Having released new versions of Lifetiler, I’m back to making a lot of progress on another app, which I hope to tell you about soon. But I don’t want to give you the impression that all I do these days is code… I also watch and record concerts of songs about code!

First of all, here’s the legendary James Dempsey performing some Swift-related songs at Deep Dish Swift, including a new one about sources of truth in SwiftUI (and elsewhere).

Here it is as a playlist of individual songs. I first heard of James Dempsey back in 2003 when the Model View Controller song he sang at WWDC leaked onto the internet. I then saw him debut Modelin’ Man in person at WWDC 2004. I believe I suggested to him at the time that he should release an album, and was excited when he released Backtrace in 2014.

When I heard he’d be playing at Deep Dish Swift 2025, that played a big part in getting me to sign up — I was hesitant as the hotel and flights were quite an expense for someone who didn’t have a job yet, though the conference was a tremendous networking opportunity. I got to meet many people in person that I’d previously only seen at iOS Dev Happy Hour, or maybe met once in-person at Core Coffee. Although I don’t know what my employment situation will be, I’ve already registered for Deep Dish Swift 2026.

When I heard James would be doing another pilot run of his App Performance and Instruments Virtuoso course, I signed up immediately. I had confirmation I’d registered within 16 minutes of getting the notification that it was happening. I’ve now completed the course, and the new version of Lifetiler is more performant because of it. Incidentally, I think I first heard the word ‘performant’ in French, and I still feel weird about using it in English. It just doesn’t feel like an English word.

Anyway, being a fan of James Dempsey is like waiting for a bus. You don’t see him for 20 years, and then two shows come along at once. Last month he performed at a Seattle Xcoders event, at a retirement party which the retiree was unfortunately unable to attend. I recorded his performance there too! This time there were two new songs — one about Liquid Glass, and another inspired by the recent passing of Bill Atkinson. I very much appreciated the latter, since I got my start in macOS development on HyperCard.

Here’s that one as a playlist of individual songs. I hear that James will be performing in Seattle again next month. I guess this is just a perk of living in the US. Living in the US is like waiting for a bus… you don’t see a single bus in years, but then three James Dempsey concerts show up at once.

And now for something completely different! Jonathan Coulton started this year’s JoCo Cruise with diarrhoea, and isolated for the first three days. When he eventually got back on stage, there were many jokes about his situation. I happened to remember that in 2015, he had joked that he was weirdly looking forward to the first ‘JoCo Poop Cruise’. He meant a cruise where everybody gets norovirus, but instead, this year, JoCo got his own personal Poop Cruise. While processing all my videos of the cruise, I kept clips of all the poop jokes so I could edit them together with that ill-fated wish, into this:

That’s all from me! I’m still writing my own apps, and still looking for a day job. While working on my next app (a text-to-speech-focused Reddit client), I’ve learnt about Swift Concurrency, SwiftData, CloudKit, AirPlay, and Media Player. It’s a lot of fun, especially being at the point of the project where there are so many important improvements I can make each day — and when I have one very excited TestFlight user giving feedback. But it would also be fun to have a day job with a salary, so if you know of anyone who’d be interested in hiring someone like me, put us in contact.