This Eats These

Backstory

Swift had only been announced six months earlier, yet we couldn’t wait to jump in and start using it, even if that meant drastically breaking stuff along the way. Our first few pull requests were largely an exercise in writing Objective-C code in Swift, i.e. verbose and not at all idiomatic. As a result, we ended up leaving the same review comments again and again, mostly pointing out syntactic cruft that would have been necessary in Objective-C land, but were entirely redundant in Swift. To make the reviewer’s life a little easier I came up with this little cheat sheet, which not only saved minutes worth of typing, but also added a sprinkle of colour to our code reviews.

Artist’s Notes

Yes, these animals are direct copies of their 2015-era Apple emoji representations. I think this is the only comic that served any practical purpose—and thus the only one that was economically justifiable—and can therefore be considered successful from a design perspective.