dfansteel

Having attempted this in the past let me say: I’m in violent agreement.

Attempting to “share code” between Swift/Kotlin is folly at this point. I’m not going to close the door on Kotlin Native some day. But for now just say, “No”.

There's a really excellent podcast on McAfee available https://www.behindthebastards.com/podcasts/part-one-john-mca...

Theorizing that one could time travel within their own lifetime, I led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top secret project, known as "Quantum Leap". Pressured to prove my theories or lose funding, I prematurely stepped into the Project Accelerator and vanished. I awoke to find myself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not my own. Fortunately, contact with my own time was made through brainwave transmissions with Al, the Project Observer, who appeared in the form of a hologram that only I could see and hear. Trapped in the past, I find myself leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong and hoping each time that my next leap will be the leap home.

City of Mist. Very cinematic with a lot of Comic Book overtones. Simple rules. All you need are 2d6. Starter kit comes with some great characters. https://www.cityofmist.co

I’ve read this exact same article every year for ten years and in that time the web has become increasingly slower and more personally invasive while apps have become more capable and faster.

Pardon me if I take this all with a grain of salt.

Does that differentiation necessarily mean Bitbucket repos are immune to this problem?

Okay, okay... I’ll be the lone Swift user. I really enjoy the type safety and in line parameter names on function calls. Of the type safe languages it feels like it has the minimal about of scaffolding needed to run some code.

The pages load too quickly. Thereby ruining me for all the other pages out there.

The Riblet is a terrible signature food and deserves to be destroyed.

Tie one arm behind your back.

Try to do the stuff you've been doing but without the resources that have been at your disposal. Build a simple Twitter clone API using only C APIs. Roll your own HTML layout renderer in Open GL. What if NGINX and Apache didn't exist? What would you do then?

Watch "Halt and Catch Fire" as an engineer. Listen to the problems they're solving and try to solve them yourself.

At the end of the day, hacking is about creative problem solving.

It's not a hacker film, but if you're looking for something in a similar style I recommend "Cloak & Dagger".

I had similar feeling regarding their experience with iOS.

I have a lot of trouble believing that the author of this page has much experience with iOS development. As such it calls into question the rest of their evaluations. Cocoa programming is the place I can speak intelligently, so I'm going to limit my remarks to that.

Let's start with Objective-C which is being listed as "Enlightenment" on the cusp of "Productivity". Objective-C has been around for 30 years. Check out the Swarm Library. An Objective-C library developed first in the 90's for research into CA. I won't go into the whole history, but it's been a productive language since the mid 90's.

In Text Editors, Xcode is listed as "Challenged" by what? There's no mention of AppCode at all. The Cocoa IDE marketplace is so small I cannot name another editor without going to google. Listing it as "Challenged" may appeal to people who aren't experienced with it, but it's still the accepted tool for Cocoa development.

For iOS Development... I know React Native is popular among newcomers, almost exclusively because they'd rather not learn a new language, but I can name exactly 0 mobile professionals who use it. Yes, I know Facebook uses it. Facebook apps are objectively terrible. They get away with it because React Native is moderately better than mobile web.

/rant

Often. I have, occasionally, actually implemented what I dreamt of. To date it's only worked once. Which, when you think about it, is pretty damn amazing.

Hands down: Swift.

I absolutely adored Objective-C. But there were a few things I never felt comfortable with and just drank the Kool-Aid on.

1. Message passing to `nil`. Sure it's nice that you can safely pass a message to nil, but the idiom is a little weird. `guard` and `defer` have completely changed the way I write code in functions to exit safely.

2. Protocol Oriented Programming. This has changed the way I architect my applications for the better. I end up with less code over all and fewer Unit Tests in particular.

3. Associated Value Enums. Another big win over Objective-C. Now I can have a type and value all wrapped in one little package for my switch statements. It sounds minor, but it minimizes cyclomatic complexity.

4. It's going to be very good to know this language in 2 years. Javascript has owned the browser for too long.

I've worked for non-profits before and have loved the experience. A couple of things stand out for me:

1) Remote Work & Flex Schedule - Quality of life is a major concern. Working in startups 100 hour weeks have happened. It's kind of a rush actually. But everyone needs to take some time off that. Allowing people the opportunity to work from wherever they want, whenever they want makes all the difference. A common miss of non-profit managers is adopting the idea that you need to be on the job from 9-5 and be seen being productive. Don't treat your devs like they're cashiers.

2) Community Engagement - Mid-sized companies and startups tend to be wildly jealous about their employees time, often requiring employees to work in a vacuum. Let your devs publish open source software that's derivative of your core business. Support their desire to establish development blogs. Encourage their extra curricular activities. I've often taken second jobs teaching software development just because I enjoy it. A lot of for profit companies don't like that.

3) Intrinsic Benefits - Be willing to hire off platform. Look for people interested in expanding their skill set. The mobile developer looking to learn web development. The web developer looking to learn API development. The boot camp graduate looking for their first job in the field. Find people who can figure out how to do the job. Have the practical experience make up for the lost direct income.

I'd send him to http://codecombat.com . It's not real productive coding, but it's a decent enough entry point for someone who may not have found their passion yet.

For me, coding is a passion. A labor of love. I haven't worked a day since starting. As an iOS developer, I'd say learn Swift. Apple pushed the great reset button and we're all starting from the same place.

A few reasons... 1) Mobile is hot right now and skilled developers are still hard to come by. Employers who need a mobile developer are in a sellers market. 2) High quality apps can be built with a single skill set, if you know your SDK. The good web guys I know need to be experts at multiple languages, architectures, and services. I have one skill that I'm good at, but because no one else has it my career has gotten a nice jump to it compared to my classmates. 3) There is room to be disruptive. The web is 20 years old. iOS development is 4 years old and Android is three. There's a lot less baggage in mobile and a lot more room for a small team of developers to impact the platform. 4) It's cheap to get started with. For under $750 you can put together a serviceable lab to work in.

The bottom line is there are low barriers to entry and a high rate of return.

He seems like a real self starter. If he has an aptitude for programming I'd recommend getting into mobile development as an independent contractor.

I'm not saying it would be easy. I started teaching myself iOS at the end of my sophomore year (4 years ago). In six months I felt comfortable accepting contracts off of elance. By the time I graduated I was employed full time as a contractor. It's just gotten better from there.

Mobile is one place where your past doesn't really matter. You either can or you can't. And your past doesn't matter much.