debt

Catalyst is pretty weak. I think that's why Electron and RN are still more appealing.

Should add support and all the boilerplate for NSDocument and CoreData. That's a bit more robust DefaultApp.

Love this though.

But it’s a career. Work defines a career.

If a crappy PM wastes an engineer’s time by having them churn out useless product features, the PM is ruining their own career and the career of the engineers.

It’s important to work on meaningful work in order to have a meaningful career. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to heal the sick, but it can mean a PM doesn’t waste my time making me do stupid shit like build a feature no one uses.

It’s very difficult to level up if you never build anything worthwhile. PM’s should focus on getting it right the first time or not doing it all, because in the world of software development, adding technical debt for something not worth anything anyway is worth less than doing nothing at all

I don’t see why exceptions couldn’t be made for smaller businesses that obviously couldn’t afford to compensate for commute.

But yes enormous, corporate conglomerates should pay.

The executive team can trim a few million off their annual bonuses so the very low number of workers that commute far distances can be compensated for that time sitting in the car.

Alas they can but they won’t and they’ll fight you in court so they don’t have to.

This is actually a huge source of potential litigation. Lawsuits that easily end in settlement given CCPA, GDPR etc. He’s likely not just doing this for his blog.

It’s akin to “Injured at work?” billboards.

I do this exact same thing except I prepend at the top of the file the days notes. Also the only consistent structure is the putting the date before each note.

I’m already here

Code is meant to be thrown away. Not to mention there exists industrial-strength automated code refactoring which will just get cheaper and smarter.

So write code you can deploy today, monolith or micro serves, in the not-to-distant future we'll be able to cheaply refactor it at scale into any style you want.

The xcodebuild command line tool is insanely powerful. The one provided by vanilla Xcode is awful.

Honestly, the biggest value Mint and all the Intuit products have is the import from X-bank/investment account/etc. I'd pay for the ability to import into a spreadsheet from my money accounts.

Normal Mailer once said he writes even if he doesn't want to because he was always able to write himself into a writing mood.

Cryptocurrency does not have anything close to widespread consumer adoption. If the Coinbase’s of the world don’t fix this, cryptocurrency will be massively devalued.

"...how often I run into things that are completely broken..."

That's because the shotgun approach(sick 40 developers on a single problem idc how they dole out the workload) works well for most low stakes, non-safety-critical software.

So like a reactivation portal for your Amazon seller account is very low stakes. But Boeing treating the 737-MAX the same way, would be(and was) a very bad idea.

Because that low-stakes approach is extremely bug prone.

"...would result in saving many human lives worth of time."

Meh this is manager-speak for "saving human lives" which they definitely were not. They weren't saving anybody. I mean, there's argument that, in modern day, 2020, time away from the computer is more well-spent than on a computer; so a faster boot time is actually worse than a slower boot time. Faster boot time is less time with the family.

Good managers, like Steve Jobs was, are really good at motivating people using false narratives.

Okay so you don’t live in China then I take it

There’s a lot of awful work that many software engineers simply don’t want to do and naturally the ones that do work the awful stuff do a pretty piss poor job because it’s hard work.

So as long as there’s awful work, there will be a market for high paid software engineers.

People that thought this way use to be referred to as a “hipster”.

“Aural platforms don't have this capability.”

Using 3D sound, you could surface multiple things simultaneously to the user. For instance, a user could instantly recognize three beeps at varying loudness and location relative to themselves.

We could also use simulated echolocation.

There’s many ways to simulate aural perception that mimics visual perpection.

Yeah Hollywood has been doing this for decades. It’s called timing.

They let particular scripts sit on shelves for years until the culturally correct moment to have them be made.

The same can be true for just about any industry, it’s just depends on the cultural landscape of that particular industry.

Also, I think this point might be missed to some young people, once you work on drone software that kills people or ICE software that detains people, you cannot reverse your contributions.

That work will permanently be part of you and your career.

Apple TV without a doubt has the most poorly designed UI of any Apple product.

There is so many problems with it it’s like they invented AppleTv+ solely to raise money to pay a team to basically entirely rewrite AppleTV.

It’s hard to believe Apple even sells the AppleTV.

Figure how to support it without being involved in actual deliverables. Or transfer to a new team/project. Or both.

I’m trying an experiment in my new role where I deliberately avoid these types of projects.

They usually don’t deliver on time and are too stressful to work with. It’s not worth it both personally and from a career perspective.

However if they manage to deliver a complex design on time, I’ll have lost a great career opportunity. It’s a gamble either way, but high complexity both in organization and design, usually yields a high failure rate on just about every metric I can think of except the metric of “I’m going to use this complex design to get another job and bail myself out of the dumpster fire I’m creating before I have to deliver anything of value”.

"it's unfortunately more about politics and luck than merit"

To reiterate, software is not all about writing software. There's usually an immense amount of buy-in you'll need from other people, not limited to other software engineers.

All while simultaneously trying to navigate budgets and legacy systems. Even if you're pretty heads down, you'll still see the outward effects of these things.

All these things are necessary though, as the system within which the software operates becomes increasingly complex over time, it becomes necessary to engage with many different people in a multitude of roles and capacities.

“organizational approval”

Is the literal problem, which necessitated the pop-up.

The Organization Does Not Approve™

It’s like asking someone if you can kick them in the knee before doing so. What do you think they’ll say?

Y’all seem confused: the organization, Google in this case, is antognizing it’s organizing employees. Google absolutely do not, will not, can not approve of unionization efforts. Ever.

It’s sort of ridiculous to think any boss would approve this, which is why she did it the way she did it in the first place.

“a poster in the cafeteria is not the best way of reaching the majority of Googlers.”

I heard the food had gotten bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad.

The concerning thing is she seems to call out that employees have the right to “concerted activities” which means Google sung only opposed to unionization efforts but to any “concerted action” by their employees.

Even so much as organizing could be viewed as a threat by Google’s management.

“ However, the real gold for marketers is from word-of-mouth discussions. Those conversations with your friends when you recommend a TV show, a brand of clothing, or share a news report. This is the most valuable kind of marketing.”

That’s saying quite a lot.