When designing APIs, using default arguments can often let us strike a nice balance between flexibility and ease of use — as they let us add solid, intuitive defaults to many of the configuration options that we’ll end up providing. Let’s take a look at a few examples of how they may be used.

Pure functions might seem like a mostly theoretical concept at first, but they have the potential to give us some very real, practical benefits — from increased reuse and testability, to more predictable code. This week, let’s take a look at how pure functions might be used in Swift — and how we can apply them to solve real problems in a very nice way.

One way to make a code base easier to navigate, while still maintaining a solid overall structure, is to inline functionality whenever two pieces of code are heavily related. This week, let’s take a look at how that can be done using inline types and functions, and how — when tactically deployed in the right situations — it can make our code a bit easier to follow.

This week, let's take a look at how we can be inspired by the functional programming world to improve the structure and robustness of our Swift code - this time focusing on using functions that return objects and values as early as possible.

Adding new features to an app or framework often involves adding new arguments to existing functions. While most such changes may seem trivial at first, if we're not careful, we could - over time - end up with functions that are a bit unclear and cumbersome to use. This week, let's take a look at how to deal with such functions, and how they often can be simplified by reducing the number of arguments they accept.

Languages that support first class functions enable us to use functions and methods just like any other object or value. We can pass them as arguments, save them in properties or return them from another function. In order words, the language treats functions as "first class citizens".

Dependency injection is a great technique for decoupling code and making it easier to test. In this article, let's take a look at how functions can be used for simple dependency injection.