> What's even the point of posting a photo of your child, with the face hidden? Seems very niche.
Might be a cultural US thing, but this is something my wife does a lot and I see a lot of people doing. It's one of those things that might not make sense if you don't have kids.
I have kids, and don't mind posting their photos. But if I did, why post at all? It just seems weird. "Here's my son, minus the face. Oh he's so cute!"
I also find it bizarre and think similarly... if you're going to cover up the person's face, why post it at all?
I have seen some people use these on dating apps where they don't want their own children's or other people's children's faces to be visible. I understand that use case a bit more from a privacy perspective.
For some, its not about the kids its about showing themselves as a parent.
For others, its about sharing with people that you know that you and your kids had a good time while providing some privacy protection for your kids. Micro-managing who can see what picture is hard, the people that know your kids get the full mental image from the picture.
> the people that know your kids get the full mental image from the picture.
Maybe it's just me but this kinda thing seems a little weird. If it's too much work to partition into groups then maybe not post at all?
But then again I'm not doing any social networks so I guess I'm not the intended audience.
I also didn't get this. Why put photo's on social media of your kids AT ALL if you feel weird about it. Making them look weirder feel a bit strange to me. But now you point out that is basically to enable virtue signalling for parents its makes more sense.
My in-laws foster and this is the first use case I thought of. It’s sad to take a big family photo and either not be able to share it, or have to take a duplicate without the foster child.
Speaking as a foster parent: my agency like many have rules against posting foster kids to social media. Usually intended to help protect kid's privacy. I think the motivation comes from a handful of places, protecting kids from being exploited for likes, keeping kids privacy, but a big one in foster circles is so that people don't know you're a foster kid unless you say so. Most adults in the system take great care to not acknowledge kids if they run into them in public to avoid situations where kids have to explain to their friends, "Who is that?" and then having an awkward situation where they have to say something like, "That's my caseworker/therapist/whatever".
Some of these make sense (not that I agree with them), but don't seem peculiar to foster children. But what does this one mean?
> so that people don't know you're a foster kid unless you say so.
If you post a photo of your family and none of the children have emoji faces, why would anyone conclude that the foster child is a foster child? Because he looks different? Seems to me that emoji:ing out one child would do the opposite, draw attention to him.
EDIT: It seems we are talking about temporary arrangements, then things become clearer. Still very weird photos.
I was referring generally to the general desire for "the system" to preserve the privacy of kids in care. I think you have to look at it holistically and not just social media. We also signed agreements that we would be very careful with the information we received about our placements, they don't deserve their story being blasted around (even to close friends and family) unless it is needed for the benefit of the child, and even then only to the degree necessary.
I've been in doctor's appointments where the nurse is quizzing me on my family medical history and I've had to stop them with, "We're not biologically related and I don't know the biological history". No need for them to know the whole story.
I feel privacy for kids is really important, for a number of different reasons. (preventing kids from being exploited for likes by foster parents, preservation and ownership for them to tell their story in their way when they are ready for it, privacy, sometimes protection from relatives that don't have their best interests at heart, and probably a dozen other reasons I have never thought of.) The best default is really to keep everything private in my opinion, but obviously not every agency or foster parent will agree to all the same specifics as me.
Not all foster kids come from the same ethnic backgrounds. So for example if you're Caucasian and post a picture of your family with a foster child who is Asian, or African-American etc, it can bring unwanted attention.
Not saying you're wrong at all, I have zero insight into foster care. Just trying to understand.
But why is it a problem if someone sees a family photo and notices that one kid looks different? He could just be adopted, or a friend or something. Is it something like witness protection, the children might have abusive parents that shouldn't be able to find them?
If it's a matter of not standing out, they will stand out just as much when you meet them anyway, right?
The number of people you meet in person is limited by geography. The number of people who might view a photo online is 7+ billion.
Foster kids might have abusive parents as you surmised. They might have been removed from an unsafe home, or have relatives that were denied custody and might act on a photo.
Probably varies by location but here's what Connecticut DCF has to say about it:
> Please refrain from posting any photos or information on social media websites about the child/ren in your care. Their presence in your home should be treated as confidential information is not to be referred to on any social media websites.
Why do you care? Nearly every comment you've left here in this post has negative language. You claim to have been an iOS developer for ten years - where's your podcast? Where are your apps on the app store that you're posting publicly about? Why aren't we talking about Grustaf in this post?
Find empathy. Find humility. Find more in life than being a negative person on the internet.
I asked because I didn't see why foster children specifically had to be hidden.
The reason you are not talking about me is that I'm not famous. Does that disqualify me from having an opinion? Do all opinions have to be positive? Do I have to (pretend to) believe that this app can make money? That seems pretty strange, this is not a kindergarten, grownups should be able to handle feedback even when it's not praise. If he needs empathy, he should go to his friends and family. I will just write what I believe, and that is that this is not a monetizable service, he is wasting his time.
He obviously has made a name for himself in podcasting, so he should double down on that. He is clearly not a product person, and I don't think he's a very good developer, he will do much better focusing on his strengths.
I'm curious, why do I need to have a podcast if I have been an iOS developer for 10 years, what's the connection?
To be fair their podcast has two programmers and a stay at home dad so it makes sense why he only had focus on his kids. The app isnt worth .99 cents though with questionable utility and a plethora of other apps that do this for free.
Two of them are working programmers though and, in my opinion, much stronger programmers. I just think it's clear why he thought this was a valuable app idea.
I've listened to ATP since day one. My impression of Siracusa as a programmer is limited to the few apps he's released. But he could be a fantastic programmer at his "jobby-job." Or he could just be average. We have no way of telling, despite how intelligent both his writing and his speaking on the podcast might convey.
Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, yet we don't know how good a programmer he is. He's made great money, and has strong opinions, but again, we don't know how good a programmer he is.
Casey used to have a "jobby-job" before leaving the corporate world. So he too might be a good, bad or excellent programmer. We don't know.
It's kind of like how you don't really know someone until you live with them. For programming, it's until you've worked with them and seen their code. All three of the hosts might be world class; or they might be average. But there's no way to determine who is the strongest programmer of the three.
We can debate who's been more successful selling their code, but we don't know where Siracusa works and code/app sales are a poor metric for code quality.
We obviously can't know, but hearing someone talk about something gives you an idea.
My impression is that Casey is quite weak (as in average), but meticulous.
Siracusa is almost certainly the one with the best understanding of theory, but hard to say how he is practically. He could be very good at what he's doing.
Marco also doesn't seem very strong in raw programming (he resisted Swift for half a decade, complains that it's hard to deal with, says that architecture is only for beginners etc) but obviously he can solve whatever problem he is faced with, even quite complex ones. And this is obviously what matters if you are an indie developer. That and product sense, which he is also very good at. He probably has the perfect skillset for an indie developer, better programming wouldn't make him any more successful.
I think Marco's resistance to Swift doesn't indicate anything about programming skill. Based on his low level audio programming (he hates to rely on code outside of his own), he's quite an accomplished programmer, unafraid of complex problems or reinventing the wheel when an existing library doesn't satisfy his desires. I doubt he would survive well in the world of unit tests, CI/CD, Jira and managers though. And I envy him for being able to avoid that.
Yeah, gotta defend Marco here, though I have my quibbles with him on this show. (He has the most first-worldiest of problems.)
He has gone in deep on performant low-level audio code, and how it integrates with the system APIs. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff with programmatic drawing of icons in his apps. He did a lot of good caching work back in the Instapaper days, when cell connections were almost like dialup.
He seemed to be reluctant to learn Swift, because Swift would have gotten him…what? I think he thought that Objective-C was mature, tested, comprehensible, and battle-tested in production. And it wasn’t going to change out from underneath him…which you sure couldn’t say about Swift for the first few years. You eventually had to adopt it, as Apple is moving to Swift-only, but I think Objective-C let him accomplish his goals, and a lot of the good security stuff in Swift is maybe not super relevant to his app development.
I love how Marco just feels like throwing money at one of life's problems is the best solution. I think he would be the first to tell you the role of luck in his success. Yes, he worked long hard hours at Tumblr, and eventually that paid off financially when Tumblr was sold. He was smart to scratch an itch when the iPhone first came out by releasing Instapaper, and smart to realize when it was time to sell it. He was smart to realize his itch for a good podcast player might be universal. So I think he's an incredible businessman who is really only limited by his unwillingness to yoke himself to a corporation.
His use of Obj-C and PHP are just as pragmatic to me. He's an expert at Obj-C and possibly at PHP, and why change? Let Swift mature, see if Obj-C becomes deprecated, and then move on. He can obviously learn new languages since he's dabbled in Rust etc.
I do wish ATP focused more on tech stuff and less on how to live your best life on Fire Island. But I enjoy it every week.
> Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast,
I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.
You're conflating smart business choices with good programming. His code could be well marketed shit that just barely works under the covers, but he sells it well (Narrator's voice: "It isn't shit...")
Marco is an excellent indie developer because he selects markets he has a good understanding of, finds his niche, then simply outclasses his competition by being ahead on features. He also has a loyal following from his podcasts, and is an aspirational figure for a lot of devs hoping to make money (or break free of corp serfdom).
A well written program/app isn't a necessary requirement for success.
There are some segments from a few episodes that show that Marco is demonstrably not a super great programmer. I suspect some of his server side code is horrible. But he doesn't matter because he is super strong at other stuff super focussed on solving his own problems at gets it done. You don't need to be super great at programming you just need to be tenacious.
What’s the purpose of programming if it’s not “make the computer do stuff I need it to do to solve my problem”?
Yes I know all about clean code, automated testing, and “sound engineering practices”. But I’ve met a number of theoretical good coders who couldn’t ship a product that met the customer’s needs to save their lives. If I’m working to support my addiction to food and shelter, if I write code that doesn’t further that effort, I’m not being a “good programmer”.
Why do you insist on not understanding what it means to write high quality code? In some contexts, like my previous job, it's important. In others, like if you're making games or non-essential apps in your one man indie shop, much less so. Other qualities are much more important. But it doesn't matter if it's "important" or not, it's a concept that exists, and the only thing we are trying to discuss is that.
It's like if we were discussing the IQ of tech founders and you kept interrupting, saying "IQ is not all that matters", "You can't pay your bills with IQ points", "Steve Jobs might not have a genius IQ but he was a great entrepreneur and that is more important". It's all true, but irrelevant, since it's specifically IQ levels we are discussing.
My thesis is still code is meant to make the computer stuff. That “stuff” can be “Candy Crush” or “reliable code that doesn’t cause a plane to fall out of the sky”.
But writing the best “Enterprise FizzBuzz” that doesn’t solve a problem no matter how good the code is is meaningless. A great developer that writes code that no one uses is not a great developer.
In other words a great developer that can’t ship is worthless - the whole “smart and gets things done” metric.
You can think whatever you want, but we are still discussing the quality of the code that they write. Not which skill is more important, what life is like at Google, your inferiority complex about not passing the whiteboard test, or anything else.
FWIW, there are plenty of people who shipping great quality code everyday at Apple, Google etc. Not "FizzBuzz", but concise, human readable, robust, maintainable code. My only contention is that Marco probably wouldn't be able to write code to the standard required at some FAANGs. Casey definitely wouldn't. John quite likely. What do you think?
Keep in mind we are only discussing the code aspect. Not putting up with standups, corporate jargon, middle managers, 9-5 etc.
Well-written apps can meet a need, but it's like furniture. You can buy some cheap futon that gives you something to sleep on, but doesn't last long. Or you can buy a bespoke bed with handcrafted mortise and tenon joints, perfectly straight grained wood, and French polish finish. Both will give you a place to sleep, but one might last longer.
It's like my code. I have some super ugly python utils I've written that a "real" programmer would cringe when looking at the code. But it works 100% of the time when run (assuming the processes they call don't change their specs). The code is written for Python2, and breaks on Python3. It's not very clear how things work, despite extensive commenting. By your definition, these utilities would be "well written." To me, they're brittle, fragile eggs that I eventually will have to rewrite when Enterprise Security decides we can't have python2 binaries on our servers.
He's undoubtedly a world class indie developer, but we were discussing his abilities as a programmer, in the sense of writing good code. True, it's not necessarily important or valuable in life, but that is what we were talking about.
Most of the people I worked with at my FAANG job were excellent programmers, surely better than Marco, but none of them would have any chance of even coming up with a decent idea for an app, let alone carry it through and launch it. So they are absolutely useless as indie developers. It's just different skill sets.
Our definition of a “well written app” is different.
An app to me is well written if it is meets a need well enough to be successful. I would be much more impressed by an Indy developer who has a successful sustainable business without being slimy than a “FAANG” software engineer that got in because he can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.
I also know we are both talking hypothetically. If you listen to him about some of the low level audio processing he does, he’s definitely pretty good.
Before I get the expected replies, no I’m not “jealous of FAANG SWEs”. I work for BigTech myself after a very slight pivot from enterprise development.
The interview is the least demanding part, working as a software developer at an ambitious company has nothing to do with binary trees.
What does it matter which skill is more impressive? Obviously there are way fewer successful indie developers than top tier developers, and obviously life as a successful indie is way better. Yet, there is such a thing as writing high quality code, which is more or less orthogonal to being a successful indie. And that was what we are discussing.
It's a bit like being a fast runner and being a good football player. There's some connection, but it's not like the fastest runners are the best players, or the other way around. Different skills.
As to low level audio, I know what you're referring to, and it doesn't say that much really. My co-founder at my previous startup wrote a bunch of DSP code that worked, and was probably more complex than the pause removal, but he was still a pretty random developer. His code was sometimes surprisingly bad. Marco's strength is to not shy away from anything, even if it sounds scary or complex. DSP sounds complex, but it's not string theory.
You saw the part about I work at BigTech? Trust me, the code is not rocket science that the vast majority of what software engineers do at BigTech. Well at least the code that runs 2/3rds of the cloud infrastructure in existence.
Many of them could never handle the complexity of writing an entire app and maintaining the backend running on 20+ Linode VMs without the support of a trillion dollar corporation.
You really overestimate the skill and complexity of most code written by “FAANG” engineers.
FWIW, I’ve been coding for a long time (the 74 is a hint) and I started at 12 writing assembly language and spent a decade writing C including maintaining a proprietary compiler/VM for Windows CE devices.
> Trust me, the code is not rocket science that the vast majority of what software engineers do at BigTech.
Again, that is not the discussion. Nobody said that you have to write high quality code to make it in tech, or as an indie. You keep coming up with strawmen but all I am saying is that I don't believe Marco Arment writes very high quality code. That's it. No judgement, no conclusions or correlations, no nothing.
As to FAANG, I can only be certain about my own experience, and the dozen or so direct colleagues I had all wrote better code than every other colleague I've had over 10 years. Not saying they are better people, happier, richer or anything else. Just to be clear.
I think it's like a preference - I don't understand it either, but I've seen it enough times that I don't think it matters whether I understand. Some people like it.
It makes total sense. I don't have kids, but I certainly understand that they aren't old enough to understand the principle of consent when it comes to being photographed for pics that will be shared online by their parents.
So blurring them out somehow protects privacy and lets parents their habitual social media posting.
I think it's not just US thing, I've seen parents did the same thing outside US.
There's a market for this but urgency is probably low, fortunately this got viral
> All of the virtual ink in this article, and honestly most of the complexity in the field overall... and it seems to really all just boil down to, 'I think this looks cooler.'
IMO there's significant complexity in building a feature-rich frontend client. The "thicker" the client, the worse it gets. There's definitely a lot of 'I think this looks cooler' going around, but also we shouldn't forget that the need to come up with something better is partially a response to very real, very-not-imagined, frontend complexity.
> IMO there's significant complexity in building a feature-rich frontend client.
Doing complex things is always complex, but when SIMPLE things are complex, then something is going very wrong.
And this is exactly where we are with most JS frameworks these days. Layer upon Layer of abstraction, and instead of the complexity the dev has to deal with decreasing as a result of it being abstracted into frameworks offering simple interfaces, complexity increases.
> this is exactly where we are with most JS frameworks these days
Have you been saying the same thing since 2014? JS frameworks have never been simpler, never been more discoverable thanks to TS, and there are plenty of levels of abstraction a developer can put between themselves and vanilla JS. But even calling React too-far-abstracted-to-be-simple is comical; it's a simple system offering composition of components.
I worked in React for a few years, although not enough to ever feel like I was an expert. This article resonated with me because I also got off the bus because of React hooks.
I've been using Lit.js for about a year now and something about it just clicks. I just wish it were more mainstream.
Am I missing something? What's the point of the tweet other than to elicit a reaction? And then in the replies: 'I CAN'T BELIEVE I ELICITED A REACTION!.
Because it's Paul Graham, who's a very rich and wise venture capitalist, over whose musings people who also want to be very rich and wise venture capitalists someday, must fawn and nod their heads and agree with, as if he has said something very profound.
Is this tweet wise and profound? Obviously not. Is there a kernel of useful information buried in there? Barely. As you said, is the purpose really just to elicit a reaction? Obviously, yes.
These kinds of remarks remind me of people who used to brag about getting good grades despite not doing the reading or homework, as if that's a virtue.
They're not harmless, because plenty of people will take away from this the idea that you don't need to do research on things, in general. Because Paul Graham is very rich and wise and he said so.
It's dumb fortune cookie wisdom, like so many of his wise and profound edgy, contrarian viewpoints.
Actually small business advisors insist that founders do need a detailed business plan. But it's both necessary for founders, people giving advise and everyone involved that it depends on the kind of business. I used to think business plans are old school and overly formal. But it's good to know the correct reason.
I have mentored for SCORE which is small business advising and is pretty old school, but they no longer push for business plans unless the client is looking for
a bank loan.
Instead, the choice of a lean business plan (business model canvas) is also offered or at least talked through. Someone has an idea but isn't sure what to do next. Well a business plan can just be the very essentials (who do you plan to serve and how... what are you planning on actually doing and can you afford to do that)
At every company I've worked at where I stayed for a bit, I eventually had to work on languages and stacks that I wasn't technically hired for/had interest in. At the very beginning I found this very hard, also wanting to quit/actually quitting. I've come to accept that this is actually pretty normal. The benefits to my career from working on a bunch of different stuff I didn't pick have been substantial.
Caveat: I probably wouldn't take the switcharoo at the very beginning either...if I'm told I'll work on A but actually get B, this is likely a sign of some important things not working well at the org.
It's fine when the context switching is managed properly. It's not OK when a company asks a team to spend a month working on a rails service, followed by a month of working on a native app, followed by a month of working on a web front end, which I have experienced.
You wind up exhausting yourself trying to pick up new technologies that you wind up forgetting because you're not given enough time to deeply learn the concepts.
I've had two companies that switched technology between recruiting me and the start of my employment. It was a bit irritating, but provided an interesting way to learn something new on someone else's dime.
I've also been at a place where I was not allowed to program in C, but had to do all the code reviews for the people programming in C. The "logic" was that since I was doing the code reviews, I shouldn't program in C since no one would review my code. I sometimes wonder about how I encounter these situations a bit too often.
We're not so different in age, and I'd be lying if I said I never feel the way you describe. However, these are some things that helped me, in increasing order of importance:
- Health. Covered already, but I'd add that you don't need to be in marathon shape. Just hit the basics: sleep, exercise (walking is enough!), diet. It's easy to feel things are ok in any of these dimensions but actually be out of whack.
- Do things with your hands. Humans develop insofar was they learn to manipulate the physical environment around them. This is one of the tenets of the Montessori pedagogy, but I found that it doesn't just apply to kids! I feel _great_ when I install a toilet, paint my living room, fix the car. There's just something about physically doing stuff with your hands.
- This one is hard to describe...I took inventory of my 'philosophical operating system' and realized that I was organizing my life around something without legs. In my 20's I was heavily influenced by stuff like '4-hour-workweek' (lol), the gary-vees, the pg essays, etc. It's not jut practical advice...it's a philosophical system and worldview. When I looked under the hood, it was all spaghetti code. It couldn't stand up to more cogent and complete philosophies, which I found literally down the street.
It's true that there are many more choices to make for a JS SPA compared to RoR but isn't this just a fixed cost? Pick once and then stick to it. Use the same things for your next project. Done.
I'd venture to guess that for a RoR newbie, it takes just as much time to understand the 'glue' (I've heard people refer to it as 'magic') that makes it all work together behind the scenes.
This aligns with my experience. It’s also a classic case of picking the right tool for the job.
I think RoR is an easy choice for anyone looking to ship some variation of a basic CRUD app. Trying to do anything interesting (read: competitive in today’s SaaS market), however, becomes a chore in reading source code to understand undocumented “magic” and fighting the framework. Use Rails if you ship many different CRUD apps or a CRUD app that is just a frontend to your services business (your “real” product).
On the other hand, learning how to bootstrap a proper JS (ideally TS) app is a job for someone with time and experience. Even then, not all answers are satisfactory. The benefit is the full power of modern web is unlocked. Use JS if you’re trying to build a company that will live or die on a single SaaS product.
Every company I’ve worked at falls squarely into the “single, innovative SaaS product” category. The ones that have started on Rails always tack React on top and then it’s just a world of hurt as the complexity gets out of control.
You have to know enough about the choices and their edge cases to make good choices. You are also at the mercy of all of those choices continuing to evolve in complementary ways in the future.
Right now the focus is on public/prod deployment. Beta Testing is a step within Runway, but it's not so fleshed out and no integrations are pulled in there yet. It's definitely on our roadmap though - we want to help teams codify and streamline their internal distribution!
Might be a cultural US thing, but this is something my wife does a lot and I see a lot of people doing. It's one of those things that might not make sense if you don't have kids.