Our Top 10 Most Popular Blog Posts in 2021

2021 was an exciting year in Mac development. Last year a lot of the buzz centered around the new Apple M1 and how Apple silicon will impact both consumers and developers. For developers who work daily developing cutting-edge macOS and iOS applications, 2021 also marked the release of a new version of Xcode and a new macOS - Monterey.

At MacStadium, we thought it would be fun to kick off 2022 by reviewing our top ten blog posts from 2021. So, let’s take a trip down memory lane to get an idea of what topics were top of mind last year as we prepare for where our journey will take us in 2022.

Top 10 MacStadium Blog Posts in 2021

#10: Setting Up a MacStadium Hosted Mac mini as a Jenkins Build Agent

Because Jenkins is still the most popular CI/CD tool in the DevOps space, we’ve found that it is common for teams to have a Jenkins master stood up for non-Mac CI/CD workflows that they would like to add to a macOS build agent in order to run macOS and iOS CI/CD jobs within their existing system. In this blog post, we provided an easy guide to add a MacStadium hosted Mac mini as a build agent to an existing Jenkins master.

#9: M1 and Kubernetes…Together at Last!

In this blog post from October 2021, we shared a preview of our own macOS virtualization layer Orka running on M1 nodes. Orka 2.0 will be available in February, and this release includes the capability to run both Intel and M1 nodes in the same cluster. Check out this post to watch the tech preview video.

#8: New Apple Silicon: When to Migrate to the M1 Mac

In early 2021, MacStadium hosted a webinar about M1 to help developers start making the migration from Intel-based machines to Apple silicon. In this blog post, we shared this webcast recording and a list of resources for developers wanting to learn more about the new Apple silicon. (Update! If you are interested in learning more about migrating from Intel to M1, we released a developer guide at the end of 2021. Download a copy.)

#7: MacStadium Supports the Open Source Community

Did you know? MacStadium offers an Open Source Program that offers free Mac minis for developers who are building open source projects for the Apple platform. This blog post provides an introduction to our open source community, what’s available, some of our favorite projects, and instructions to apply to the program.

#6: GitHub Actions Self-Hosted Runner for iOS CI at MacStadium

GitHub Actions is a highly flexible automation tool that is baked into GitHub. With it, you can automate nearly anything relating to your repository. In this blog post, we shared the steps to set up a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner on a macOS compute resource hosted by MacStadium to provide simple, secure iOS and macOS CI for our customers.

#5: How to Upgrade to macOS Big Sur in Your VMware Cloud

Last year, we advised our customers who are currently virtualizing macOS in VMware, that it may be time to make the upgrade to Big Sur to take advantage of Xcode 12.5. In this blog post, we revealed the compatible VMware versions and provided steps to upgrade their version of ESXi.

#4: New From Apple - CI/CD with Xcode Cloud

WWDC is always thrilling and in 2021, Apple announced the beta of their new CI/CD service, Xcode Cloud. Xcode Cloud is built into Xcode and integrated with TestFlight. Check out this blog post for a roundup about what Xcode Cloud is, what it means for developers, and what this new service means for MacStadium and our customers using our Mac private cloud solutions.

#3: Sharing Variables Between Jobs in GitHub Actions

In this blog post, we provided some valuable insight into how to level up your GitHub Actions workflows in this guide to controlling the order of execution of jobs in a workflow and passing variables from one job to the next within the workflow.

#2: Making Sense of xcodebuild Arguments

In this blog post, we took a close look at xcodebuild by examining several key Xcode concepts that inform the arguments developers pass when calling xcodebuild in the terminal, including Xcode project, Xcode workspace, Xcode target, and Xcode scheme.

And the most popular blog post in 2021…

#1: Xcode 12.5 now requires Big Sur - What’s new in this release?

In early 2021, we learned that if developers wanted to run Xcode 12.5, then teams would need to migrate to Big Sur. In this blog post, we examined some of the most important features for developers in Xcode 12.5 and in iOS 14.5 SDK to figure out the impact of these new features on developers and how migrating to Big Sur would affect development.

So there we have it, the top 10 blog posts from 2021. We hope you’ll continue reading our blog in 2022 as we continue to offer guidance, tips, and information to help make macOS and iOS development easier.

Have suggestions for any future blog posts from MacStadium? Join our MacStadium Community on Slack and let us know!