Scott Matthewman

Improve your test code by moving away from the DRY principle This article is based on a lightning talk given at LRUG’s February 2024 meetup. In the Ruby community, the same acronyms have a tendency to pop up frequently. There’s MINASWAN (Matz Is Nice…

This story also appears on my blog m currently building a large and rather complicated app in SwiftUI that involves quite a lot of data. While the app handles most tasks internally, there are some features of spreadsheets like Excel or Numbers that…

How to express “none of the above” without reaching for custom code The Picker in SwiftUI is an incredibly versatile view designed to allow the user to a pick from a list of discrete values. Depending on the platform you’re using, those values can be…

This post discusses changes to SwiftUI first revealed at WWDC 2021 and are still in beta, so are subject to change. If you’ve spent any time working with modal views in SwiftUI, you’ll usually want to have some way of dismissing them in code. As I…

Creating a dummy view that prevents users from accessing your app until they log in is quick and easy using ‘full screen cover’ modal views. This article is geared towards SwiftUI on iOS/iPadOS 14, and example code is written using Xcode 12.5. The…

Building custom controls in a declarative style is easy with SwiftUI — and you can do it all on an iPad if you like Apple’s declarative visual design framework SwiftUI, introduced in 2019, ushered in a very different way of thinking for those of us…

It is nine years since the passing of Elisabeth Sladen, an actor who was beloved to many as Sarah Jane Smith, the quintessential Doctor Who companion. Upon hearing the news, I wrote this piece for The Stage’s TV Today blog. That blog and its contents…

Applying your style guide selectively is the way to stay sane, but takes a little work TL;DR Relax about the state of your old code (for now); work out how to make your new code (including changes) conform to your style first. In my previous blog…

Ruby and Rails developers: adding style linters to your legacy projects is harder than it should be. Let’s do something about that. This is the first of a series of posts I’m writing about implementing RuboCop in legacy Ruby and Rails projects, and…

On a recent project, we hit an awkward snag: a set of tests, which ran perfectly fine locally in our Rails application’s RSpec suite, but would mostly fail when they ran on our continuous integration server. What would be most annoying is that this…

Ruby on Rails (strictly speaking, the ActiveSupport gem which is installed as a prerequisite for all Rails projects, but which can be installed and used independently of Rails) has some pretty useful features built in. One such feature is something…

I am ten years old. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Doctor Who fan. I’m not old enough to remember any other actor playing the Doctor, although I’m aware that he regenerates. But I’ve been an ardent fan of the older man — older even than…

Here we are again, with ten talking points about this week’s episode of Doctor Who: Smile by Frank Cottrell Boyce. For newcomers, last week’s 10 Things About Who: The Pilot explains what little rationale there is behind each post. And if you haven’t…

A few years back — in modern numbering terms, Doctor Who’s 7th season — I got into the habit of writing weekly posts to accompany each episode. Not reviews as such, more a series of ruminations, mind wanderings and general impressions, each Ten…