Observation in Practice

Brandon: For the last four weeks we have gone deep into the new Observation framework in Swift 5.9. We’ve seen what it takes to use the tools, we’ve looked at the actual source code of the tools to roughly understand how they work, and we’ve even discussed a variety of gotchas and things to be aware of when using the tools.

But in those episodes we didn’t really build anything real world with the new tools. The little demo app we created served as a nice testbed for understanding observability, but in the real world we come across much different problems.

Stephen: So, it would be nice if we could see what it looks like to use these tools in a moderately complex, real world application. And luckily for us we actually built such an application over the course of 7 episodes where we discussed modern SwiftUI concepts. This included things like navigation, side effects, domain modeling, controlling dependencies and testing.

And to show off these techniques we re-built a fun application that Apple released as demo code a few years back called Scrumdinger. And after that series finished we even open sourced our version of the Scrumdinger so that we could show what we think goes into making a modern SwiftUI application.

Brandon: However, that series was done before we had these new observation tools, so perhaps we can take that code base and update it to use observability.

Let’s take a look.