It can be challenging or even overwhelming to prepare for a job interview or project meeting. The number of subjects you need to be familiar with as a developer is staggering. Mastering the fundamentals of the platform you're developing software for should always be a key focus area. That is why a significant portion of the content published on Cocoacasts focuses on the fundamentals of Swift and Cocoa development.

Even though threading and concurrency are more advanced concepts, you need to understand the basics regardless of your level of experience. The devices we develop applications for are powered by multicore processors and it's important to take advantage of that power.

In the previous episode, we drastically improved the performance and usability of the application. It no longer takes several seconds for the application to become responsive. Even though the application's performance has gotten better, there's room for improvement.

Many developers still get confused when they come across the word asynchronous. What does it mean? What is asynchronous programming? To understand what asynchronous programming is, we first need to understand its counterpart, synchronous programming. Let's use a playground to illustrate the difference.

I tend to talk about topics that aren't very exciting to most developers, but I also try to make it a habit to discuss topics that are fundamental for software development. Security ticks both boxes. Few developers get excited when I bring up security. The truth is that security should always be top of mind when you are creating software.

Most of the Cocoa APIs we use to build applications are driven by Objective-C. This doesn't mean we need to use Objective-C to take advantage of these APIs, but it does mean that the APIs lack some of the niceties you expect from a Swift API.