So much of all programming, and really all work in general, is developing a common vocabulary, and after that, common goals. That is most of the work in a lot of the projects I work on.

I spent some time this evening starting to code something new for work in C#: a tool for comparing actual drug formularies to required ones. It should be a fun little project.

As an iOS developer, my job is never done, even though my app, SwiftoDo, is internally simple and focused. There are always more features to add. There is competition in the App Store to worry about. There are third party libraries that deal with that break from time to time or have APIs change. Most of all, there is the regular drumbeat of regular iOS updates, which, frustratingly, can break standard UI controls and behaviors, and new hardware to support.

What I like about having my own iOS app is the act of creating something unique, something I actually use every day, and supporting other people who want to use it to. It is a lot of work, but it is also a lot of fun—except for migrating between Swift versions every year; that part I could do without, and hopefully the changes will be more minor as time goes on.

Right now I am trying to knock out several features that have been in development since this summer, and get it all done before Apple no longer supports builds from Xcode 8.3.3. I think, when I finally upgrade to Xcode 9 and do yet another Swift version upgrade of my code, I will drop support for iOS 9, and bump the minimum supported iOS version up to iOS 10.3, or maybe even iOS 11.0. I hate to do that, but support for the older SDK is probably causing me more trouble than it is worth at this point. Still, I don’t want to leave my iOS 9 users with an app that is broken or unstable in any way. That is why I have delayed dropping support so long now.