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Comment by semireg | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, Quinn “The Eskimo!” is a legend. They have helped me on a few occasions with code signing electron apps. In the American south there is a saying “doing the lords work.” Thank goodness we have people like Quinn. Their understanding of complex system and abilities to troubleshoot are invaluable.

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also, his posts on the Apple Developer Forums are also much more professional and insightful than the crap which Apple calls their documentation.

I keep an archive and index of his posts on GitHub so that they are easy to find. https://github.com/macshome/The-Wisdom-of-Quinn

great idea, please consider making the links clickable in the PDFs

If you like, archive 1 level deep too, where it makes sense.

Thanks.

It sucks because the forums are one of the worst place he could be putting this information–it's a terrible medium, hard to search, and full of information that ought to be elsewhere. I do not appreciate that Apple can rely on this horrible stopgap instead of writing technotes like they're supposed to.

Quinn does actually author doc pages as well. Some of the code signing tech notes are written by him I think.

Also he's got to approaching retirement age at this point, and there is no backbench corps of other DTS who do what he does. Maybe another decade we'll have his help, then what?

Pre-NeXT takeover, Apple had a lot of folks like Quinn to support developers, and an entire documentation department churning out content. Quinn was always one of if not the best.

While much was gained in the NeXT merger, the biggest thing that was lost was developer support and documentation. They were gutted in March 1997 and were never restored. Avie Tevanian had no respect for documentation and his attitude infected the rest of the organization. One dude did so much irreparable damage.

I found the documentation of NeXT and Apple during the early days of Mac OS X to be pretty excellent to be honest. It was even one of the points that drew me to the platform. But then I only started with Mac after the takeover, so I don’t know how things were before.

I do know how they are today though and it’s sad.

I worked with Quinn at Apple during my brief stay in the mid-90s. He's amazingly knowledgeable about almost everything in the Apple world, which is why he is so valuable at answering questions.

Quinn's been around forever, you can see his name in Apple Developer Connection CDs from the 90s.

http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.16/16.06/Ju...

Agree! Quinn “The Eskimo!” is indeed a legend. Hope to meet him one day during WWDC. Just to shake his hands.

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