angryredblock

Is this Clippy for Grafana?

A friend of mine who has done mostly professional web development is starting his journey in iOS development with SwiftUI. He's done great work of finding answers to specific questions he's had on the process but I wanted to give him a list of "good things to be generally aware of so that you know the keywords to start googling when you hit these sorts of problems." A lot of the "iOS development topics" lists I've seen were more around getting started with development in general, so focused more on things like good architectural patterns, or source control, etc. I wanted to give him a more focused list for iOS specifically, so I wrote one up -- sharing it here in case anyone finds themselves in a similar situation and finds it useful.

I don’t think it’s bad advice but having shipped multiple (really bad) games, I think it misses the two biggest/best pieces of advice I’ve gotten: 1. GDDs are probably a distraction if you’re a solo dev - prototyping and grayboxing a lot and looking for the fun mechanics without any art/music/story to get in the way or distract is essential 2. If you’re truly just starting (and don’t already have a sense of fun), absolute best way to start is to carbon-copy a game you find fun, then start adding/tweaking elements. This both builds the mindset required to make games, and helps you get into the “fun iteration” loop quickly without getting bogged down in writing a lot of interesting technical systems that don’t end up contributing to the game in a meaningful way.

I haven't gotten too far with my test 13" MBA. I booted it up and installed Xcode -- it took about 2 hours to install, which I don't understand. Now that it's installed I can't build my project without recompiling some dependencies so will be some time before I can properly compare it to my Intel 13" MBP on things that matter to me (compile-run-iterate on iOS apps).

If you have any specific questions about software or task speed I'm happy to answer though!

Out of curiosity - how do you normally interview? Is the risk that much greater when interviewing someone who already works for a direct competitor as opposed to someone who could go start at your direct competitor tomorrow?

If you want to be a solo/technical founder, I'd consider learning to build web apps a great first step - it's accessible, cross-platform, and flexible. There's also no shortage of resources online. On the frontend, React is commonly used and generally a safe choice. On the backend, some nodejs with heroku or docker should give you a gentle introduction (with the added advantage that you'll be learning the same language for both front and backend -- one less thing to worry about as you're starting).

This is a great idea, well done!

Have you considered adding a background task to automatically push the data to e.g Dropbox once/day? I would love to have my data in a usable location without exporting it manually each time

Unrelated: Great pricing too

Interesting article, IMO the single biggest "blind spot" gmail has that makes Hey look very attractive is the idea that users should be in control of the experience. Privacy is great, I think Hey's specific innovation goes beyond that though.

Hey this is a really great idea and well executed. Did you use a template for the website or built from scratch?

I have a lot of things I want to do. I also suffer from 'decision paralysis' -- rather than starting any one thing from my list, I avoid them all at once. During one of these "avoidance sessions" I stumbled on a reddit thread where someone else had the exact same problem.

shia.guru is the very beginning of a tool to help myself and others push themselves to spend more time on the things that they want to do rather than the things that are easy.

It works by trimming your TODO list to just ONE item for you to focus on -- with a promise to call you in an hour and check in on your progress.

Agreed, this feature set looks like an incredible amount of work for a year.

Interestingly it seems it started as a shooter game more than an engine — explains why the feature set is tailored towards that.

Definitely agree caution is a good stance to take -- as much as we need to be supportive of victims we also need to be smart about doing our research. With that said, given Uber's recent history (Fowler) and without any action from Uber's higher-ups that indicates they actually give a shit (frankly a twitter apology from Kalanick and a half-assed 'investigation' isn't enough at this point), I'm far more inclined to err on the side of supporting the alleged victim than the alleged perpetrator in this case.

Would love to see more details on what actually goes down on the nitty gritty level -- it sounds like the business hemorrhaged money for quite some time and given that you didn't have investment it'd be great to know how you got from there to having the capital on-hand to start running fiber.

Complete misrepresentation of homeschooling based on one person's anecdotal experience.

"A single powerful person who is convinced of their own Rightness with no thought of introspection is dangerous."

Indeed.

Perhaps we'd be better served to stop vilifying an entire subset of the population and actually listen to the parents who have recognized that public education is broken and who are taking other measures to educate their children.

I wish there was more detail about the pain-point-finding process. As is, simply looking for examples of current pain points is very prone to cognitive bias -- if you go looking for a pain point, you'll find one, but how do you quantify the intensity of pain and willingness to change solutions? Maybe more of an overall competition-assessment strategy (rather than a specific pain-point-search) -- if you research the current shortcomings AND high points of current solutions you'll have a much better understanding of the value your product can add.

100% agree.

I like having a smartphone with me because it allows me to do things I couldn't reasonably otherwise do -- but it can also be used as a crutch for things you don't really need a smartphone for. I've started looking for ways to solve problems that DON'T involve popping open a google window or launching yelp. Simple stuff like memorizing routes I want to take before I start so I can navigate with my eyes ahead rather than in my phone, asking friends for food recommendations, keeping eyes out for posters advertising upcoming events. For me, making life less convenient and reducing instant-gratification is helping me enjoy the ride more.

(yes, this is 100% a first-world-problems comment)

Was it the boolean check that degraded performance or was branch misprediction inside a nested loop the root cause?

The solution you came to seems quite elegant but I'd be curious to see metrics with the debug_on check moved outside both loops.

I wasn't explicitly taught this - but as someone with no dependents, I relate quite strongly to this.

Yeh, as an American driver I don't know how people open their doors in the city WITHOUT looking first.

In rural areas where bikers ride on the sidewalk and are not super common, sure, but I can't remember a time driving in a city where I was NOT super paranoid about hitting a car or a cyclist or a pedestrian with my door.

In addition to film being entertainment, it's one of the most effective mediums for communication we have right now. Case in point: way more folks are aware of the Narcos subject matter than previously.

Now whether or not we can transition communication to action is another question entirely...

Love it -- reminds me of a more focused Uplink.

If you're happy to allow fellow humans to continue along a poor path, sure. I believe in establishing feedback loops and giving people opportunities to grow.

Tongue-in-cheek aside, of course passive-aggressive isn't the ideal path to improving interview processes. :P

My response to such questions is usually along the lines 'Sorry, didn't realize I was interviewing for my ability to perform 5-second google searches.'

If 'getting the job' in that instance is the metric of success, then it doesn't work well at all, but in quality-of-life terms it's served me well.

What? A megacorp trying to erode net neutrality under the guise of philanthropy? Shocking.

Do you generally work 'normal' (9-5) hours? Do you have help on the farm or are you the primary caretaker? I'd not have thought of farming as low-time-commitment enough to be a hobby.

Absolutely. Writing bad code is a great way to put yourself on the path to writing better code -- as long as you have the 'always refactor' mindset.

Indeed - it's shocking how many adherents to these imaginarily-discrete spheres even see room for the separation of philosophy and science. Philosophy requires science to evolve, and science requires philosophy to provide context.