App Quality and Target Audience
I am pretty critic against Facebook but I can’t deny that Paper was a gorgeous app. There are not many teams that can pull off a really well done app like Paper, and it’s a pity that it will be shut down. If it was that gorgeous why didn’t it have success? There are probably a million reasons, like: they didn’t push it enough “political” issues within Facebook teams change of priorities and many more.
40 and still cranking code
Do not worry about hype. Keep doing your thing, keep learning what you were learning, and move on. Pay attention to it only if you have a genuine interest, or if you feel that it could bring you some benefit in the medium or long run. Adrian Kosmaczewski source I really enjoyed this talk by Adrian Kosmaczewski. I can relate with many of the messages he sent out.
How many design titles?
We go so far as to define the very word "design" as arranging pixels for display on a screen. Drew Wilson source I am with Drew on this. Every choice in a product contributes to its design. If a DevOps engineer spots that a service is slow and makes it faster, he/she improves the overall experience of the product. Would you call that engineer a designer? Probably not, but still the design has been improved.
Software updates are complicated
If you think waiting for Apple to approve a new version of your App is nerve-racking you should listen to Episode 4 of the Code Breaker. It’s an interesting podcast that I recently discovered and season 1 is all about the question “Is it evil?”. There’s a little segment in which they interview the folks behind Instapaper to talk about software updates in the Apple land. But the best part is when they talk about the NASA that screwed something up in a software update to the International Space Station.
Software Masonry
We have been restoring our house for a few months. I saw many things that are pretty similar to the world of software development. Most of them are related to “executing a design”. When you restore a house there’s usually an architect or a quantity surveyor that leads the job. They check out the house, take a lot of measures, come up with a blueprint and the masons are supposed to execute it.