Might be a cultural US thing, but this is something my wife does a lot and I see a lot of people doing. It's one of those things that might not make sense if you don't have kids.
> so that people don't know you're a foster kid unless you say so.
If you post a photo of your family and none of the children have emoji faces, why would anyone conclude that the foster child is a foster child? Because he looks different? Seems to me that emoji:ing out one child would do the opposite, draw attention to him.
EDIT: It seems we are talking about temporary arrangements, then things become clearer. Still very weird photos.
But why is it a problem if someone sees a family photo and notices that one kid looks different? He could just be adopted, or a friend or something. Is it something like witness protection, the children might have abusive parents that shouldn't be able to find them?
If it's a matter of not standing out, they will stand out just as much when you meet them anyway, right?
Foster kids might have abusive parents as you surmised. They might have been removed from an unsafe home, or have relatives that were denied custody and might act on a photo.
I've been in doctor's appointments where the nurse is quizzing me on my family medical history and I've had to stop them with, "We're not biologically related and I don't know the biological history". No need for them to know the whole story.
I feel privacy for kids is really important, for a number of different reasons. (preventing kids from being exploited for likes by foster parents, preservation and ownership for them to tell their story in their way when they are ready for it, privacy, sometimes protection from relatives that don't have their best interests at heart, and probably a dozen other reasons I have never thought of.) The best default is really to keep everything private in my opinion, but obviously not every agency or foster parent will agree to all the same specifics as me.
> Please refrain from posting any photos or information on social media websites about the child/ren in your care. Their presence in your home should be treated as confidential information is not to be referred to on any social media websites.
https://portal.ct.gov/DCF/CTFosterAdopt/Manual/Chapter2#Scho...
The reason you are not talking about me is that I'm not famous. Does that disqualify me from having an opinion? Do all opinions have to be positive? Do I have to (pretend to) believe that this app can make money? That seems pretty strange, this is not a kindergarten, grownups should be able to handle feedback even when it's not praise. If he needs empathy, he should go to his friends and family. I will just write what I believe, and that is that this is not a monetizable service, he is wasting his time.
He obviously has made a name for himself in podcasting, so he should double down on that. He is clearly not a product person, and I don't think he's a very good developer, he will do much better focusing on his strengths.
I'm curious, why do I need to have a podcast if I have been an iOS developer for 10 years, what's the connection?
For others, its about sharing with people that you know that you and your kids had a good time while providing some privacy protection for your kids. Micro-managing who can see what picture is hard, the people that know your kids get the full mental image from the picture.
Maybe it's just me but this kinda thing seems a little weird. If it's too much work to partition into groups then maybe not post at all? But then again I'm not doing any social networks so I guess I'm not the intended audience.
Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, yet we don't know how good a programmer he is. He's made great money, and has strong opinions, but again, we don't know how good a programmer he is.
Casey used to have a "jobby-job" before leaving the corporate world. So he too might be a good, bad or excellent programmer. We don't know.
It's kind of like how you don't really know someone until you live with them. For programming, it's until you've worked with them and seen their code. All three of the hosts might be world class; or they might be average. But there's no way to determine who is the strongest programmer of the three.
We can debate who's been more successful selling their code, but we don't know where Siracusa works and code/app sales are a poor metric for code quality.
My impression is that Casey is quite weak (as in average), but meticulous.
Siracusa is almost certainly the one with the best understanding of theory, but hard to say how he is practically. He could be very good at what he's doing.
Marco also doesn't seem very strong in raw programming (he resisted Swift for half a decade, complains that it's hard to deal with, says that architecture is only for beginners etc) but obviously he can solve whatever problem he is faced with, even quite complex ones. And this is obviously what matters if you are an indie developer. That and product sense, which he is also very good at. He probably has the perfect skillset for an indie developer, better programming wouldn't make him any more successful.
He has gone in deep on performant low-level audio code, and how it integrates with the system APIs. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff with programmatic drawing of icons in his apps. He did a lot of good caching work back in the Instapaper days, when cell connections were almost like dialup.
He seemed to be reluctant to learn Swift, because Swift would have gotten him…what? I think he thought that Objective-C was mature, tested, comprehensible, and battle-tested in production. And it wasn’t going to change out from underneath him…which you sure couldn’t say about Swift for the first few years. You eventually had to adopt it, as Apple is moving to Swift-only, but I think Objective-C let him accomplish his goals, and a lot of the good security stuff in Swift is maybe not super relevant to his app development.
(Ugh, PHP, though…)
His use of Obj-C and PHP are just as pragmatic to me. He's an expert at Obj-C and possibly at PHP, and why change? Let Swift mature, see if Obj-C becomes deprecated, and then move on. He can obviously learn new languages since he's dabbled in Rust etc.
I do wish ATP focused more on tech stuff and less on how to live your best life on Fire Island. But I enjoy it every week.
You know he is good because…
> Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast,
I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.
Most of the people I worked with at my FAANG job were excellent programmers, surely better than Marco, but none of them would have any chance of even coming up with a decent idea for an app, let alone carry it through and launch it. So they are absolutely useless as indie developers. It's just different skill sets.
An app to me is well written if it is meets a need well enough to be successful. I would be much more impressed by an Indy developer who has a successful sustainable business without being slimy than a “FAANG” software engineer that got in because he can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.
I also know we are both talking hypothetically. If you listen to him about some of the low level audio processing he does, he’s definitely pretty good.
Before I get the expected replies, no I’m not “jealous of FAANG SWEs”. I work for BigTech myself after a very slight pivot from enterprise development.
What does it matter which skill is more impressive? Obviously there are way fewer successful indie developers than top tier developers, and obviously life as a successful indie is way better. Yet, there is such a thing as writing high quality code, which is more or less orthogonal to being a successful indie. And that was what we are discussing.
It's a bit like being a fast runner and being a good football player. There's some connection, but it's not like the fastest runners are the best players, or the other way around. Different skills.
As to low level audio, I know what you're referring to, and it doesn't say that much really. My co-founder at my previous startup wrote a bunch of DSP code that worked, and was probably more complex than the pause removal, but he was still a pretty random developer. His code was sometimes surprisingly bad. Marco's strength is to not shy away from anything, even if it sounds scary or complex. DSP sounds complex, but it's not string theory.
Many of them could never handle the complexity of writing an entire app and maintaining the backend running on 20+ Linode VMs without the support of a trillion dollar corporation.
You really overestimate the skill and complexity of most code written by “FAANG” engineers.
FWIW, I’ve been coding for a long time (the 74 is a hint) and I started at 12 writing assembly language and spent a decade writing C including maintaining a proprietary compiler/VM for Windows CE devices.
Again, that is not the discussion. Nobody said that you have to write high quality code to make it in tech, or as an indie. You keep coming up with strawmen but all I am saying is that I don't believe Marco Arment writes very high quality code. That's it. No judgement, no conclusions or correlations, no nothing.
As to FAANG, I can only be certain about my own experience, and the dozen or so direct colleagues I had all wrote better code than every other colleague I've had over 10 years. Not saying they are better people, happier, richer or anything else. Just to be clear.
Marco is an excellent indie developer because he selects markets he has a good understanding of, finds his niche, then simply outclasses his competition by being ahead on features. He also has a loyal following from his podcasts, and is an aspirational figure for a lot of devs hoping to make money (or break free of corp serfdom).
A well written program/app isn't a necessary requirement for success.
Well-written apps can meet a need, but it's like furniture. You can buy some cheap futon that gives you something to sleep on, but doesn't last long. Or you can buy a bespoke bed with handcrafted mortise and tenon joints, perfectly straight grained wood, and French polish finish. Both will give you a place to sleep, but one might last longer.
It's like my code. I have some super ugly python utils I've written that a "real" programmer would cringe when looking at the code. But it works 100% of the time when run (assuming the processes they call don't change their specs). The code is written for Python2, and breaks on Python3. It's not very clear how things work, despite extensive commenting. By your definition, these utilities would be "well written." To me, they're brittle, fragile eggs that I eventually will have to rewrite when Enterprise Security decides we can't have python2 binaries on our servers.
Marco has already solved that problem. He said if he dies, his app dies with him…
There are some segments from a few episodes that show that Marco is demonstrably not a super great programmer. I suspect some of his server side code is horrible. But he doesn't matter because he is super strong at other stuff super focussed on solving his own problems at gets it done. You don't need to be super great at programming you just need to be tenacious.
Yes I know all about clean code, automated testing, and “sound engineering practices”. But I’ve met a number of theoretical good coders who couldn’t ship a product that met the customer’s needs to save their lives. If I’m working to support my addiction to food and shelter, if I write code that doesn’t further that effort, I’m not being a “good programmer”.
It's like if we were discussing the IQ of tech founders and you kept interrupting, saying "IQ is not all that matters", "You can't pay your bills with IQ points", "Steve Jobs might not have a genius IQ but he was a great entrepreneur and that is more important". It's all true, but irrelevant, since it's specifically IQ levels we are discussing.
But writing the best “Enterprise FizzBuzz” that doesn’t solve a problem no matter how good the code is is meaningless. A great developer that writes code that no one uses is not a great developer.
In other words a great developer that can’t ship is worthless - the whole “smart and gets things done” metric.
FWIW, there are plenty of people who shipping great quality code everyday at Apple, Google etc. Not "FizzBuzz", but concise, human readable, robust, maintainable code. My only contention is that Marco probably wouldn't be able to write code to the standard required at some FAANGs. Casey definitely wouldn't. John quite likely. What do you think?
Keep in mind we are only discussing the code aspect. Not putting up with standups, corporate jargon, middle managers, 9-5 etc.
I have seen some people use these on dating apps where they don't want their own children's or other people's children's faces to be visible. I understand that use case a bit more from a privacy perspective.
So blurring them out somehow protects privacy and lets parents their habitual social media posting.