Tag: Elm

I’m Rhys, an iOS developer from Cardiff, Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿.

I’ve been a professional iOS developer since 2019, but interested in Swift and iOS development for far longer. I got my first taste in 2014, writing a basic Pokédex app in Swift 1.1 for iOS 8, and later, reproducing the Pokémon battle engine for my university dissertation project – far from my finest code, but I was very early in my software development journey! As you may have gathered, I rather like Pokémon…

So what are my intentions with this website? I want to write about programming, almost certainly with a skew towards Swift and Apple platform development, as that’s primarily what I know. There are ideas I want to get off my chest. There are frameworks I’m excited to write about, such as version 2.0 of The Composable Architecture from Point-Free, or Swift Algorithms from Apple.

I’m also very keen to write about other programming languages, and what I’ve learned from them as a Swift developer. I recently attended iOSDevUK 2026, and really enjoyed Douglas Hill’s talk on Rust for Swift developers, covering similarities between the languages, what Swift developers can learn from Rust and how, in some ways, it’s “Swiftier” than Swift! Some of the concepts we consider idiomatic and “Swifty”, Rust enforces at the compiler level. I’m also interested in writing about Elm, some of the overlap between Elm and Swift, and the projects it’s inspired.

The main reason for me to write is simply that I really enjoy sharing the interesting things I’ve learned and used. I want to share the joy of programming too: the dopamine rush I’ve always got from things like figuring out tricky problems in code – completing a new feature, getting some abstraction finally compiling and working, and refactoring a complex, over-abstracted slab of code down to something much simpler without trading anything meaningful away. I suppose writing is also a selfish way to try and keep myself sharp, keeping me on the lookout for things I find interesting enough to learn well enough to explain and write about!

Why write about programming in 2026?!

I also want to take a stance against the strain of anti-intellectualism we’re seeing in tech right now, predictably from the very people who stand to benefit from software engineers voluntarily de-skilling. I’m gonna choose to ignore the weirdos ranting on stage about how you don’t need to read code any more, and those near enough insisting you must become a glorified return-key presser or get left behind.

I care about the quality of code I put my name to, and put out into the world. I really care about my capacity to read and understand it, and others’ code, so I can learn from it, and share my own advice back. I don’t believe these values are especially unique, either!

I reject the notions that learning more about programming and sharing that is futile, and that everything I love about software development is over. I do not believe that you must give up your craft to produce good quality software now, whatever tooling you use. You don’t need to atrophy your coding skillset – you can choose, if you wish, to augment it.

AI policy

Nothing I write here is going to have been written, edited, or suggested by generative AI models – it’s all going to be my own words, authentically from me.
I’m not completely anti-AI. I use Claude pretty much every day at work¹ . There might be times I use AI to assist in research, e.g. to find edge-cases or counter-points to what I’m writing about, to run a deep investigation on some undocumented Swift feature that I read and verify before writing about, that sort of thing. I might also write more specifically about AI as a topic, one way or the other. Perhaps one day I could write about Apple Foundation Models or link to someone’s post about it, or I might write about an experience I’ve had that wouldn’t have been quite so easy before – I’ve experienced some magic there, it’d be silly to pretend I haven’t. So if and when I write about AI, I’ll try writing from my not-a-booster, not-a-doomer (don’t call me a centrist!) perspective of where I’ve genuinely found it useful for something concrete, something specific.

Anyway, that’s quite enough for an introduction – don’t want it getting self-indulgent… I’ll be back soon with my first real post, about protocols and abstractions in Swift.

Rhys

Addendum

I don’t imagine anyone reading this is hitting my homepage and expecting to find old posts about my teenage skeptic years debunking bogus miracle cures and cancer quacks – but if you were, you can still find them. They’ve been archived as a static site, with comments preserved, at https://archive.rhysmorgan.co. For the preserved blog posts, I’ve added redirects, so hopefully any old links out there still work!

1. Less on the code-generation side right now, more for planning and codebase analysis. ↩︎