Last Monday, my blog experienced a brief outage due to an expired HTTPS certificate. Thankfully, within five minutes of the issue, an attentive reader notified me about the problem. After contacting my cloud service provider, we discovered the outage was caused by a bug in their automated SSL certificate renewal system. Following two hours of troubleshooting, the issue was resolved, and my website returned to normal operation.
Currently, my blog uses an automated renewal SSL certificate provided by my cloud service provider, valid for 90 days. However, following the approval of the SC-081v3 proposal, the validity period for SSL/TLS certificates has officially been reduced to just 47 days. Although it will still take some time before this measure becomes mandatory, we can reasonably expect that major cloud service providers and tech giants will proactively adopt the new standard, effectively forcing website administrators and ordinary users to adjust to this new reality.
This drastic reduction in certificate validity not only increases workloads for system administrators and users alike, but also directly affects consumers’ preferences when choosing service providers. For example, the image CDN service I currently use still lacks a free and reliable auto-renewal solution and fails to integrate smoothly with Let’s Encrypt’s automatic renewal mechanism. If the provider does not offer an effective solution in the coming months, chances are high that I will have to switch providers.
Although shorter SSL/TLS certificate validity periods might have legitimate security justifications, certificates are not the only things facing accelerated lifecycles. The hardware and software surrounding us are also being updated and replaced at ever-faster rates. Even today’s most popular intelligent electric vehicles, constrained by battery life and chip performance, have significantly shorter operational lifespans compared to traditional fuel-powered cars, increasingly resembling the upgrade cycles of consumer electronics. This trend may not be the future most consumers desire.
Interestingly, as our digital world sees ever-shortening validity periods, certain products in the physical world, particularly fruits, seem to be gaining unusually long shelf lives. Due to rapid advancements in modern warehousing technology and global logistics networks, buyers and distributors increasingly favor new varieties of fruits that last longer in storage and transport. Consequently, farmers have been pushed to abandon traditional varieties in favor of these sturdier, “durable” alternatives. These fruits, growing ever more visually appealing and resistant to spoilage, unfortunately, have gradually lost the unique taste and distinctive character we fondly remember from childhood. It is becoming increasingly difficult to experience that simple yet genuine flavor again.
In our rapidly changing world, whether it’s the shortened validity of certificates or the lengthened shelf life of fruits, both reflect how technology and commerce continually reshape our daily lives. As developers, we deeply appreciate the necessity of agile iteration and rapid updates; yet as consumers, we continue to value products that withstand the test of time. Amidst constant change, preserving our right to choose and our insistence on quality remains both precious and essential.
Originals
My Hopes for Xcode
With rapid advancements in AI, it appears that the era of low-code or even no-code development is imminent. However, over the past year, rather than diminishing, various tools for professional developers have emerged continually. Can Xcode still capture developers’ enthusiasm? What changes does it need to stay competitive and relevant? In this article, I will outline several key improvements I hope to see in Xcode.
【Tip】How to Test Core Data Code in VSCode/Cursor
Recent Recommendations
SwiftUI Colors – Exploring Overlooked Features
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Crafting a Better Snapping Experience for Sliders
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Thinking of WWDC
A thoughtful and personal warm-up for WWDC, best read with a quiet mind. Daniel Steinberg reflects on how developers are becoming more sidelined at WWDC—from limited access and shifting priorities to the overhead new UI changes could bring. He also shares what he’s keeping an eye on: App Intents, SwiftData, SwiftUI, Swift 6, and Swift Testing. The piece ends with a call for Swift to grow beyond Apple’s walls, suggesting the creation of an independent foundation and community-led developer conference.
Alerts in iOS: Simple but Tricky
System alerts are one of the most common UI components in iOS. They may look simple, but are filled with subtle design decisions: button order, roles, color usage—getting these wrong can confuse users. In this article, Nikita Ermolenko walks through proper .alert usage in SwiftUI, closely referencing Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and calling out common mistakes. This is a highly practical UI guide that not only encourages developers to follow the platform conventions, but also highlights SwiftUI’s current limitations in achieving consistent design.
Swift Reduce: Combining Elements Into a Single Value
A fundamental part of Swift’s functional programming toolkit, reduce helps you transform a collection into a single value. While its most common use is summing numbers, its power extends much further. In this article, Antoine van der Lee explains both reduce and reduce(into:) through clear examples, demonstrating their use in building dictionaries, counting occurrences, and flattening nested arrays. An essential read for those looking to deepen their understanding of Swift’s expressive capabilities.
Tools
XcodeBuild MCP
Developed by Cameron Cooke, XcodeBuild MCP is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server designed to provide a standardized interface for Xcode operations, specifically for AI assistants and automation clients. It supports project builds, deployments, simulator control, and more—eliminating the fragility of traditional CLI scripting and enabling agents to interact with iOS/macOS projects reliably and efficiently.
Swift Regex
Created by Kishikawa Katsumi, Swift Regex is a developer tool that converts traditional regular expressions into Swift’s native RegexBuilder syntax, complete with real-time preview and evaluation. In a recent update, it added debugging features that let developers step through Swift Regex operations to analyze backtracking behavior—especially useful when fine-tuning complex regex in Swift-native contexts.