It’s now been almost exactly one year since Apple Music was announced, so I thought I’d give a bit of a retrospective of that time.

I inadvertently kicked up a big stink two months ago by pointing out how slow Swift was, which was version 1.1 at the time. Apple has since responded with a new beta version of Xcode which includes a shiny new version of Swift, version 1.2. Since it promised to:

… produce binaries that run considerably faster, and new optimizations deliver even better Release build performance.

I thought it would be prudent to re-run my tests and see just how much Swift has improved, if at all.

Much and more has been written about Apple’s new programming language, Swift. I even did a talk about it at Yow: Connected 2014. If you saw me there, you’d know that I’m not the biggest fan of Swift. I think the rollout of it has been an absolute disaster: the compiler is a shambles, the language design is inconsistent in places¹ and it’s stupidly difficult to get working in libraries, particularly if you want to support iOS 7. Surely though, at the very least its performance would be all right. After all, it’s designed to be more static and do more checking at compile-time and is meant to be made with the LLVM optimiser in mind…

Let’s talk about performance in Swift, then.

Just as it is with coding standards, everyone thinks they have the answers when it comes to hiring new people. I’m under no such delusions. I don’t pretend that this method will work for everyone. It won’t. This is simply the mechanism that I used to hire the team I currently work with. The team in question has turned out rather spectacularly, thanks in no small part to the effectiveness of this method. If you or your business is looking to hire more developers, I’d encourage you to consider this method, or at the very least, consider simplifying your hiring process to just the bare essentials that tell you what you’re really looking for.

It’s no secret that the rhythm game genre is dying, or at least wheezing its last wretched breaths. From 2008 to 2009, both the Guitar Hero franchise and Rock Band franchises saw up to 50% declines in revenue – Activision responded by releasing even more games, to the collective sigh of the entire games-consuming public. The last major title in the genre, the venerable Rock Band 3, released in 2010 and the finest entry of the bunch in my humble opinion, barely sold a million copies. Compare this to the monstrously successful Guitar Hero 3 from 2008 which sold somewhere over 3.5 million copies and it paints a pretty depressing picture.