Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦

The king is dead, long live the king 🍎

On Apple's CEO change

Liquid Glass - first impressions

Man I hate changes

Running Bluesky PDS undockered

A bit over a year ago, in the first week of January 2025, I migrated my main Bluesky account to my own PDS on a Netcup VPS. It’s been quite easy to set up using the official installer, and it’s been r…

zzzzzzz

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My 2025 review & plans for 2026

More ATProto stuff

Skythread rewrite status

140 commits later

November updates 🌧️

Skythread, Svelte, blogs… and more

ATProto blog posts collection

I come across a lot of blog posts about the AT Protocol and Bluesky technicals – both on Bluesky official blogs and those of the team members, and by independent developers from the community. So many…

Everybody has a Leaflet, so do I!

On switching from micro.blog

Test post

for testing

Launching Lycan - a search tool for your likes

About a new tool I've built, which lets you search for text in all the posts you've liked, reposted, quoted or bookmarked

How I ran one Ruby app on three SQL databases for six months

Since June 2023, I’ve been running a service written in Ruby (Sinatra) that provides several Bluesky custom feeds (initially built with a feed for the iOS/Mac developers community in mind, later expan…

Introduction to AT Protocol

Walkthrough of the various parts and concepts in Bluesky's AT Protocol (ATProto), the types of servers involved and how it all fits together

Skythread updates

A bit about what I've been working on in May/June

Social media update 2025

So here we are, halfway through 2025, a bit over 2.5 years after the Eloncalypse… For better or worse, the Twitter as we knew it in the 2010s and the communities we had there are mostly gone. But it d…

Firehose go brrr

About some more optimizations in the firehose consumer, and the PR I made for the faye-websocket library

Speeding up the firehose

About the recent changes I made in my code & database config to bring the firehose processing speed from ~2k evt/s to 4k+

MacBook Air vs. Pro

A comparison between the two MacBooks I've tested

Year 2024 review

Micro.blog journal

Update 17.11.2025: I’ve migrated this journal blog now from Micro.blog to Leaflet, a new blogging service built on top of Bluesky’s ATProto. I wrote about this here, the new URL is https://lab.mackuba…

Postgress progress

Optimizing the Postgres database for my feed service

March 2024 projects update

I’ve been still pretty busy with various Bluesky- and social-related projects recently, so here’s a small update on what I’ve been working on since my November post, if you’re interested: Skythread –…

Social media update - Elon's Twitter and Mastodon

Update 01.03.2023: Updated Mastodon address - my previous instance has been unexpectedly shut down and I had to make a new account. I’ve decided to set up my own server to make sure it won’t happen ag…

New edition of the "Guide to NSButton styles"

Note (Oct 2023): The names of the buttons have been changed again in the SDK in macOS Sonoma - I will update the blog post again once I have Sonoma on one of my Macs :) Back in October 2014 I wrote a…

TypeScript on Corona Charts

Back in spring I built a website that lets you browse charts of coronavirus cases for each country separately, or to compare any chosen countries or regions together on one chart. I spent about a mont…

WatchKit Adventure #4: Tables and Navigation

< Previously on WatchKit Adventure… Two weeks ago I posted the first part of a tutorial about how to build an Apple Watch app UI using WatchKit, using a WKInterfaceController and a storyboard. We’ve …

WatchKit Adventure #3: Building the App UI

< Previously on WatchKit Adventure… This is the third part of my series about building a WatchKit app that shows current air pollution level on the watch face (it started here). In this episode, we’r…

SwiftUI betas - what changed before 1.0

In the last few weeks I’ve been trying to catch up on SwiftUI - watching WWDC videos, reading tutorials. Not the new stuff that was announced 2 months ago though - but the things that people have been…

Photo library changes in iOS 14

I’m the kind of person who cares a lot about their digital privacy. It makes me very uncomfortable when I see ads on Facebook for something I opened on another site a moment ago, and I generally don’t…

Notes from WWDC

When I watch conference talks, I like to take notes - either on an iPhone or iPad when I’m in the conference room, or on the Mac when I’m watching online like in case of WWDC (I’ve never seen it in pe…

I'm building an ad blocker

Since my update to the iOS version of Banner Hunter was rejected by app review, the app’s been in a kind of Schrödinger state, both dead and alive. It’s still selling those few copies a week, and I’m …

Coronavirus charts

I’ve been tracking the growth of the new coronavirus ever since it first appeared in China in the last week of January, and even more since it spread to Europe around mid February. Initially I’ve been…

SwiftUI quotes

I was going through some saved links and open tabs from June recently while finishing the WWDC collection post. I found a lot of interesting quotes about SwiftUI, Catalyst and the future of Apple plat…

New stuff from WWDC 2019

As I’m writing these words, it’s the last day of November and the temperature has just dropped to close to 0°C here in Poland. But let’s move back to a better time for a moment, to the first days of J…

SwiftUI on AppKit: Building a Dark Mode switcher

I spent a large part of last week learning and playing with SwiftUI. So far it’s been pretty frustrating at times since I kind of feel like I forgot everything I knew, but I’m also very excited about …

Thoughts on SwiftUI

Like everyone, I was shocked by Apple’s surprise reveal of SwiftUI at WWDC last week. We’ve heard rumors of some kind of declarative, multi-platform framework coming sometime in the future, but I don’…

WatchKit Adventure #2: Minimum Viable Complication

< Previously on WatchKit Adventure… This post is the second (or technically third) part of my series about building a WatchKit app that shows current air pollution level on the watch face. If you hav…

Setting up Piwik (Matomo) analytics on Ubuntu + Nginx

I’ve used several website analytics services over the years, including Statcounter, W3Counter, Clicky and Gauges (Google Analytics always seemed kind of too complicated and pro-focused for me). I don’…

WatchKit Adventure #1: The Big Picture

Update 03.07.2019: watchOS 6 has changed a lot of things that I’ve written about here, so I went through the post again and updated all parts that got out of date. < Previously on WatchKit Adventure……

WatchKit Adventure #0: Intro

Ever since I saw the first Apple Watch announced on stage, I wanted to learn to write apps for it. I bought my first Watch half a year later, when they finally appeared in Europe, with that thought in…

New stuff from WWDC 2018

For the last 3 WWDC’s I’ve been collecting ordered lists of all new features and APIs added in the new releases of Apple’s OSes, either announced in the keynote or one of the talks, or in release note…

Dark Side of the Mac: Updating Your App

(Part 1 is available here.) Last week I posted an article here about how the “Dark Mode” in macOS 10.14 works behind the scenes and how such features as appearances, materials and vibrancy, which wer…

Dark Side of the Mac: Appearance & Materials

One of the most exciting announcements at this WWDC was the introduction of a long-awaited “dark mode” in macOS 10.14 Mojave, which lets you use a whole desktop with all the apps on it in a dark theme…

What's new in notifications in iOS 12

One of the things that caught my attention in the WWDC videos I watched last week were the improvements in the notification system, meant to on one hand give more control over notifications to the use…

Changes to location tracking in iOS 11

Apart from a whole bunch of new frameworks (see the whole list here), iOS 11 also makes some major changes to existing APIs. One of the affected areas is location tracking. If your app only uses locat…

New stuff from WWDC 2017

It’s that time of the year again - if you’re like me, you’ve probably spent a lot of time in the last few weeks following everything that’s been announced at WWDC, digging into release notes, watching…

MacBook Pro 2016 - an iOS developer's review

Here are some thoughts about my new MacBook Pro that I’ve been using for the last few weeks (the Santa Claus from DHL brought it to me just before Christmas), hopefully this will help someone who’s co…

New stuff from WWDC 2016

Following the tradition from last year, here’s my complete list of all interesting features and updates I could find in Apple’s OSes, SDKs and developer tools that were announced at this year’s WWDC. …

New stuff from WWDC 2015

Here’s my own list of the interesting stuff announced during this year’s WWDC, collected from the keynotes, various Apple docs, blog posts and tweets. If you’re planning to watch the videos, I really…

Testing Retina images on an older Mac

Update 7.12.2020: Added info at the bottom about a UserDefaults setting you can use instead. If you build iOS apps, you’re used to providing all icons and other images in @1x and @2x versions for old…

Accessing user location data in iOS 8

In iOS 8 Apple made some changes to how apps are supposed to request access to location data. If you use CLLocationManager and you don’t make any changes for iOS 8 compatibility, your app might stop r…

How to add icons to the menu bar on Yosemite

Mac applications often add their icons to the notification area on the right side of the menu bar. That way they can show you some status changes by changing the icon image, and they can also save som…

Setting up an HTTPS site on Nginx

This is my SSL configuration guide. There are many like it, but this one is mine… Last week I needed to set up my first HTTPS site for Hive Mac [link removed - site has been shut down since then], an…

Making iOS apps compatible with iPhone 6/6+

This is the first part of a new (hopefully) longer series of tutorial-like posts. I’m planning to write shorter posts now but more often, based on specific things that I learn while working on my curr…

A guide to NSButton styles

The NSButton class used for making buttons in Mac apps has as many as 15 different styles, not counting subclasses. But which should be used where? (Updated with new examples and Big Sur graphics)

Backbone and Ember

I’ve read a post comparing Backbone to AngularJS recently, and another that ended with similar conclusions about Backbone, and since I’ve been working with Backbone for the last year or so, I thought …

Notes from Mobile Mobile Conf

Here are my notes from the Mobile Mobile Conf that took place in Kraków this week. I just wrote down what I heard, so it might not be completely correct, but I figured it will still be useful. Day 1 …

What's new in ObjectiveC

This post is mostly based on a presentation I’ve done on the last CocoaHeads meeting in Kraków. (If you’re a Cocoa developer and you’re in Kraków on a 2nd Thursday of a month, come say hi!) Thea idea…

Pick holes in your Gemfiles

The beginning of 2013 was a really bad time for the Ruby community. In the first few weeks of the year a few separate security issues were found that made everyone run to their SSH consoles to update …

Extending asset pipeline with custom preprocessors

If you’ve read the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline docs, you’re probably aware that you can add preprocessors to your asset files by appending extra file extensions. For example, to write your JS files in Co…

Notes from “The Passionate Programmer”

Last month I read a great book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf - “The Passionate Programmer”, another book in the not-directly-technical series of their books started with the original “Pragmatic Program…

How to fix NTFS support on OSX Lion

After I upgraded my Mac to Lion this month, I’ve noticed that my NTFS drives stopped working. I’m using NTFS on my Windows XP partition and on a WD external drive. I’ve previously used MacFUSE and NTF…

Tips for creating mobile sites

I’ve recently updated my new blog’s layout to support mobile phones, iPhone in particular (since that’s what I’m using ;). Here’s how it looks now: I decided to use the same HTML for both versions, a…

Psionides Blog: Sinatra Edition

I started this blog almost 3 years ago. It was a bit of an experiment, as I wasn’t sure if that actually made sense, if I would want to keep writing it a few months later - so I put it on Jogger (Poli…

On Open Source licensing

There are many posts and articles that compare available open source licenses. A lot of them aren’t objective and are biased towards some kinds of licenses based on author’s own preferences. Well, I …

Cocoa JSON parsing libraries, part 2

A few months ago I wrote a post about JSON parsing libraries for Cocoa. I compared 4 libraries – BSJSONAdditions, JSON Framework, TouchJSON, and YAJL, I ran a benchmark on all of them, and the conclus…

The longest names in Cocoa

Ever since I started coding in Cocoa, I’ve been wondering what might be the longest name used for any function or constant in the entire API. Cocoa names can get quite long in general, so the longest …

Notes from the MongoBerlin conference

This week I went to Berlin for 2 days to attend the MongoBerlin conference organized by 10gen, the creators of MongoDB. I took a lot of notes from the presentations, and I figured this may be useful f…

Cocoa JSON parsing libraries

Update: A new post from December 2010 with updated stats is available here. For a few weeks I’ve been working on a new iPhone application. Like most of other Cocoa apps I’ve written so far, this app…

RipTip - pretty tooltips for RightJS

I’m working on a new version of this blog, in which I want to use RightJS. This week I wanted to add some kind of pretty JavaScript tooltips there; there is a Tooltip class in RightJS, but I don’t lik…

Sharing code between projects with git subtree

I came across a problem recently. I have a project called xBlip which I’ve described before – it’s an iPhone client for a Polish Twitter-like service Blip. This project has a backend part which I keep…

JSLint on Rails available as gem

I released version 1.0 of JSLint on Rails yesterday. It has a few new options (see Github project page for more info), but the biggest change is that it’s now available both as a plugin and as a gem, …

Check your scripts with JSLint on Rails

This year, for several months I’ve been working on a project which involved quite a lot of JavaScript. I’ve already written about how this prompted me to start writing JavaScript unit tests. But as I …

My top 20 iPhone apps

Yeah, I know that there’s already about 5.4 gazillions of such posts on the web. So what :) I believe that cool apps – especially cool free apps – deserve promotion like this; and although some of the…

Installing Sphinx on MacOSX from ports

A few days ago I spent a couple of hours trying to install the full text search engine Sphinx on my work computer in order to use it in my current project. I’m posting the details here, maybe this wil…

JavaScript template libraries

For the last 3 months I’ve been working on a new web application at work. It’s quite unique in some regards, from the architecture perspective; the biggest difference from other projects that I’ve wor…

JavaScript unit testing

I’ve read a lot about good programming practices recently. I’ve read the “Pragmatic programmer” book (which is awesome, one of the most useful books I have read, seriously); I’ve watched a great prese…

Psionides presents: xBlip 0.1

As I’ve promised in the previous post, I’ve started working on my first iPhone application, the Blip.pl client, which I’ve given an extremely creative name, xBlip :) (why “x”? that’s simple, because “…

Hello, iPhone!

For the last few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time learning how to create apps for the Mac. Since I’m slowly starting to run out of new tutorials to read, I’ve decided to find myself something …

The Dark Side of Cocoa

Photo by Alexander Staubo (CC) Some time ago I wrote about all the things that I loved in the Cocoa framework. This time, I’d like to write a bit about the worse side of Cocoa - the things that annoy…

Interface Builder tips and tricks

I read Apple’s tutorial about Interface Builder this week. Most parts of it told about rather basic things and were quite boring, but I’ve learned several useful tricks from it. IB, like most of Apple…

Code like a hobo

For the last 2 months, I’ve been using a new Ruby framework at work. A very… interesting framework :) It looked very promising in the beginning, only to become a complete disaster a few weeks later. I…

Generating scaffold interfaces in Cocoa

I discovered an interesting feature in Interface Builder a few days ago. It seems that it can generate a scaffolding UI for you based on a CoreData model. It works like this: first you have to design …

Missing controls in IB 3.1

I’ve upgraded XCode and Interface Builder to version 3.1 recently (the update doesn’t appear in the system update, you have to download it manually, and it’s deceitfully hidden - you have to register …

Addicted to Cocoa

Photo by Sharyn Morrow (CC) For the last several weeks, I’ve been learning a lot about ObjectiveC and Cocoa programming. It’s really addictive… I just can’t stop myself sometimes :) I’m reading the “…

Learn Objective C in 30 minutes

Recently I started thinking about writing something simple in Objective C - you know, that weird Apple language used for Mac programming… Not that I’m planning to switch from Ruby to ObjC - I rather t…

To Cocoa or not to Cocoa, that is the question...

It seems that starting a blog was not the only stupid idea I had recently. I’m having more of those… For example, now I’m thinking about learning some Cocoa and writing some applications for the Mac :…

Bandwidth limiting in MacOSX

I played a bit with bandwidth limiting tools in MacOSX recently. The reason was that I was uploading huge files to DivShare, and my Firefox took all the available upload bandwidth; and since upload ba…