Cocoon Development Training

A while ago we arranged to go up to Leicester in order to get some Apple development training from Stephen Radford at Cocoon. Recently we did said training and I wanted to share some thoughts.

We’ve worked with Stephen on our event ticketing solution, Bonzai and knew he knew his stuff.

A combination of needing to support the Bonzai codebase, and some of our other projects desiring a bit of Apple development knowledge meant we figured it was time to dedicate some learning time to this.

If you’ve ever decided to look into Apple development before you will know it isn’t a straight forward experience. Objective-C vs Swift needs to be considered, package management isn’t just as mature as some of the other ecosystems, and things like Xcode and Apple development practices are an alien concept to many developers.

We contacted Stephen and asked if he could run through some of the main points.

He was happy to oblige and booked a meeting room in the offices they work out of up in Leicester.

The outline

We’d decided upon the following rough outline for the day:

• Creating a project
• Using Cocoapods
• Using Carthage
• Xcode interface
• Interface builder interface
• Autolayout 101
• iOS simulator
• Installation on device
• Archiving apps
• Manual upload or export
• Fastlane deployment
• Testflight
• Apple Dev portal
• Push notification certificates
• App store connect
• Submission to the App Store

Given that both Elaine and myself have negligible experience with this stuff I was interested to see how much we would actually get covered.

Turns out, all of it, and ahead of schedule!

Thoughts

Stephen was an excellent communicator, he moved at a fast but manageable pace and could quickly spot when we made a mistake whilst following along.

He was able to answer any and all questions with ease and had fully formed opinions on all aspects of the development lifecycle.

After a day spent with him we both feel in a much better position to be able to dive through Apple codebases and play with stuff in a more meaningful way.

Cocoon didn’t ask for this review to be written, but we’ve been so happy working with them in general and now with this training that I wanted to publicly call them out as a great Apple development company.

A++ would learn that Xcode really cares about constraints being set again.