“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
-Andre Gidé
This is one of my favorite quotes, only because it so directly speaks to the exploration of substantially upgrading my software development chops.
I got to spend an afternoon with Blake Watters aka Mr. RestKit. He showed me something magical, well, more like a life-changing choice, really.
| <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> | |
| <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> | |
| <plist version="1.0"> | |
| <dict> | |
| <key>Ansi 0 Color</key> | |
| <dict> | |
| <key>Blue Component</key> | |
| <real>0.19370138645172119</real> | |
| <key>Green Component</key> | |
| <real>0.15575926005840302</real> |
Spent the better part of the first-half of the day transitioning into zshell using oh-my-zsh.
The thing that's great about zsh is that a lot of bash configuration data can be moved very cleanly into the .zshrc file, which is the canonical user-customizable startup file for zsh.
The thing that the interwebs doesn't tell you is that if you used Homebrew to install zsh, you need to continue using Homebrew to keep going the distance and making things work.
| /* ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict */ | |
| { | |
| /* | |
| * Keybindings for emacs emulation. | |
| * | |
| * WARNING! After Mountain Lion, this file cannot be symbolic linked to another file, | |
| * you need to put this file in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict directly | |
| * | |
| * Reference: |
I have this nearly debilitating habit of using the front-end of the time allotted to me to burn up doing non-urgent, non-important stuff. It's a habit I developed in childhood because I was far smarter than the average elementary school student.
As an adult, it has cost me dearly over the years. But I am not present to that cost the vast majority of the time when I am in the middle of the action. Or non-action.
You could say this behavior has made me a first-class citizen of Procrastination Nation. Things are delusionally easy there, until something actually needs to get done to further my survival and the survival of those closest to me.
The big dreams are not available as a citizen there.
So, it turns out that there's always another good idea.
Patrick Hughes implemented a cool idea WRT eliminating the use of magic strings from his Objective-C codebases (at least for the use of the -[UIImage imageNamed:]). It's a pretty good idea, and one that has inspired at least one extension: GenLoc by Ivan Suhinin.
The problem is, both of them use preprocessor hacking to get this done
I read an article last year about code smells and I can definitely say that I felt a LOT better knowing that I wasn't littering the precompiled header file with a lot of auto-or-human-generated constants. Seeing it used A LOT on The Daily's codebase creeped me out.
I have to believe that there's a way to do this such that:
So I was listening to the latest episode of Core Intuition today and at one point Daniel Jalkut started talking about upgrading not his infrastructure, but his personal skillset.
When I heard him talk about that, I thought metastructure.
One thing that's been consuming me for the last few weeks is the notion of the MOVE programming model. MOVE stands for Models-Operations-Views-Events.
Pretty cool sounding, huh? For me it was amazing. And amazingly obvious that the hole was related to Events.
Conrad Irwin is right that the Controller layer gets too much code stuffed into it. However, it's not really clear (to me) where the Events are wired up.
The jump to ARC and blocks has been a lot more treacherous than the promise the ARC announcement originally had back in June 2011.
Mike Ash gets us started with stacks vs. heaps.
Basic ARC retain cycles also comes up, especially with the infamous retain-self-from-a-block bug.
There's the whole stacks v. heaps challenge again for blocks.
It's just a bitch. My memory about memory is just such a bitch.
I listened (finally) to the first Debug podcast with Loren Brichter.
The thing I was struck by was how much he emphasized the word experiment. He was always experimenting as an indie developer around different ideas, like rewriting UIKit using OpenGL, and GameCenter, and all kinds of other ideas.
He also (no surprise) focused on experiences. But the way he did it got me thinking about how his experiments contributed to his capacity to craft experiences for his users. I think about how little I experiment and go with the standard solution only. As I'm writing this, though, I can see how the automated testing harness that I'm experimenting with can be an awesome verification tool for the experiments I attempt.
I think it could be really something to focus on my own experiences and experiment to improve those experiences as well. As I play around with this MOVED paradigm, it could really yield some interest
The phrase "A comma, not a period" comes from Evangelical Christian circles, where the notion of "being finished" is a period and being in progress for the transformation of righteousness is a comma.
Done and Gets Things Smart is an ideal I aspire to. I don't know if I'll ever get to "god-like" seed engineer status (according to Steve Yegge), but I do see a pathway to emulating particles of that superhero engineer (If you want a sample of who I'm talking about, read this book).
A screening interview at Black Pixel I think would look something like Rob Napier's interview.
A serious candidate interview looks exactly like this.
Here's the direction