Dimitar Chakarov

Recent Posts

  • October 14, 2018

    MacBook Keyboard Setup: The Mysterious § Key

    When you start a new job in an office, you usually get a new laptop. If your job is an iOS developer, you probably get a MacBook Pro. The first few days are usually dedicated to setting up your environment, big part of which are the keyboard layout and shortcuts. My first job is to install the Bulgarian keyboard layout and to remap Cmd-Space to switch between English and Bulgarian. I realise this is too specific to me and as such probably has no value to you. A thing a bit more useful for you - the second thing I do is swap the two shortcuts for screenshots. That means Shift-Cmd-4 to save the screenshot of the selected area into the clipboard and Ctrl-Shift-Cmd-4 to save to a file. I realised I was pasting screenshots into chats way more than I was needing them saved for later.

  • July 17, 2018

    Am I Running On A User Device?

    A common problem every iOS developer has to solve is finding out whether the app is being executed on a user device (via AppStore), a test device (via TestFlight) or a dev device (via Xcode). This is useful for deciding the level of logging, showing and hiding “admin” features, and connecting to the right backend environment.

  • July 15, 2018

    My GitHub - A New Beginning

    After I finished cleaning up my GitHub account last month it bugged me how empty it was. On the other side, I didn’t want to upload just anything, as that would have lead to another clean up. So I spent a few days thinking about it and in the mean time I managed to read the book App Architecture (more on that in the next post) which inspired me to rewrite my two apps currently on the AppStore.

  • June 25, 2018

    where are all the stories?

    In trying to refresh my online presence, I went through all the things me online and decided to get some stats out. My initial idea was to create a sort of a basic homepage or a single screen app representing me. After some experimenting and testing (meaning that I actually created the app and the homepage and showed it to friends who didn’t like it), I decided to take a more streamlined approach to my home page. Mostly because my home page shouldn’t be just a glorified CV. In fact, it shouldn’t be a CV at all. So I scraped the whole thing and started over, culminating at the current state of it (for now).

  • June 14, 2018

    new site, who dis?

    After a successful redesign of our company website seenit.io I felt inspired to redesign and rearrange my personal web presence. I made a long list of all my websites and all the most important places I had some kind of presence on (i.e. StackOverflow, GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter) and started planning a strategy. I decided that, since most of these places invite you to link to your personal website, it would be smart to start with that, so I can have something I like to link to.