I found “the old way” of doing things to be a mess. Despite building one of the first apps in the App Store, NSLayout just never became “second nature.”

Instead of the native app world, I stuck to web front ends and managed that awkward transition from jQuery to Angular to React. These models for UI made increasing amounts of sense — instead of fiddling with weird lines a slop gui, I could just tell the system what I want and get it!

Then SwiftUI came along, and lo, I get all the goodness of React in iOS and even MacOS! My first native app in years is coming along swimmingly, and it’s even cross platform!

(yes, I did do an app in React Native, and found it gross for reasons that I can’t put my finger on)