Mych’s Declassified Dev Survival Guide: How to Survive WWDC ’22 📱

A JamBlog by Mychal Culpepper, Founder at Pinview

It’s every dev’s favorite/most dreaded time of the year, WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference). In this annual display of opulent minimalism, Apple unveils its plans for the latest upgrades to their suite of hardware products, as well as OS upgrades. While consumer excitement has certainly wained in recent years, this is marginal compared to the overall excitement this event still delivers. Monumental releases like the iPod, iPhone, Airpods, Facetime and a myriad of others have all debuted at WWDC. From the dev side, iOS software upgrades mean almost assuredly one thing : Crashes & Bugs 🦟 ! To help get my fellow SWE through this, I’ve come up with a comprehensive list of helpful things to get you through these trying times 😪:

Survival Guide List

I. Clear Storage 🧼

• This is less of a concern if you have a mac powered by the new M1 chip, but regardless, it’s always best practice to clear storage space for the changes they’re inevitably making to XCode

I apologize to those I may have triggered with the preceding image

• This is also helpful because I can’t tell you how many phantom programs I’ve had for miscellaneous reasons that I’m able to declutter my drive for. A great tool to use is Grand Perspective. It provides a graphical representation of how large certain files on your hard drive are

II. Buy an SSD ⿳

• Piggybacking off of the last item, you’re more than likely working on a few projects of which will likely only grow. While repos are great (personally a BitBucket fan), I highly suggest getting a 1TB SSD.

• Being honest, I’ve actually stored Xcode ITSELF here and run it from my drive. If you’d like to know how to set that up I’ve included the link here

• You can actually buy them for like $50 at Walmart, super good investment

III. Trash Pods that haven’t been updated in 2+ yrs 🗑

• I know Pods/dependencies make our lives so much easier, but these are usually the first things to crash your project when updating

• If it’s a large part of your codebase and not as easy to refactor, I’d recommend holding off on updating (more on this in a minute)

IV. Wait to Update XCode for at least 6 months 🤓

• Unless you’re a dev whose got the patience/pull for experimentation, hold off on updating

• Personally, I like to give it about 6 months, that way S/O and Apple’s Dev Community have a chance to test it out, find major bugs and report them

• This will save you immeasurable time for shipping because you don’t have to spend ~3 days on refactoring everything to make it compatible w/ the latest version of Swift

V. Only Download The Most Stable Version ⎍

• Again, this compliments the above point but only download the most stable version of XCode. There are all sorts of enhancements that can effect run time, testing and god knows what else; Stick to versions that are not betas

VI. PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT FROM THE MAC APP STORE!!! 😰

• This may have changed with the processing power of the M1 chip, but for some reason these downloads have historically been UNBELIEVABLY slow

• It’s far better to download the .xip file from Apple’s Website

VII. While you Ship, Learn about the Latest Updates 🧐

• It’s always best to be proactive, so you aren’t completely blindsided once you finally do decide to update (it’ll be a rough day if you’re still using UIKit)

Welp, those are all my suggestions for now gang. While it’s exciting to get new tools to play with it’s always best to be prepared for how it may affect your current projects. All the best and I’m excited about what’s to come this year! 🍎

MC