On Wednesday night James Dempsey and the Breakpoints perform LIVE near WWDC in a benefit concert for Techtonica.
The show is a full concert of humorous, original, programming-oriented songs, including favorites from our iTunes chart-topping, #5 Billboard comedy album Backtrace.
I’ll be joined on stage by the Breakpoints—a fabled group of talented techies-by-day and musicians-by-night who make the music and fun come alive!
You can enjoy the show in person or watch the free live stream.
The live stream includes a live chat hosted by Breakpoints Steve Hayman and Tom Harrington. Join the live chat to connect with other folks in the community while enjoying the show!
Continuing a tradition that started at AltConf, I’ll be closing out the week at the One More Thing conference with a WWDC Week In Review, a lighthearted look back at the announcements and events of the week.
After a week front-loaded with announcements and technical talks—this easy-going closing session of One More Thing combines humor, music, and perspective.
And there will be a bit involving a ukulele.
The closing party for One More Thing will be held immediately after the session. So come on by, enjoy the session and then the party. RSVP for the event.
As usual, it will be a busy WWDC week with plenty of new announcements and technology to wrap our heads around. Feel free to follow me on Mastodon and say hello!
I hope you can make it out to one or more of these events—see you at WWDC! •
We started creating posters for LIVE near WWDC shows back in 2017.
Each year, we try to use a different style. Some years the posters have been created by talented artists, some years it’s just been me.
I’ve always admired vintage national parks posters done by the WPA in the 1930s. I came across the SimpleBits font Parkly, which is inspired by those posters, which in turn inspired me to go with that style this year.
I could picture the end result that I was hoping for but knew I definitely did not have the artistic skills required to create what I had in mind.
On Mastodon, I asked for recommendations for real human artists (thanks to everyone who replied!). One of the replies was from Cheryl Cicha at Iconfactory.
Iconfactory is a legendary design house, having created icons and app designs for many well-known apps, as well as their own apps, for more than a quarter century.
Without Cheryl’s reply, it would not have occurred to me to approach Iconfactory for a show poster. In my mind they were strongly associated with icons and apps.
Even after her suggestion, there was a little anxiety on my part. It’s probably a bit of imposter syndrome on my part, but our yearly benefit concert is a small operation in the grand scheme of things.
Should I be dreaming about having a show poster created by a company with some of the most talented designers and artists in the business?
In the end, it was a pleasure to work with Iconfactory and I am incredibly happy with the results. The answer to my question has turned out to be an enthusiastic ‘Yes!’.
From Concept To Poster
The process of working with the folks at Iconfactory was very collaborative, exploring a number of ideas in a relatively short period of time.
The artist for the poster is Anthony Piraino, who was familiar with this artistic style and happened to already have prints of a few of those national parks posters in his office.
My original concept sketch. An awful piece of artwork—but it got the point across.
I provided a very rough concept sketch and a few pages of notes and Anthony did a first pass at the artwork.
It was a very iterative process. I provided feedback and suggestions based on work in progress. Anthony made suggestions and many design choices, and we puzzled out a few design questions together.
Turnaround was quick incorporating feedback.
Comparing the original concept sketch to the final poster, two things occur to me.
The first is that despite being an awful piece of artwork, the concept sketch managed to convey what I had in mind.
The second is that Anthony did a fantastic job of taking that sketch and many, many notes and ideas of mine and incorporated them into a beautiful piece of artwork.
LIVE near WWDC
This is the first show poster to visually represent the name of the concert: LIVE near WWDC.
The official event is happening off in the distance at Apple Park while our own joyous band of nerdy musicians performs nearby.
The Tiki outpost is inspired by the venue for the show—local San Jose geekeasy The Art Boutiki.
The Santa Clara Valley, better known as Silicon Valley, is depicted with a nod to its past, filled with greenery, as opposed to highways, strip malls, and tech company campuses.
Easter Eggs
The poster also includes a few visual easter eggs.
First, every piece of JDBP album art and every show poster includes the breakpoint symbol in one form or another. Sometimes it is fairly obvious, sometimes much more subtle. This year it appears in two contexts, not particularly hidden.
The Breakpoint symbol itself is inspired by how a breakpoint is represented in Xcode. Other IDEs may use different visual representations, but we’ve been pretty happy with this shape and variations of “breakpoint blue”.
Besides the breakpoint motif, the poster incorporates a few additional easter eggs. One stands out to longtime Mac users pretty quickly. The other two are more subtle. No spoilers in this post, but I may post a few hints on Mastodon over the next few days.
Posters Available At The Show
It is always an exciting day for me when the show posters arrive from the printer.
The printed posters provide tangible evidence, beyond fleeting Mastodon messages, blog posts, and the like, that the show is on its way.
Show posters will be on sale at the event with all proceeds going to the show beneficiary, Techtonica. If you‘re a VIP ticket holder, we already have you covered, one is included with your ticket.
To help raise funds for Techtonica, a very limited number of posters signed by me and all of the Breakpoints performing at the show will also be available.
We provide a hard cardstock envelope for the poster so you can mail it, put it in luggage, etc. and guard against the poster being bent or damaged.
Some Tickets Still Available
The show is getting very close to being sold out, but some tickets are still available.
If you have been planning on coming to the show but have not gotten around to buying your ticket yet, this would be the perfect time.
And if you can’t make it to the show, you can watch the live stream of the concert.
Show and live stream details and tickets sales are at livenearwwdc.com
I hope to see you Wednesday night for LIVE near WWDC 2025! •
Our sponsors make this show possible. Everyone involved in this event, from planning to performing, sends an enormous thank you to our sponsors for their support. Please support our sponsors by clicking through the links below and checking them out!
I am very happy to report that we’ve worked out the details and will be livestreaming the LIVE near WWDC show once again this year.
If you’re not going to be in town for WWDC (or could not get a ticket to the show—they’re going fast!) you’ll be able to watch the show from wherever you happen to be.
There will be a live chat along with the stream before and during the concert, hosted by Breakpoints Steve Hayman and Tom Harrington. The live chat is a great way to connect with other members of the community.
The live chat begins at 7:30 pm with the music starting about 8:00 pm. All times Pacific.
The live stream is free, no paywall or ticket required to watch the concert online. In the spirit of the benefit concert, we do request you consider making a donation to Techtonica.
Tickets still available
A limited number of tickets are still available to come see the show in person.
Our sponsors make this show possible. Everyone involved in this event, from planning to performing, sends an enormous thank you to our sponsors for their support. Please support our sponsors by clicking through the links below and checking them out!
It’s that time of year where rumors fly in anticipation of another WWDC keynote.
Meanwhile across multiple timezones, Breakpoints are rehearsing nights and weekends getting ready to perform LIVE near WWDC once again.
For 2025, the show returns to The Art Boutiki—a funky San Jose gem of a venue and self-proclaimed “Geekeasy”.
(Being a sucker for a nice pun, when scouting venues last year, they pretty much had me at “Geekeasy” before I even walked in the door.)
Carrying on what has become a yearly tradition, this year’s show poster is inspired by vintage National Parks posters of the 1930s. It leans into the theme of the venue and the name of the show, with a Tiki outpost near, but not at WWDC, with Apple Park in the distance.
The poster art was created a talented artist at the legendary Iconfactory. They were a pleasure to work with as we iterated on the design, moving from a truly terrible rough concept sketch and a few pages of notes I provided to the finished artwork. I am very happy with how the poster turned out and am looking forward to hanging it on my wall.
Show posters (11” x 17”) will be on sale at the event with all proceeds going to Techtonica. If you‘re a VIP ticket holder, we already have you covered, one is included with your ticket.
You can get tickets to the show as well as full details (date, time, venue address, etc.) at livenearwwdc.com.
Tickets are still available but they have been going quickly.
Every year I hear from people who waited to buy tickets and then were disappointed that the show was sold out. If you are planning on coming to the show, I encourage you to get your tickets now to save yourself a lifetime of regret. ;)
Introducing A New Song
At the end of April, at the Deep Dish Swift conference, I performed a new song as a work in progress. I had arrived in Chicago on Saturday afternoon with a partially-written song with a chorus and bridge but no verses at that point. By noon on Monday, I had a completed draft of the full lyrics and melody. Between conference sessions I would rush back to my room to rehearse the new song for our Breakpoint Jam on Tuesday afternoon.
Because it was brand new, there wasn’t time to have the other performers learn it, so it was just me singing and playing ukulele. On stage, I called it the TestFlight version of the song because just like an app in TestFlight, it wasn’t the final version and the entire thing could potentially come crashing down at any moment.
We’ve been working on the arrangement for the full band and are really looking forward to sharing it everyone live at the show.
The Band
Speaking of the band, as in past years, we have an eclectic group of musicians ranging from the core band of drums, bass, rhythm and lead guitars to violin, banjo, saxophone, Croatian tamburica—and of course: slide-advance keyboard; additional vocalists round out the sound.
At present about 18 different musicians are expected to perform, arriving in the Bay Area from various locations around the globe. The exact lineup is always subject to change right up until showtime. This year, we have a mix of longtime Breakpoints as well as some folks performing LIVE near WWDC for the first time.
I am incredibly grateful to everyone who lends their time and talent to the show. This includes all of the musicians as well as folks volunteering to do operations like working the door and the merch table, photographing the show, and producing on the livestream.
For me, one of the greatest joys of this band has been the number of people I have had the chance to meet, get to know, and perform with over the years at various LIVE near WWDC shows and Breakpoint Jams. This community has so many wonderful, talented people and it has been a true honor to have so many join me on stage.
A Big Night During A Big Week
WWDC25 is promising to be an exciting week full of announcements and almost certainly some surprises.
And for Wednesday, June 11th, we‘ve been working on a show we hope you’ll really enjoy.
Once again, all of us are incredibly excited and grateful to be able do this show again; happy to be supporting Techtonica; and very thankful for the support of our sponsors.
We all hope you can join us on Wednesday night for LIVE near WWDC 2025! •
And speaking of sponsors—our sponsors make this show possible. Everyone involved in this event, from planning to performing, sends an enormous thank you to our sponsors for their support. Please support our sponsors by clicking through the links below and checking them out!
For those not familiar, BuildSettingExtractor (BSE) is a free, open-source utility that provides a fast, easy way to extract build settings from an Xcode project into a set of xcconfig files.
(And even that description likely makes very little sense unless you develop software for Apple platforms.)
Reaching milestones like this make me reflect on the passage of time and think things like “How is it possibly ten years?”
So today I take a little walk down memory lane to celebrate the anniversary of BuildSettingExtractor.
Origin story
I was watching an NSScreencast episode by Ben Scheirman (friend and longtime guitarist in the Breakpoints) describing setting up xcconfig files.
Part of the episode demonstrated copying and pasting build settings out of Xcode into xcconfig files.
All of the copying and pasting made for a tedious process. In addition, at the time it also required a lot of manual clean up of the pasted values. (As of Xcode 16, pasted build settings are in valid xcconfig format.)
Months earlier I had been futzing around with some code I had written to extract build settings from an Xcode project but I had no intention of releasing it until I watched that episode.
It bothered me thinking about people going through a tedious, time-consuming, error-prone process, when I already had written some code that would do the same thing quickly and easily.
I cleaned up the existing code, added a user interface, and released BuildSettingExtractor 1.0 just a few days later on January 31, 2015 as an open source project.
A decade with the same simple interface. Drop an xcodeproj file on it—it spits out xcconfig files.
What does that setting do?
About ten days later the second release of BuildSettingExtractor quickly followed the first. This version added one of my favorite features: generating build setting info.
There are dozens upon dozens of build settings and it’s often not obvious how they behave. BuildSettingExtractor can annotate each setting with an explanatory comment gleaned from Xcode.
This info is available wherever you are looking at the xcconfig file—in GitHub, text editors, diff tools. No trip to a reference webpage or Xcode help is required to figure out what a build setting does.
For example:
// Enable Testability
//
// Enabling this setting will build the target with options appropriate for running
// automated tests against its product.
//
// This setting can be enabled when building targets for debugging if their products will
// be tested. This may result in tests running slower than otherwise.
//
// When this setting is enabled:
//
// * `GCC_SYMBOLS_PRIVATE_EXTERN` is disabled (`-fvisibility=hidden` will not be passed
// to `clang`).
// * `-enable-testing` is passed to the Swift compiler.
// * `-export_dynamic` is passed to the linker.
// * `STRIP_INSTALLED_PRODUCT` is disabled (`strip` will not be run on the produced
// binary).
ENABLE_TESTABILITY = YES
// Build Active Architecture Only
//
// If enabled, only the active architecture is built. This setting will be ignored when
// building with a run destination which does not define a specific architecture, such as
// a 'Generic Device' run destination.
ONLY_ACTIVE_ARCH = YES
For those who prefer a pithier xcconfig file, there is also a setting to turn these comments off.
Design goals
A decade ago, I set a few design goals which have guided each version of BuildSettingExtractor:
Safe
Focused
Easily Maintained
The design goals were driven primarily by the following:
The Xcode project file is a proprietary, unpublished format. Although the format has been remarkably stable for many years, it is still subject to change without warning at any time.
Time is limited and always at a premium. The less time required to maintain a piece of software the more likely it can be maintained over a long period of time.
From the beginning, safety has been an explicit goal. A user should never have to worry that BuildSettingExtractor would leave them with a corrupted or incorrectly formatted project file.
For that reason, BSE never changes the original project file. Extracting the build settings is a read-only operation.
This means that BuildSettingExtractor will generate xcconfig files, but it is up to the user to set up their Xcode project to use the configuration files.
I periodically think about adding this functionality to BSE to automate the project setup.
And, every time, I come back to those initial design goals and decide against it.
Beautifully, Unapologetically Objective-C
The app began in Objective-C and has stayed that way.
The initial choice was because the core functionality was already in Objective-C and I was very familiar with the Obj-C AppKit APIs.
At the time Swift 1.0 had only been released for four months and I was trying to use what I already knew well to release the app quickly, as opposed to using the app as a way to learn Swift.
Looking back at the last ten years, developing in Swift and Objective-C have been two very different experiences.
Swift brings with it many great language features as well as a lot of excitement.
But one major benefit of choosing Objective-C has been stability.
If I had written BuildSettingExtractor in Swift a decade ago the code base would have needed to do major migrations to Swift 3, Swift 4, a minor one to Swift 5, and now to Swift 6.
Throughout that time, the Obj-C code has just kept working with a minimum of fuss.
I have considered migrating to Swift and SwiftUI, but as long as the tool continues to work as intended without requiring a great deal of maintenance, there are plenty of other things to spend time on.
And finally, maintaining BuildSettingExtractor keeps me from forgetting how to write Objective-C.
What’s next for BuildSettingExtractor?
The main thing that has been on my to-do list is adding Sparkle support for automatic updates from within the app.
Are there things you would like to see in BuildSettingExtractor? Feel free to file any requests using the project issue tracker.
And if you have yet to experience the glorious build setting extracting splendor that this utility provides, you can download it for free at buildsettingextractor.com.
