages. This post will explain how to sign these packages with a trusted certificate entirely from the terminal. These methods should work on Linux and macOS alike. At the end I describe how to have Swift on Linux implicitly trust these packages.

Using this technique I have published my own package collection.

If you're targeting macOS only and find GUIs more intuitive I recommend following the “Swift Package Collection” blog post from Shaps, which is the post that finally made this “click” for me.

At WWDC21 Apple introduced DocC, a tool for creating archives of Swift documentation that includes the static files required to host a version of the documentation on a website.

In this post I will summarise various methods of serving a DocC archive:

• Netlify
• Vapor middleware
• nginx
• Apache

All the examples provided here are hosting the DocC archive for VaporDocC, the Vapor middleware I wrote for hosting DocC archives.

The iCal format, first defined as a standard as RFC 2445 in 1998, is the universally accepted format for distributing calendar files, mainly used for distributing events.

As part of my QR code scanning app Scanula I added support for detecting events in scanned objects. Thanks to the fantastic libical and the Swift wrapper swift-ical it's fairly easy to parse an iCal feed, but adding it to iOS is a bit trickier.