Hugo’s secret caching superpowers
This blog isn’t all that complex. A bit of CSS, a bit of JS (only for fun; press G), some fonts, and a whole bunch of HTML. No images to speak of, at least as of this writing. It’s not exactly slow to load, even with empty caches across the board.
But until recently the best case was only somewhat better than the worst. All static responses included Amplify’s default Cache-Control header: public, max-age=0, s-maxage=31536000. That is all of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images.
A simple URLSession mock
There are so many people advocating for the use of URLProtocol for mocking HTTP requests in Swift that I couldn’t believe how quickly it fell apart for me. In fact, I found more writing about using URLProtocol as a mock than I did about using URLProtocol for its intended purpose. This post is about the shortcomings that I encountered, and how I solved them by mocking URLSession instead.
The trouble with URLProtocol
Most of the posts advocating for mocking with URLProtocol recommend storing a single request handler as a static variable on the URLProtocol subclass. The closure gives you a chance to assert against the request and inject a specific response or raise an exception. I like that this approach lets me keep all of my #expect and #require calls in the test function, but I ran into trouble using it to test my API client. One method implements the pretty common pattern of getting a pre-signed S3 URL from my API, and then using that URL to upload some data to a bucket. These two requests have to happen every time I upload something, so it made sense to treat them as a single method in the client rather than exposing the two-step process.
Better networking while traveling
As I was preparing to travel to a family wedding recently, I decided to take action on an item that has been on my to-do list for some time: get better internet access for my devices while traveling.
Motivation
Hotel Wi-Fi is such a pain. I travel with a stupid number of devices, and getting all of them connected can take a lot of effort. At home each TV has a Chromecast with Google TV for streaming, but getting one connected to hotel Wi-Fi is usually an exercise in frustration. If we can manage to connect it, Caroline is stuck watching the morning news for wherever we happen to be because of silly content restrictions.