2025: Enter the Ewoks

Before I get into anything serious, I just want to humble brag and let anyone reading this know that my year officially began with the destruction of the second Death Star. At 9:56:55pm Central Standard Time, I meticulously hit play on the Disney+ version of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. I have to tell you, it was the best way to end 2024. Luke Skywalker firmly refused the dark side of the Force, Darth Vader was redeemed, Palpatine kicked rocks (we’re not going to talk about how he somehow returned right now). As the clock switched from 11:59pm to 12:00am (actually 23:59 to 00:00, if we’re talking about my specific device), the Death Star went boom! All of Palpatine’s plans were foiled because he didn’t foresee the influence of the Ewoks—no really. Stop and think on it for a second. I think the moral of the story is that we need some Ewoks in 2025, and I’ve got mine, thankfully.

The iOS Community is largely my crowd of Ewoks. For years, they’ve been so kind to me, and it’s given me some of my very best friends. If you’re reading this and you’re involved in the iOS/Swift Community, I hope you’ll consider them your Ewoks too. I’ve never known such a large body of folks who hold themselves to the same standards of quality and kindness. The beautiful thing is that this isn’t the only community out there. Regardless of your industry, you can find your Ewoks! And I really hope that you’ll take a mindful minute in 2025 to assess the Ewoks you want to form lasting relationships with.

And now for a bit of news—this year I’m shipping an app of my own, and no, I did not just come up with it. I’ve spent the last two months really digging into it, and all the things I want it to do for its 1.0 release are in place—which means it would be an incredible waste of time to can it now. I’m aiming for a Spring release, which judging by any calendar, is actually quite soon. I’d say I’m equal parts nervous and excited, so maybe I should stick with Simon Sinek’s trick to see me through. It’s easy to be passionate about this app, though, because I feel I’ve finally had my “aha! I’m solving a real problem” moment. Long have I waited for an inspiration like that. If you’re a parent, I think you’re going to love it.

Apart from my solo app, I’m going strong with the contracts, and I feel that I’ve done some of my best work with some of these folks, and I simply cannot wait to have you experience for yourself what we’ve done. I abide strongly by the idea that if I’m not in charge of a project, it’s not my story to tell, but wow I’m struggling to keep my mouth shut.

That’s all for now. May the Force be with you.

Is this thing on?

I’ve tried to start a blog three times in my life.

No, really. Once in high school—the one I’m proudest of, actually—and twice later on. I think with each successive attempt, the general idea of blogging got less and less inspired. Now I know what you’re thinking: Adrian, is a fourth effort going to fix that? I read that question in the voice of one of my close friends, and if he’s reading this, I hope he gets a chuckle out of it because it’s exactly what he’d ask me if he were sitting across the table from me. But to answer the question honestly, I’m not sure what it’ll fix, but I think this time I’m not really setting out to fix something or to be someone. I constantly fear saying not just the right thing, but the best thing—the thing that elicits laughs, earns me a react or two in my group messages, or otherwise gets recognised for the cheeky verbal gold that it is. And that’s exhausting. Every year, another close friend and I set our New Years’ themes—not a resolution, but a singular word or phrase that we want to carry in our minds to grow as people. This year, mine was “tenacity”, and I learned many other meanings of that word other than the one I fixated upon. My intended tenacity was kind of on par with Conan the Barbarian’s phrase from the 1982 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger: Let us take the world by the throat and make it give us what we desire.

At the year’s end, I don’t think that’s at all what happened. In fact, the opposite happened quite frequently, and I felt the world had me by my throat more than I’d like. There’s a reflex I’ve possessed for most of my life to sit amidst my losses a little pitifully, and I don’t mean that to judge anyone’s processing of difficult moments. But I’ve sort of made my identity about the difficulties I’ve had, and it’s taken a few severely painful moments this year to come to this conclusion.

I was in the Atlanta airport trying to race home when our five-year-old golden retriever lost the fight against cancer, and my wife, and a competent veterinarian, did everything she could to beat it. Over the summer, I lost one of my best friends suddenly in a freak accident, and nothing’s been the same since. I’ve admittedly overplayed Ed Sheeran’s album, Subtract, through a lot of this. Autumn rolled in as it does with its scarlet glory, and we stared glassy eyed at the ultrasound that showed us that one of the twins we were expecting had passed away—his name is Michael Francis Eves, and he deserves to be remembered despite a cruelly short lifetime. Shortly after, amidst all of this, I got asked to leave my small business, a children’s theatre company, because I distractedly made a costly mistake in my emotional haze, and I obliged. I’ve spent the better part of these twelve months feeling sorry for myself, and most of it rightly so. I say all this not to invite you to pity me, but just to share with me for just a moment. All of these things have put me in a mental headspace unseen and untrod, so of course how could I express tenacity with a bunch of new and ugly feelings? As it turns out, I think the tenacity I needed to learn is really just as simple as gently holding on to those you love, and that includes yourself.

So I’m going to end the year with that tenacity, and I want to focus on the beautiful relationships and things that I’m fortunate enough to have. I’ll start with the losses to finally anoint them with the ethereal power of acceptance, that last pinnacle in the stages of grief. Thor was honestly the best dog we’ve ever had, and the fact that we got five years with that dog, let alone five minutes, was truly special. We still talk about him as though he was some legendary figure in our family. Moreso than any other pet we’ve had, he really participated fully as a member of the family, and it’s mind blowing to me that that is a lesson I learned from a dog because I struggle with that a bunch. My friend Wade was amongst the best caliber of human beings you could ever contrive—he had such a true goodness to him, a light humor, and a sense of loyalty fiercer than anything I’ve witnessed. This was a relationship I was so fortunate to have, and I really hope that at least one of my friends in the world feels that I’m half as good a friend as Wade was. I could rest easy on that. Michael Francis, there’s a lot we don’t get to have, and I’m sorry, my son. I so desperately wish for a different ending to this story. There’s no way around that, no way to really embellish that with a synthetic sense of beauty. But you are my son, and I am glad we share that, for no passage of time can erase that, nor the love that I carry for you. The same from my error in the theatre company has largely faded, and I’m fortunate enough that the mistake was a blissful accident as opposed to an unscrupulous intent. I lost friends to this, but I also realised what a real friend does and does not do for one another.

As unfortunate things happen to everyone in existence, for I do not claim a monopoly on bad things, great things occur too. I got an opportunity for work that was so fantastic that I’m going to give it its own paragraph. The software engineering industry has been largely marred by egregious layoffs in the past few years. I experienced a couple of those, but my attitude on them has largely shifted thanks to a brief conversation with Ellen Shapiro, someone with an incredibly massive heart. If I recall correctly, it went something like this:

I was sitting in the speaker room at iOS Conf SG, and Ellen was there with me. I had expressed a certain level of anxiety after experience a layoff at the Walt Disney Company as a part of the notorious 7,000, and I’m sure I was heavy on the pessimism. When I’d finished speaking, Ellen looked at me plainly and asked, “First time?”

It was not a remark of sarcasm or a callous walk-it-off attitude—it was communicated with wit and empathy with a remarkable brevity. Ellen had experienced layoffs, too. A lot of us have. And as she told me one of her stories, I realised this kind of thing happens. It happened again after that, but it really wasn’t as much of a ground-shaking moment. I found something immediately after, and it brought me a lot of happiness—and friendship.

There’s an app called Foodnoms—if you haven’t downloaded it, I strongly recommend it, especially as we head into the New Year. And no one paid or prompted me to say this. It’s a wonderful thing when you get to work on something you 100% believe in, and in my case, it 100% was meant to help people. Foodnoms is an app used to track your nutrition and set goals for yourself based on those things, and Ryan Ashcraft is its creator. And it’s time for that paragraph I promised. Ryan let me contract on Foodnoms for some really cool work—I’m not really going to get into exactly what I did until he feels comfortable sharing because that’s his story to tell. But the two of us got started on this work like two outlaws living in the Wild West. Documentation was sparse, examples were few, and Ryan wanted to be one of the best, if not the best. If you take a look at Foodnoms, you’ll get a taste of what the best feels like, and yet Ryan isn’t so saturated with the idea of “the best” that it comes off as cocky or narcissistic, but far from it. To say he is an excellent communicator is an understatement. Ryan has this enviable ability where he can clearly describe what he wants, and his no’s don’t feel at all crushing. He understands how to balance what needs to be done with the sensibilities of basic human needs. I’ve mentioned this to him, and he says he’s learned things from what he’s read, et al. But I think it takes a special kind of person to be receptive to that at all. I think I started out loving working on Foodnoms, but by the end of the contract, the thing I enjoyed most was the relationship I formed with this person. Ryan’s a good friend. A great one, actually. If you know him, you know. If you don’t, he’ll likely be at Deep Dish Swift 2025, so start the queue early. But the conversations I’ve had with this person have been great, and I’ve learned so much. Somewhere down the line, I think Ryan somehow inspired me to start shedding this way of life where I equate my hardships with my identity, and I cannot even begin to describe how grateful I am for that. Of course, I can’t say for sure how grateful he’d be for all the attempts to nudge him into (Taylor) Swiftie culture, but it’s part of the package, right?

So here we are at the end of 2024, a mixed bag of a year. It had its joys, and it had its pains, but though all of it, we have community. Let’s quell the suspicion that I’ve dodged the initial question “what’s different about this time”? To be honest and frank, I simply believe it’s the first time I’m just going to write things I’m proud of, accept constructive criticism where it counts, and to treasure the community that I am so grateful to have. You can expect musings such as these, though this is really more of a prologue, but I’ll sprinkle in my experiences with software development, most notably with the Apple platforms. I’ll most definitely be using this to promote my upcoming app, but more on that in a few days. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for joining me on this journey of vulnerability and experience.

Let’s make something special with 2025.