I'm Andrew Wagner, a staff engineer turned cofounder building Odo, a YC-backed AI email assistant. I write about company building, working with AI, and the craft of shipping software.
I built a side project, a silly alarm app, without ever reading the code. I lost some control and mastery along the way. I also found a joy of discovery that my careful, controlled programming life had never had.
I told Claude Code I was stepping out for a while, and it did some of my best work of the week. Here's the trick, and the skill I built so I can reach for it on purpose.
Burnout made it easy to stop reviewing AI's work, the one thing I'm most valuable for. That left me with a harder question: when am I avoiding something because it doesn't matter, and when am I avoiding it precisely because it does?
Years ago I wrote that finishing a book was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Starting a company has taken the title, and it's hard in a different way.
Does separating code into extra extensions and/or modules have a meaningful impact on compile times?
While toying around with an app idea I came across the need to develop my own algorithm and therefore return to Data Structures and Algorithms techniques I learned in college. Here is the problem, my process, and my solution.
While updating my app for the iOS 13 SDK, I came across a change in JSONEncoder that broke some of the logic in my code. It now supports encoding top-level values.
What is the value of result after doing: let result = false && true || true
Be warned: there may be a bug in the fancier version of Key Value Observering. I discovered it while implementing a progress callback in my Decree web request library.
A couple very common programming patterns, especially in the Apple world, are Singleton and Shared Instance. People often confuse the two and there's also controversy around them. Let's clear these things up.
I walk through how I solved the question: How do I display a text field directly above the keyboard to prompt the user for some text?
Decree allows you to make HTTP requests in a clear and type-safe way by declaring web services and endpoints. It supports all Apple platforms as well as Linux. It is the culmination of a technique I've developed over many projects. Some of those projects even include both a frontend and backend implemented in Swift that get to share a single source of endpoint declarations.
I recently came across a video showing an “Amazing Crabs Shell Exchange” and realized that it was a perfect example from nature of how seemingly complex (or “amazing”) behavior can emerge from simple governing desires. This is directly applicable to programming. Lets explore how.
A look at the interesting technical challenges I ran into while developing this app.
A list of core skills that are necessary in almost every app. If you can do all of these things reliably, you are well on your way to being a great hire as an iOS developer
There are many ways you could choose to host a Swift website or web service, but here I share what has worked well for me.
There are many ways you could choose to host a Swift website or web service, but here I share what has worked well for me.
A list of skills, beyond just the ability to get the job done, every Swift developer should know before they get paid to develop.
The hardest part of developing Server-Side Swift is the incomplete nature of Foundation including some pretty critical basic functionality. After I thought up this technique, the problems I ran into changed from mountains to mole hills.
I have been extremely busy so I haven't made the time to write any blog posts. In this post I give a brief overview of what I have been up to and what are my short-term plans for the future.
An in-depth discussion of my experience writing a technical book about learning Swift.
An practical example of how curried functions in Swift can be useful for implementing a logger
My attempt to implement a KVO replacement purely in Swift
A list of key concepts to know when getting started with Swift and links to resources to stay current with its development.
A list with concrete examples of when and when not to use Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals in Swift.
A summary with examples of what an Optional is in Swift
Concrete examples for some cool and practical new features in Swift that will improve the daily lives of iOS and OS X programmers.
Basic value types like String and Int can be secretly converted to Objective-C types like NSString and NSNumber. This has some interesting effects and implications.
A more declarative and testable way to display alerts in iOS.
Testing asynchronous code in Objective-C can be a real pain unless you make one simple change to the way you program it in the first place.
A list with descriptions of the main podcasts that have made me a better developer and keep me informed.
The way that I handle my to-do list so that I stay on task with minimal effort.
While developing a Rails backend using Devise for user management, I ran into trouble determining a user's status. This is how I solved that problem.
I hate being constantly distracted by incoming emails. To solve this problem I decided to drastically reduce the amount of emails I receive. This is how I did that.
Being and independent developer can be extremely stressful. It is important that you learn to accept, appreciate, and channel to turn it into something positive.
A series of posts about how to be a better independent developer
No person is an island. It is virtually impossible to be successful in anything that you do without having a good support structure around you.
A look at how pushing through discomfort is exactly where I want to be.
A system to make version control change sets more understandable at a glance.
A way to make all path changes on a CAShapeLayer be animated automatically.
My theory on how user experience's and code architecture's interests can converge. Good UX can encourage good code reuse and code reuse can encourage effective UX.
A library to allow binding a UITableView directly to a to-many property. The library automatically handles insertions and deletions as long as you make sure the to-many property emits KVO notifications.
Speech is still a relatively new interface. Technology is finally starting to catch up to the dreams that we've had since the invention of the computer itself: dreams of having natural conversations…
An extension to NSObject that adds the allows binding the properties of two different objects together, allowing for much more declarative and understandable code.
How I came to the decision to finally take the plunge and go independent.
Discusses a high level way that we can integrate UX designers better into Agile software practices.