Many of the issues I’m running across in Nos development these days feel like really basic problems with Apple APIs that thousands of other developers are probably encountering and solving. But when I search for other people on the internet having this issue (using Kagi.com, Google, StackOverflow, and ChatGPT) I can’t find anyone with the same problem. It makes me feel like I’m on crazy pills or losing my edge. A year or two ago I think these problems would’ve been a 5 minute trip to Google and StackOverflow. Are search engines just that much worse these days? Or am I just bad?

Just one example: I just spent an hour trying to write a fresh unit test that kept crashing on the line “let collectionView = UICollectionView()” with the error “freed pointer was not the last allocation”. No help from the internet, no help from Xcode, I’m not doing anything weird in the code, it’s a super basic programming task that I just can’t complete. 

The test was to exhibit a crash that happens with an NSFetchedResultsController I wired up to a UICollectionView. These are Apple APIs that are over a decade old that I’ve used dozens of times, but now they just crash unless I write a bunch of workaround code. And again, can’t find anyone with the same issue 💀 rant over