What does HackerNews think of fastlane?

For context, fastlane is “a tool for iOS and Android developers to automate tedious tasks like generating screenshots, dealing with provisioning profiles, and releasing your application.”

https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane

Google seems to have acquired(?) it in 2017: https://krausefx.com/blog/fastlane-is-joining-google I would guess this means they hired the lead developer(s) and funded a team to work on the project.

Mobile app build/deployToAppStore automation: https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane

Have been doing iOS programming with Swift 2.5 days per week for a bit less than a year now. The first step I took was to read through Apple's Official Swift Language Guide[0]. After completing this I followed the Stanford course on iOS Development with Swift[1]. I didn't spend much time on this, I did this in a Friday afternoon(language guide) and full weekend(watching lectures), since I believe more in learning by practicing.

I've really come to like Swift as a language, since it's concise and simple. The iOS SDK however is not so much fun. Learning the iOS SDK will take a lot of time before you develop routines to approach your problems. I'm still learning about strange behaviour from the SDK and getting frustrated by it every time I use it. It's important to keep things fun, look through the trending Swift repositories on GitHub, follow #iosdev on Twitter and /r/iosprogramming, you will learn a lot if you keep up to date with these sources.

Some of the habits I've created, which might be handy to other people:

- I manage dependencies with CocoaPods, with no dependencies residing in my repository.

- I don't use storyboards or xib's at all. Everything I do is with SnapKit[2]. This takes some time to learn, but it greatly improves the diffs and overview on how the ui elements are constrained and set up.

- I use API endpoint enums which get called by an API Handler, which uses Alamofire[3] to execute the api requests.

- I try to use as many tools provided by Fastlane[4]. Especially if you're developing many Apps, or incrementally building an App, releasing a new version every two weeks: automate all the things. Otherwise you will waste so much time simply waiting for a process to complete.

Side note(if you're interested):

I'm currently developing a tool called Evans(will write a blog post as soon as it's reasonably finished), which performs all kinds of routines automatically. It for example listens to GitHub comments like '@evans screenshots' on a pull request. Evans then emits a request to one of the build slaves, which retrieves the branch, builds the project and runs the screenshot routine, puts the screenshots in an s3 bucket and posts a link as a response in the pull request.

[0] - https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/...

[1] - https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/developing-ios-8-apps-swi...

[2] - https://github.com/SnapKit/SnapKit

[3] - https://github.com/Alamofire/Alamofire

[4] - https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane