Category Archives: Programming

Pivot to Video

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Every year it happens. WWDC comes and unleashes a bunch of new stuff for all of us to learn. For most people the last few years, WWDC hasn’t been that exciting because it’s primarily been graphics and augmented reality stuff. For me, it’s been Christmas. I love Metal and ARKit and all the new shiny graphics stuff that gets released each year.

However, inevitably I will encounter some aspect of my workflow that doesn’t involve low level graphics. I will have to connect to a network backend. I will have to figure out the new user interface framework.

I want to get back to my fun graphics stuff as quickly as possible, so I Google tutorials and sample code for these things I don’t want to think too much about. The results come up. Perfect! I found exactly what I want!

I click the link and my heart sinks. Instead of a nicely written blog post or article about the technology, I stare into the void of a 5+ hour video course someone put together.

Videos Are Terrible

The last few decades have show the emergence of this idea of different learning styles. Some people are “visual learners,” whatever that means. Some people learn things by doing, which to be honest is basically how everyone learns?

This has unleashed this unholy deluge of instructional videos for the poor, underserved portion of the population that learns by watching other people talk. These are probably the same people who learn by listening to the same three white dudes in tech talk about cars on podcasts.

I’m sure there is some portion of the population that learns by watching videos. And videos have their place. I love watching short cooking videos. Cooking is a physical thing and watching how someone folds a dumpling or condenses a 3 hour baking project into a three minute video that cuts out all the prep work and waiting can be quite instructive. None of that applies to programming.

Programming isn’t suited to a video medium

I know that someone who won’t read this blog post is going to “Well, actually…” me on how video is great for programming because it shows you how to use the IDE/game engine/etc… I am not talking about videos on how to use storyboards or set up an animation loop in Unity. I am talking about code. Words you type into a text editor or IDE with no software interface.

Programming is inherently word based. I have used the analogy that programming is what you would get if Math and English had a baby. It’s got language and syntax and grammar. All of which gets lost in translation when you have someone trying to verbally read it out loud.

Every bad tech talk I have attended at conferences goes the same way. The presenter spends a few minutes introducing the topic of their talk and gets everyone excited about using the framework. Then they pull out all the slides covered with code and it all goes downhill from there. People’s eyes glaze over. They start chatting on Slack. They surf Facebook. Everyone waits for it to be over, but hey, beats being at work I guess?

Code wasn’t meant to be read out loud. It’s the most efficient compromise you make with the computer to be able to communicate. You can read through code and bounce around asynchronously to see how everything works in a way you can’t if someone is just talking.

If you have a nicely written tutorial and you didn’t quite get something, you can scroll back to see where you got lost and review what you don’t understand.

Which leads into the next point.

You can’t search for what you need

It’s incredibly frustrating to spend hours looking for something that covers the exact topic you need, only to find out that the presenter isn’t going to cover the part that you need. When you have a video, you have no idea what the specifics are that the presenter will actually cover. I went to an Accelerate talk where the presenter said that he would not cover any of the math that the framework utilizes, which is basically the entire point of the framework!

If I am dealing with a book or documentation, I can utilize a search function to see if the document I am looking at contains what I need. I can zero in directly on the part that I need to understand and be on my way in a few minutes. If what I want isn’t there, I haven’t really invested anything into it.

If you’re dealing with a video, it’s a crap shoot as to whether the author is going to speak about the one specific thing you need to know at any point in their long rambling video. Sometimes they are helpful and will give chapter titles so you can guess if they’re going to talk about the thing you need to do. But usually the author has created an elaborate project that is dependent upon you watching everything up until that point for anything to make any sense.

You can’t do anything else

I learned to code by working through the Big Nerd Ranch iOS book multiple times. I didn’t quite understand the concepts the first time through, so I would do them again and again. By the time I got to the fourth or fifth time, my brain had been introduced to the concepts enough that it began to understand how everything works together.

To keep myself from going insane, I would throw on episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I worked through the entire series by having an episode on while I coded through a tutorial. This worked for me.

If I have an instructional video on, I literally can’t do anything else. I’m held hostage. You can’t read or check email because you miss something and have to rewind to figure out what someone said. If you’re coding along, you have to keep pausing and rewinding to catch what the person said. You endure long bits of watching someone writing the same code as you in real time. This is miserable and tedious. Not to mention mentally exhausting in a way that reading is not.

I do have some Unity videos I will throw on in the background, but I do this knowing that I am not engaged enough with the material to actually learn it. I can’t do this for something I must use for an active project.

If I am working with written materials, I can take mental breaks for a few minutes and come back. I can copy/paste code if I don’t quite get it written correctly. I can reread things a few times if I didn’t quite get it the first time. I can have on music or do literally anything else to make it easier to stand at my computer for hours force feeding myself technical information.

Back when I used to work for people, I would be asked to figure out something I didn’t already know. Rather than flailing blindly around I would look for something written that I could look through to learn the things I need to get working immediately.

It’s a lot easier to sell your employer on the idea that you’re actually working if you’re reading something and have a code editor open. If you’re watching a video, it looks like you’re slacking off. It also means that if someone interrupts you, it’s way more disruptive than if you are reading something. In the age of surveillance capitalism, it looks bad if you try to learn something by watching a video. This is not the case if you are reading something. Perception matters.

The podcast problem

I don’t listen to podcasts, which is ironic because I have hosted three of them. Podcasts tend to be two or more people rambling about some topic and making in jokes that only they find funny where nothing is edited out. Sometimes you get someone who knows enough audio production that they will fix levels and remove long awkward gaps in conversation, but rarely do you get a well focused discussion about a topic with an interviewer who not only knows what questions to ask but who will keep the conversation on track.

A lot of instructional videos are people just kind of turning on a screen capture app who then begin to work on a demo project they feel like working on. There isn’t really an agenda for them to follow. They don’t think about how best to present information. They leave in their coding errors.

It’s this idea that it’s a lot easier to just record yourself talking than it is to have a well thought out plan as to how you are going to take a complicated topic and explain it to someone who doesn’t know everything you do.

Final Thoughts and Complaints

I really do not understand why this video explosion has happened. I don’t know if it’s similar to that Facebook pivot to video ads where they lied to people about the impact of video and everyone dove in wallet first and got screwed over.

It may just be easier to half ass a video than it is to write a good tutorial. There was that ghastly Hacker News bit saying that a group of coders could start up a news room in a month which was totally bullshit. Writing is a skill. A lot of people are not good at explaining things. Everyone complains about the quality of Apple’s documentation coverage, but think about how hard it is to scale up a team of people who are not only technically savvy enough to understand all the code but can also write clearly. There are a limited number of people out there who can do that.

That isn’t to say you can’t improve. The first few things you write might be terrible, but if you know they’re terrible and it bothers you, you can work to improve it.

I dunno. I might just be a crusty old person who is stuck in my ways yelling at the kids to get off my lawn. But after they do I am going back to my she shed with my programming books and my 600 queued episodes of Chopped.

2018 Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes

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Happy 2019 readers! This blog has been on something of a hiatus for the last two years and I would like to rectify that in the coming year.

2018 was a time of some rather big changes for me. At the end of 2017, I moved in with my boyfriend. We fell into a rather comfortable routine. My job allowed me enough down time to work on side projects, such as my game development blog and a new third-party framework.

As 2018 progressed, I left that job and began a consulting contract. I had a year to complete the contract and I was slightly burned out, so I worked that part time. This allowed me to continue to work on the third party framework, which I had hoped to complete the port of by the end of the year.

But, life gets in the way.

In March my loving boyfriend asked me to marry him. I joyfully accepted and we set a wedding date for September. I had already planned out what we were going to do. The wedding would be quite small. I figured that it wouldn’t disturb our routine that much and I could continue work on my side projects.

Let’s just say this did not go to plan…

Beyond the actual wedding, there were a lot of things that needed to be taken care of. There was paperwork and deadlines. I had to go through various processes to get my name changed. There were dress fittings and meetings with the minister. All of my mental energy that I had been using for my side projects went into the wedding/marriage.

The whole family at the wedding. Mazel tov!

I think I have written on here before about the depression I suffered after my first marriage officially fell apart. I thought when I got my ex-husband out of my house that all of my mental energy would be free to work on projects and do things I care about.

I didn’t realize that the huge change in going from being married to being single would be a tremendous shock to my system. I had never paid taxes before. I hadn’t paid the water bill before. I had no idea what any of my expenses were because I never saw them before. I now had to handle those things and budget for them and figure out how to feed myself. This threw me into a shock and it took a few years to shake off.

Even though the wedding was a nice disruption to my routine, it was still a disruption. I had a lot of trouble getting motivated or focused on my side projects because I kept worrying about something I needed to do for the wedding. I knew it would be over soon and when it was that we could get back to our routine and I could continue with my projects.

Again, that turned out not to be the case.

When I moved in with my husband, I wasn’t really comfortable with the house. It was his house and even though I gradually made it feel like our home, there were some issues with it. I didn’t have a room that worked well as a home office. I converted a bedroom to my office, but it was still a bedroom. It had closets and was in an upstairs corner of the house. We couldn’t open our window shades because the houses next door were within touching distance and we didn’t want people to look in. We had basically no yard, so that was hard on the dogs.

Instead of weekends spent lovingly working on game and graphics projects, we attended open houses and got our hopes up on homes that didn’t pan out. It was mentally and emotionally exhausting.

My new dedicated office space!!

We found a lovely new place that suited most of our needs perfectly. The ones it didn’t were improvements we could implement as opposed to ones that could not be changed, like the size of the lot and the nearness of the neighbors.

So instead of spending nights and weekends working on projects, we spent that time cleaning our house to put up for sale. After the sale, we spent that time cleaning and packing for our move.

For about two months it was close to impossible to work on anything I didn’t absolutely have to because of the sheer mental exhaustion of just planning out everything that needed to be done before we could move. I couldn’t even get involved in my usual cooking projects because I knew that I should be packing up the kitchen for the move and it made no sense to buy a bunch of food that would need to be moved from one place to another.

Around the time we started putting the house up for sale, my consulting gig got a bit more serious. I discovered there were a bunch of required features I had been unaware of and the client wanted the project completed by the end of the year. I started working on that full time and had literally no time for anything else I wanted to work on. The third party framework has languished for months and people are beginning to ask if it will ever be completed.

Three days after Christmas we moved out of our old house and into the new one. It was an exhausting day, but we made it work. We’re still surrounded by boxes and I still have trouble finding clean underwear in the mornings, but we’ve weathered the worst of it and we’re beginning to take stock of where to go from here.

I have a few goals I would like to accomplish in the first half of 2019:

  • Make GPUImage 3 have feature parity with GPUImage 1. I feel badly about not updating the framework for so long and I want people to feel comfortable knowing the framework isn’t abandoned before integrating it into their projects.
  • Blogging. I have let all of my blogs languish because I have been too overwhelmed to think about what to write. I would like to go back to blogging about graphics and getting more comfortable with Metal in general.

It’s not a first half of 2019 goal, but I have the same goal for 2019 that I have every year: Ship an app. I have shipped books and held interesting jobs, but I have not shipped an app of my own. Technically the consulting project I am doing is an app that will ship that I essentially wrote on my own, but it’s not mine. I learned a lot from the experience of building that app and now I want to make one of my own and be my own client. I have not decided if it will be an iOS native app or a project created in Unity.

I have a few possible projects on the horizon that have not been committed to yet, so I won’t mention them here.

I know that there is something of a backlash against New Year’s resolutions. Most revolve around losing weight and going to the gym, which is hard to sustain. I think it’s nice to have a delineating beginning to a span of time where you can take stock of things and say “I don’t like how things are right now and I want to change them.”

I love my husband and I love our new home. I would not change that for the world. But right now I need a mental change. I am tired of my side projects being packing my life to move from one place to another. I miss having a thing I am making for myself that I will feel proud of. I keep worrying I will never get back to that again. I want my own life. I want my own projects. I want to look at things I have produced and feel pride that I did something this year that I couldn’t do last year.

Professionally I feel like 2018 was a wash. I didn’t accomplish anything I wanted to. I don’t feel I progressed in a meaningful way. I guess I have mostly completed an app by myself that should ship, but that doesn’t feel like progress to me. I want to learn from these experiences so that I can use my time better this year on things I care about.

I don’t think we’re going to have a wedding or a move this time around.

The Fallacy of Logic

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Over the last 24 hours I have had several upsetting exchanges with people. I was dumb and responded to a notorious Twitter troll because I had just woken up and was angry and behaved impulsively. Later that day, I had someone I didn’t know call me out on it and demand that I logically defend my behavior. They told me if I was going to state my opinion online I should expect some backlash and be prepared to defend my point of view.

I got very upset and told this person that if they thought I was an irrational bitch that was just fine with me. This person got incredibly offended and told me not to put words in his mouth. He continued to fight with me until I broke down upset. In order to preserve peace with the rest of the people in the chat room who had witnessed this exchange, I apologized to them for engaging in this argument. The person who started it misunderstood who the apology was for and thanked me for apologizing to him. This action has made me physically ill and prevented me from sleeping much last night.

I have been rolling around in my head why this exchange upset me so badly. I wonder if I am unreasonable. I wonder why the hell this person felt that verbally attacking me on a chat room was perfectly fine but me implying he thought I was a bitch was simply beyond the pale and a bridge too far.

I have had a number of these kinds of exchanges over the last year. I noticed that people became incredibly hostile during the 2016 Presidential election. I had hoped that things would die down after that, but if nothing else, they’ve gotten worse. I had to deactivate my Facebook account because I was being attacked by people for not sharing their exact specific political beliefs. I have left multiple Slack rooms this year because one person out of 50-100 will lay into me about how my observations of sexism and discrimination do not fit in with their experiences as young white men who have computer science degrees who live in San Francisco.

None of these people are evil. I know several of them are generally nice people, but the way they engage me upsets me greatly. I feel like a rattlesnake frantically rattling my tail to warn them not to step on me. I don’t like being stepped on and biting them takes a lot out of me. They’re always surprised when they get bitten and decide that I am not behaving rationally and they get quite angry. I cut a lot of these people off because I simply can’t deal with them anymore.

I have been told that some of these people I have cut off are saying I am paranoid. They are saying I am mentally ill and I am destroying relationships with all my allies and one has gone as far as to say I am a sociopath.

I don’t want toxic people in my life. Life is short. I love cooking. I love my dogs. I love to write books even though they stress the living crap out of me sometimes. I feel like the world is this vast sea of endless possibilities and things to learn and explore. Then I get dragged down by the reality of trying to interact with other people who want to fight with me about Swift equivalents of vim versus emacs. These people drain all of my optimism and turn me into an angry bitter person that I don’t like being.

I have been trying to figure out why I am not allowed to simply withdraw from interactions I find unpleasant. I am not allowed to simply retract whatever the offending statement is. It is demanded that I defend it to the death and give up my precious spoons arguing with someone who is never going to be convinced that they are wrong.

I believe it is a fallacy of logic.

My ex-husband was an atheist. He said he would not believe in anything that couldn’t be proven with science. He said if Neil Degrasse Tyson says it’s true, then it must be so. Once he verbally assaulted me in the car to the point I was planning to jump out of the moving vehicle for saying “God bless you” to a stranger in public.

I am not an atheist. I would consider myself a Christian except I do things like read Tarot cards that I am pretty sure Christians see as witchcraft. I get very strong feelings about things that I know to be true but I have no evidence for their existence. When I was an atheist for ten years I would ignore these feelings and ignoring them always got me in trouble. I had a stranger talk his way into my dorm room and even though I had a bad feeling about him, I couldn’t think of a logical response to his argument that I should let him in. He raped me so badly I now have PTSD. My life was not on a good track and my world felt quite grey and empty. I decided ten years ago to believe in God, even though I had no evidence for his existence. I decided to trust those gut feelings i had been ignoring for ten years because they weren’t rational and to have faith that they were leading me to a better place.

I read a book many years ago called “Blink!” by Malcolm Gladwell where he talks about how our unconscious mind works much faster than our conscious mind does. It’s like having a background thread and a main thread. We can instinctively know something without being able to consciously and verbally explain it. I have faith in these feelings in spite of lack of evidence and I believe in them deeply. I have discovered most people in tech are not like this.

Emotions are not rational. We have been trained as a society to scorn anything that isn’t rational and can’t be explained very simply with logic. Any time I have a discussion with someone who doesn’t agree with me, they have a long list of talking points with very simple ideas that they use to try and convince you that you’re wrong. A lot of these people are simply unwilling to believe that you can see where they are coming from and still disagree with them.

I remember in college having boys try to logically explain to me why I should have sex with them. I was dumb and at the time I thought I could reason with them, but any arguments I made with them only gave them another argument point they could use to try and reason with me about why I should have sex. I would tell them I found them unattractive. They would say “Well I don’t find you attractive either! But sex is fun!” They were so invested in getting the result they wanted that it was completely useless to argue with them and the only course of action you had was to just walk away and hope they found someone else who is less work.

That is what the tech industry feels like to me some days.

I am not allowed to have my finely honed sense of intuition about anything because everything must be an argument. I can’t say that I don’t want to interact with someone who persists in arguing with me about nothing because that makes me a bad person. It doesn’t matter that these arguments destroy my ability to function. I am expected to have them because if I simply refuse no one knows how to respond.

Everyone is invested in believing that whatever they believe is right and correct and they have constructed intricate logical facts around supporting that believe. If someone doesn’t agree with them, they feel it is a personal attack on their core sense of self. They defend it to the death and feel that they are doing nothing wrong in behaving this way.

There was an interesting study recently that showed that most men will say that rape is wrong. They will swear up and down that they would never rape anyone. But then laster in the survey they admitted to forcing a woman to have sex that they knew did not want to have sex. There is a fundamental disconnect in their brains between the word “rapist” and what it means to rape someone.

We have a lot of labels for people that are not nice. Racist. Sexist. Rapist. Nazi. No one wants to be associated with being a racist even if they have racist beliefs. Calling someone a racist is seen as being similar to calling someone a bitch. It’s lost all meaning other than as a name you can call someone to try and make them feel bad about themselves. They don’t want to be called a racist. They think that their racist beliefs are rational and can logically be explained and that someone who is a racist hates for no reason and therefore can’t be them.

I hate to break it to you, but feelings are irrational. We feel the way we do based on things we can’t really explain. We are a result of decades of experiences and neurochemical reactions. I know people who got slighted by someone when they were seven years old and that one experience still angers them to this day. My father is still angry at being slighted by someone forty years ago who died in a terrible car accident thirty years ago.

We’re all giant bundles of irrational behaviors. I just wish that we were better at accepting that sometimes there isn’t a logical explanation for why we feel the way we do. We’re all entitled to our own perspective on something without feeling like the existence of a different perspective threatens our own.

If someone is triggering my PTSD symptoms and doing something I find threatening, I am entitled to end that conversation. I should not have to suffer flashbacks because someone finds it fun and engaging to get involved in an endless argument over nothing. You don’t get to argue with me that what you’re doing wouldn’t bother 99% of the rest of the population. It bothers me. If you persist in behavior that I perceive as threatening I have the right to cut you off to protect myself mentally. If you know that what you are doing is upsetting me and you persist in doing it, you are harassing me. My right to feel safe is greater than your right to argue with me. I don’t care if you agree with me or not. I am entitled to my own perspective just as you are entitled to yours. Agree to disagree and get a beer with me later. Or call me a bitch. I would vastly prefer that to the death of a thousand cuts of being forced to explain why I feel differently than you do while looking for a way to escape.

What Will Your Verse Be?

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Yesterday was the conclusion of WWDC 2017, and what a WWDC it was. It felt like everyone got what they wanted. Most developers got better stability in tooling and not too many changes to the core frameworks. We also got some breathtaking graphics and games APIs, like ARKit, along with easier integration for machine learning models, such as MLKit.

I watched the keynote in awe, my brain exploding with everything that was now possible in iOS. I had augmented reality on my wish list, so that thrilled me. But seeing how much love Apple gave Metal really touched me deeply. I have spent the last eight months working on a Metal book and I had feared that it would land with an unceremonious thump and no one would care about a three year old technology framework. The keynote gave me hope that Metal would be a continuing important part of Apple’s future for the time being and that my efforts were not wasted.

I downloaded the Xcode 9 beta with the intention of diving into ARKit. The beta still has not been extracted from its .zip file. I got home and immediately became overwhelmed by everything. There are so many new things. I tried to look at the docs but my head swam and I couldn’t deal with it.

The next day I started to see people posting their own AR efforts and a few days after that I started seeing ML efforts. I got very depressed. I left the keynote feeling like I was ahead of the curve and now I was already behind it again.

I feel we in the Apple Developer Community have been trained to jump on every new shiny thing Apple announces immediately. We all remember missing out on the Gold Rush when you could put out an app that you made over a weekend with some new piece of technology that Apple created and earn $10,000 in a week. The new Photos stuff allows us to do a vast but limited number of things and if you want your Photos app to be the top dog you have to get it out before anyone else does because you all have access to the same tools and the barrier to entry is low.

I want to be emphatic about this point: That is not the same situation with ARKit or Core ML.

My background is in the creative field. I wanted to be a film director and do sound design. My dream since I was a child was to have the Back to the Future experience of getting a box of books on my doorstep that had my name on them and to know I wrote a book. I have had that experience several times now and I feel quite blessed that I got to have that experience.

Anyone can write a book. We all have access to the same tools. There are fancy authoring tools like Ulysses and Scribner that cost $50, which is basically nothing compared to the cost of being an iOS developer. There are self publishing sites everywhere that will allow you to publish your book if no one else is interested, or if you don’t want to give up 50% of your royalties.

Just because anyone can write a book doesn’t mean everyone will write a book. Also, it doesn’t mean that someone else is going to write your book.

We still read stories that were written hundreds of years ago because they speak to something foundational about how we see ourselves as human beings. I read Tarot cards and the cards haven’t changed for a hundred years in spite of all of our changing circumstances because even though we all have iPhones and can connect at any given moment, what makes us human has not changed. We all worry about money. We all strive to advance in our careers. We all crave love. We all desire to have some kind of family, even if that family consists of friends and a grumble of pugs. Those aspects of ourselves don’t change.

A story by Jane Austin still resonates with us because we know how difficult it is to find another person you are willing to spend the rest of your life with. Romeo and Juliet still appeals to hormonal teenagers to whom every little bump in the road is the end of the world and for whom every relationship is forever. Unfortunately, the same applies to Twilight.

One reason so many people are appalled at the behavior of the Republicans right now in trying to strip tens of millions of Americans of their health insurance is because it goes against our script of what we think people should be like. Atrocities like the Holocaust speak to us on a deep level because it goes against our human nature of the way that we think people should behave. And it keeps happening. This is one reason The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have such staying power. They speak of ordinary people being placed in extraordinary circumstances, facing incredible odds, to attempt to defeat evil. The evil of Lord of the Rings was a different evil than we have now, but evil is never truly defeated. If you wanted The Legend of Korra, you know that light and dark are in an eternal battle where one can never truly vanquish the other.

Yin and Yang. Darkness and Light. Good and Evil.

Augmented Reality has me excited because it opens up another medium to tell stories. You could create an AR app that takes you around the Tower of London while you investigate the disappearances of the Princes in the Tower. You can stand on the site that Anne Boleyn lost her head and see the crowds of people observing the event. It makes these old sites and dusty facts come alive in a way that they can’t if you’re just reading about them in a book.

Technology in and of itself doesn’t make something compelling. Every Jurassic Park movie has dinosaurs, but only the first one truly feels special. When I think about Jurassic Park, I don’t think about the dinosaurs. I think about the characters and their story arcs. The overarching story arc is a tale of human hubris where a con man with a bunch of money is able to cobble together extinct animals by buying enough technology other people developed in order to create an amusement park to make money. He doesn’t think through the consequences of what he’s doing and is brought low by his own hubris.

The secondary arc of the film has to do with Alan Grant. The first thing you learn about him is that he hates computers and technology. Nothing in this movie is going to change that opinion. The second thing you learn about Alan Grant is that he doesn’t like children. So of course he is the one that is stuck watching the children after the park goes to hell. He goes through a fundamental change by having to interact with actual children and at the end of the film they snuggle with him as Dr. Sadler starts ovulating. It keeps Dr. Grant from just being the crabby guy who loses all of the good one-liners to Jeff Goldblum.

We’ve seen many other films in the last 25 years that have dinosaurs, including the most recent Jurassic Park last year. But none of these films have the satisfying feeling that the first one does. It has an encapsulated story and a grand theme of human scientific hubris. Everything goes to hell the way it’s foreshadowed. The park is destroyed by the unnatural force that was brought into it, and all of the people we actually care about survive. It’s a satisfying story that is enhanced by the use of special effects that are actually used quite sparingly.

One reason Pokemon GO was so successful was because it was building off of an experience that people have been emulating for 25 years, which was to pretend to live in a world where little pocket monsters live in the tall grass and can be captured and made into your friend. There is a sense of wonder about Pokemon GO in that you can take it into the normal world that you inhabit and you can lift the veil on the normal world and expose a fantastical world you never knew was there. Most people agree that Pokemon GO was rather repetitive and the game play wasn’t great, but it created an experience that was wanted by a large number of people. The same thing happens when people visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park.

One thing these have in common is that they are pre-existing properties that have large and established fan bases. Most developers aren’t going to be able to go out and create their own Doctor Who augmented reality application because of licensing issues. So that means that there really isn’t a hurry to go out and do whatever the first few AR apps are going to be. If a company like Warner Bros wants to release their own Harry Potter AR app, you can’t stop them. But you can think about what story you want to tell.

AR is a tool that is made or broken by the story that the creator wants to tell. You can create an interactive murder mystery or a tour of a museum. There are so many unexplored avenues of AR that the limit is what you can imagine and how much work you’re willing to put into creating that experience.

We have such tools to create and express ideas, yet few people seem to. I am guilty of that as well. I do hope that the barrier to entry gets low enough that I can spare some time to create some experiences for the joy of creation. But please do think about creating something for the joy of creating it and not because you assume that there are a wealth of new AR related jobs or a limited number of AR apps to be created and you must pursue the money train on this. That train goes over a cliff. We have so many media for self expression and no time to do it and no stories to tell. Life is filled with possibilities if you lift the veil on the real world and reveal the hidden one.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry, because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering — these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love — these are what we stay alive for.

To quote from Whitman: ‘O me, O life of the questions of these recurring. Of the endless trains of the faithless. Of cities filled with the foolish. What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer: That you are here. That life exists and identity. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.’

What will your verse be?

Legitimate Complexity and The Art of Teaching

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I have been working on a book on Metal for the last several months, since October. I am entering one final push and trying to complete the rough draft of this book by the end of June. That gives me about a week to write each chapter, which is really stressing me out and upsetting me tremendously.

The thing that is stressing me out is that I feel like learning Metal is like zooming into a fractal. Every time I think that I have a good grasp on the material, I realize there is a much more complicated layer of complexity underneath what I just learned. The complexity grows exponentially.

Metal is multi-disciplinary. It’s not just the framework. It’s all the things around the framework that you need to understand in order to actually create something useful. There are a lot of math concepts and a lot of 3D graphics concepts that most books on OpenGL don’t focus on because no one wants to write a 2000 page book that contains everything you need to know that absolutely no one will read.

I am frantically trying to edit myself enough to present a coherent chunk of information in each chapter without getting overwhelmed with all the things I don’t have time to explain or learn.

I’ve been an iOS developer for the last five years. I learned a lot of programming from Ray Wenderlich tutorials. Those tutorials are fantastic, but I feel like they give a false impression that anything anyone wants to do can be broken down into a 3,000 word step-by-step tutorial.

Right now I am trying to work through their 2D Games by Tutorials book. This book is a monster. It’s nearly 700 pages long. I have only ever gotten through the first 150 before I got overwhelmed and given up. I managed to get further than I had before, but it’s still incredibly dense. If you asked me what they could have gotten rid of to make it less overwhelming, I would be hard pressed to tell you.

A lot of things we do, especially when we’re starting out, are small and easily encapsulated. This lulls us into a false sense that everything we do will be simple and easily encapsulated. We develop sound byte memories where if something can’t be spoon fed to us in ten pages or less, then we get muddled and confused. This severely limits our ability to work on anything more complicated.

I am absolutely not picking on Ray’s site. It’s an amazing resource and the reason the tutorials are set up the way they are is because of this issue of us only being able to handle a certain amount of complexity. His site is working with how we process information rather than being a source of bad habits. I have nothing but admiration and respect for the writers on that team and I do not want this to come off as me bashing them or saying people who learn from that site are not real developers. I am simply talking about how for the last few years I have lulled myself into believing that everything can be broken down into easily digestible chunks when not everything can.

At this point I am trying to figure out how to expand my brain’s bandwidth so that I can tackle more complexity than I am used to. It’s incredibly difficult to do so. Not only am I trying to figure out something incredibly complex, I am also trying to process and package it into a digestible chunk by another person.

I have been reading a lot of graphics books and gotten frustrated at how abstract they are. I get frustrated that certain things are assumed and that nothing seems to be explained. I am now beginning to understand that once you reach a certain level of complexity there is a limit to how well you can convey that information.

This is an issue we are currently dealing with in our political sphere. Take the tax system for example. The tax system is an incredibly complex system that most people don’t really understand. When we go to vote for our representatives, it sounds good to say “Reform the tax system to make sure everyone pays their fair share,” but how to actually implement that is complicated. Something that is simple and sounds fair usually winds up being worse that the current system that is too complicated to explain in a 30-second sound byte on the evening news.

In programming we talk about precision and elegance. Those are concepts that do well in incredibly controlled and contrived situations. When you have to deal with things in the real world, stuff gets messy. There are edge cases. Things don’t behave predictably.

For a “simple” example, look at dates and times. There are 365 days in a year, 24 hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, and sixty seconds in a minute. Except when there aren’t. Every four years our year has 366 days. Then you get into leap seconds. Then you have Einstein’s Theory of Relativity where clocks that are shot into space are slightly off from their counterparts back on Earth. Things get wibbly wobbly awful damn fast and this should be a straightforward example.

I get that the world is so hopelessly complex that if we tried to understand the full scope of just how little is standing between us and total anarchy our heads would explode. We simplify complex systems as a means of being able to just cope with every day.

Right now I am frustrated because I am just beginning to grasp something that is hopelessly complex, but I don’t know how to package it in a way that is accessible to a group of people. I want to write a Rosetta Stone where someone can read through my book and totally understand a complex system, but that really isn’t possible. It would take a hundred pages to walk a reader through creating every piece they need to get a minimum useful thing up and running.

I am doing the best I can to present the information to someone in a way that will help them figure things out. I am trying not to be hard on myself for not being able to do an impossible thing. I know with several years of practice and working with this, that I can master it. I have to accept that there is no magic book that will intuitively teach you everything you need to know in order to do something legitimately complicated. I can just try to do my best to present what information I think your brain can handle and hope that you can find the next step to figure out the rest for yourself.

Why I am Discontinuing my Algorithms Series

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I have spent the last week doing some soul searching and I have decided I am going to discontinue the planned algorithms and data structures series I was going to do on this blog.

My calculation was if I attempted to solve one problem in Cracking the Code interview each day it would take me about six months to get through the whole book. That was before I encountered several road blocks with attempting to implement a custom data structure that was not really intended for this use and required me to greatly extend its functionality.

I made the mistake of reading the beginning of Cracking the Code Interview and to my horror, found a lot of the same things I was saying in my post about the algorithms of discrimination, except they were being touted as features and not bugs.

The author indicated that companies know you probably won’t use algorithms on a day to day basis, but that they’re being used as a proxy to see if you got a computer science degree. They’re assuming if you got a computer science degree you’re a good programmer.

I am a hacker. I love to build things. I love to wander off into unexplored areas of our field to figure out how something works because I enjoy doing it. I love to craft code and make things work. I am fascinated by how to actually grow a complex code base in a way that is sustainable. I am interested in figuring out how to break up a seemingly insurmountable task into pieces that can be accomplished. I am interested in figuring out how to make my code better and I am willing to write absolutely terrible code initially that I know I will go back and fix to get to that point. I am interested in how my user interacts with my code and making sure it’s seamless and intuitive.

I know that not all companies are the same, but my experience of interviewing at companies that use algorithms screening is quite bad. I feel like I am being treated like a criminal whose guilt is assumed and I have to prove my innocence but I don’t get a chance to call a lawyer.

I have never had an interview at a company doing an algorithm screen where anyone has bothered to read my resume. Most of them ask me how they’re supposed to know if I know how to code or not without this screen. Well, I have written books that are published and available. I write about code on this blog. I speak about code at conferences. I post code on GitHub.

A lot of these companies are also ones where they expect relocation. Relocating is a massive deal for me. I have a stable and cheap living situation at the moment. I have parents to watch my second pug while I take the first pug with me to conferences. I have issues with depression and other mental health that are exacerbated by being in urban areas.

If a company is going to demand that I uproot my life, greatly increase my cost of living, and give up the stability of working from the place I feel most comfortable, I want them to not treat me like a criminal. At the very least read my resume. Don’t put me in a situation where I don’t get to speak to an actual human being until I jump through some hoop to prove that I got a computer science degree.

I heard a lot of people telling me that I am shitty developer because I am refusing to spend a few months learning data structures and sorting algorithms.

I disagree.

I feel learning this stuff without context is yak shaving. It’s future engineering. It’s learning something before you need to know it. It’s important to know it is out there, but it is not vital to learn it before you need it. If you spend all your time learning things before you need them, then you won’t build anything.

I learned so much about my code after I started implementing it. I wrote what I thought were solid data structures until I tried to work with them in my code. I found I had underlying assumptions about it that were wrong and I had to go back and add functions and properties to correct for my assumptions.

We like to think that the world can be simplified with algorithms in text books, but they rarely account for the complexity of the real world. You wind up adding bits and pieces to deal with edge cases and your artfully crafted algorithm turns into a house with pieces tacked on. Why not go into it knowing that you’re doing something complex and ugly rather than simple and elegant but imaginary?

There is the argument that I won’t understand how programs work if I don’t learn data structures and algorithms. Again, I disagree.

There are so many things we could use as a proxy for actual engineering knowledge. Why not ask candidates to write things out in assembly language? Why not ask them about computer architecture? Why not ask them how they would break out a large project into smaller pieces? Why not ask them about how they would test their code?

How many people have used a disassembled on their code to look at what the machine is actually doing? I just found out this is something I can do and it’s magical to me. It’s far more interesting to me than memorizing the difference between a bubble sort and a quick sort when I will always just use the sort() function on collection types in Swift anyway.

For whatever reason, this is the thing that we use as a proxy for being a good developer and I am not doing it.

I am interviewing companies and ones that behave like this are ones I don’t want to work for. If this is a small component of a larger hiring process, I am willing to engage in it, but not as a barrier to entry to even get to talk to a human being.

So instead of trying to please large companies and shave all my edges off and submit to conformity, I am going to build things. I am aware that there are algorithms and solutions out there that could make my code cleaner and work better. Once I get something working I will go back and refactor it to resolve many of the issues that I know are there. My understanding was that refactoring was part of being a great developer too. If you disagree with that, then I really hope I am not stuck maintaining your legacy code.

I have faith that if I keep learning and working on cool projects and contributing to the programming community that there is a place for me somewhere. It may not be one of those big companies on the West Coast, but I think the world is big enough to accommodate a lot of different kinds of people.

Super Mario Brothers

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I have written on here before that I did not get to play video games as a kid. The closest I got to a Nintendo was watching my daycare owner’s kids playing Super Mario Brothers on the NES from the couch because I never got to join them.

When I watched them play, they knew where all the hidden shortcuts were. They knew to jump in certain places to hit invisible boxes and to travel over the side of a wall to get to a pipe that allows them to skip a bunch of levels.

I wondered as a kid how they found all these short cuts. I realized at a certain point that someone else showed them. Someone created a guide that talked about where all the easter eggs were and people either found them through reading that guide or watching someone else play.

There are speed records where someone can get all the way through the game from beginning to end in just over five minutes. It became a thing to try to get through the game as fast as possible.

As a kid I didn’t really understand that. I thought the point of the game was to play the game. I was told by people rolling their eyes that the point of the game was to beat the game.

I wrote a post yesterday talking about my being upset about the algorithm questions that are asked at programming interviews.

I have gotten a lot of push back on this.

I have been accused of being incompetent and not being a real programmer. I am confronted by people who are angry with me for not just accepting that if I read an algorithms and data structures book that I will be a better programmer.

I feel I am being misunderstood.

I feel like a a lot of people telling me this are like the people who I watched playing Super Mario Brothers as a kid. I think that they have been told there is some bible of short cuts that get you through the game faster. They don’t look around on their own or explore the game. They’ve been given a set of instructions that gets them through the game faster and they can’t comprehend why someone would not take a short cut that they know is there.

The impression I am getting from people is that they are blindly accepting that these are strict rules that we are supposed to follow and if we don’t follow them then we’re ignorant and wrong.

I think about all of the levels that the game designers created that no one ever looks at because everyone is in such a hurry to get to the end and beat the game.

I don’t care about beating the game.

I care about playing the game.

I don’t want to accept that there is only one way to be a programmer. I like to find things out for myself. I want to explore more than one way to do things. I don’t want someone telling me my code is wrong because it’s not the way they would do it because they only know one “right” way. I think there are a lot of right ways.

I did not mean to imply there was no point in learning algorithms. I am sure they have their place. I’m sure the right algorithm in the right place would completely change the way I think about my code. It’s just that over the last two years I have seen so many people implement lots of terrible code that they think is “best” because they read in a book somewhere that things have to be a certain way.

I had someone try to create a protocol around a class that would never be subclassed because it’s what he thought Apple wanted him to do because he didn’t think critically about how to use polymorphism properly. I have had people suggest I simplify my code by doubling the code base and add three or four data structures to get around using an if statement.

Singletons are evil. React is evil. JavaScript is evil. Use MVVMMVVMMVMVC. Emacs over Vim!

There was a lot of push back against Swift when it first came out because it was different. People lashed out at it because it was not what they were expecting or familiar with.

I feel like sometimes we over-engineer things instead of looking for simple solutions. We think we have to place a thing in another thing and guard against the possibility that someone in the future will do. We have to force a tool to act like another tool in order to conform to some protocol rather than using it how it’s supposed to be used. We want everything to be one size fits all because it makes life easier to think that way.

Right now I am trying to see if a simple solution will work for me before I implement a more complex one. I don’t want to just blindly apply something because a stranger on the Internet tells me to.

Just reading an algorithms book doesn’t make you a good programmer. Understanding a problem and when to implement the right algorithm makes you a programmer.

I want to figure that out for myself rather than having a bunch of people talk down to me about how I can beat the game in five minutes. I am actively refactoring my code to implement better solutions, but I don’t want that to be my first step. I want to screw up and do stupid shit so I can learn from it and figure out how to do it better. Sometimes when you think you know all the answers you don’t look for new ones and if you’re not learning anything new then what’s the point?

I’m sorry for people misunderstanding my desire to figure things out for myself as being willfully ignorant or contemptuous for good software development. You learn more from your own mistakes than you do from other people’s. The last time I checked, thinking for yourself was still allowed. I don’t care if you hate me, or think I am wrong or ignorant or stupid. I am entitled to my own reality and you are too.

The Algorithms of Discrimination

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This is a cross post between this blog and my podcast. I realized that this blog has more reach than the podcast does because it’s new, so I am posting the script from that podcast here.

Transcript

This is a special episode of Janie Rants.

I have been asked a lot of questions about a series of tweets I posted on Twitter last night. In these tweets, I said that this was the first time I felt like I was unwelcome in the iOS programming community.

Like many things on the internet, this is a long and complicated story and it was not really conducive to the short format and tempers of Twitter, so I will try to do my best to explain myself here.

At the moment I am between jobs and I am trying to figure out how to proceed. I am trying to see if I can make it as a contractor but I have also been looking into obtaining regular work as well.

I posted a blog post a few weeks ago about an experience I had interviewing at a rather large and well known company that had a white board interview where I was being asked to implement a linked list in Java.

I expressed that I felt this was a useless task.

I got a lot of pushback from people on Twitter about this. A lot of older programmers chastised me that you can’t be a great programmer if you don’t understand data structures and algorithms. I tried to make the point that if you are an iOS developer that most of your job is to have knowledge of the iOS frameworks and that the language is secondary. Someone who had never owned a Mac or opened Xcode could theoretically get a job as an iOS developer.

I continued to get pushback about the absolute importance of algorithms and how someone implemented a linked list once in their career. I asked whether it was more important to be able to answer a question about something you might do once in ten years or about something you would use every single day. I don’t think I got a response to that.

I did a phone screen where I was once again told that the tech aspect of the screen involved doing an algorithm test. I expressed frustration on Facebook about once again being asked to do an algorithm test for an iOS position.

One person on there told me if I spent all the time I used complaining about algorithms to actually learning them I would know them by now. He also criticized me for not being willing to implement well known algorithms and structures that are simply not part of the Swift Standard Library. This hurt my feelings because this was a person I considered a friend.

Another person made the comment that really prompted my series of tweets last night. He said that he asked algorithm questions because he wanted to make sure he worked with the “right” people who has the “right” skills and could talk “his” language.

I know that to most of you listening out there, you probably hear that and don’t give it a second thought. Let me decode this for you.

Algorithm questions are not a way to make sure you’re hiring someone who is capable of coding. Algorithm questions are a way to discriminate against certain kinds of people.

I know, you think I am paranoid. You think this is some kind of conspiracy theory or that I am somehow claiming sexism because I am a bad programmer or I am too lazy to learn these things. Please hear me out.

My first experience learning programming was from Code Cademy online. I accepted a terrible job that my ex-husband would not let me quit where our team lead did not know what we were supposed to be doing, so he told everyone to pretend to work and to look busy.

To keep the suicidal thoughts at bay, I went on Code Cademy to learn programming. I had taken some programming classes, but had only coded things once and subsequently never practiced it enough to understand it.

I discovered that if I wrote code forty hours a week that I could learn programming. I could type code as easily as I type an email and the logic finally made sense. This was a revelation to me. I had given up on programming because I thought it was too hard and I could never learn it. I found that if I put in enough time and effort I could learn how to code.

I got myself fired from that job and went on unemployment. In the state of Wisconsin, if you’re on unemployment you can stay on it as long as you’re going to school to learn a trade. I re-enrolled at the local tech college and started taking iOS classes to learn iPhone programming.

A lot of people learn programming from sites like Ray Wenderlich or from the Big Nerd Ranch books. Lots of people spend thousands of dollars going to code bootcamps.

President Obama has talked about how he wants all kids to know how to code. Apple has added Swift Playgrounds to the iPad to teach kids to code. We’re inundated with messages everywhere that learning programming will lead to a better life. We’ll get better jobs and earn more money and be able to start companies.

None of these paths to programming include algorithms or data structures.

I spent two years trying to scrape up enough iOS experience to be able to get an entry level job. It was brutal learning Objective-C. It was brutal learning about the Model View Controller design pattern. Asynchronous closures. Memory management.

iOS is not a simple framework to learn. There are a lot of moving parts and there is a tremendous barrier to entry to get to a point where you have accumulated enough experience of working with the frameworks and the devices and the compilers to be able to be somewhat proficient with iOS.

So why the fuck do we quiz people of fucking algorithms?

We do that to keep people like me out.

If you have a six week coding boot camp, you’re going to teach people the bare minimum that they need to make something useful. You’re not going to spend weeks talking about data structures and algorithms.

The only people who know about data structures and algorithms are people who got computer science degrees or have been around for so long that they learned it on their own.

This discriminatory practice is written off as a meritocracy. Anyone can learn this stuff if they’re ambitious and smart, so it’s the standard against which all people are held.

Let me tell you about another standard we don’t think about: The SATs.

We think of the SATs as being fair. Everyone receives the same test. Everyone has the same time limit. Everyone has the same equipment. It’s fair, right.

Nope.

If you come from an upper middle class family, you probably had some help with the SATs. I went to a private Catholic high school that specialized in college prep. My parents bought me books that helped me figure out how to get better scores on the SATs. I had practice tests I could take with instructions about what the right answer was and why. It explained to me how to see a trick question and gave me strategies for getting around them.

Both of my parents had college degrees and were in education. It was expected that I would go to college. I didn’t have to have a job because my parents paid for my college, so all I had to do when I was in high school was study. When I didn’t like the score I got on the first test, I took it again. I could take the test as many times as I wanted and each time I took it my score got better because I got practice.

I can stand by my scores and talk about how I earned them through hard work and how the system is a meritocracy because I did marginally better than a few other people with the same privilege I had. But that’s not a complete story.

Take a student living in a poor community in Mississippi. This student might go to a school where they teach creationism instead of evolution. This student has no expectation of ever going to college. This student doesn’t know that there are resources out there to help them do better on the test. They don’t know about the trick questions. Their school doesn’t offer algebra because no one would take it anyway.

Does the test honestly reflect this person’s potential?

This theoretical person could be a genius. But they don’t have the cultural context to know what they are supposed to do in order to move from the sphere they are now to the better one brought by money and education.

I know so many of my classmates from my school who have trouble finding jobs. There are so many road blocks that are set up to keep the wrong people out. You have to have a GitHub repository and a Stack Overflow account with a certain amount of points. You have to contribute to open source. You have to present at meet ups.

We create so many barriers to entry for people who are culturally unfamiliar with what the community expects and we set these up to keep people out. We like to feel like we’ve earned our place in the community and we don’t want to deal with helping more people enter that we have to compete with.

Knowing algorithms and data structures means that you were privileged enough to get a computer science degree. It means you had enough free time that you learned this stuff on your own if you’re self taught. This assumes you have the money to take time off to learn something that will help you get better jobs.

If you’re struggling to make ends meet because you’re a single parent who can’t get past the velvet ropes to the land of coding opportunity, you do not have time to learn these things. You are told you’re not welcome and you give up.

None of this would bother me so much were it not for how completely useless this exercise is. Yes, knowing data structures and algorithms makes you a better programmer at some point, but if you’re interviewing someone for a job doing iOS development, there are so many other things that are iOS specific that no one ever asks about because for the most part these places don’t know them. You’re getting interviewed by people who don’t know anything about what we do who for some reason are in charge of determining whether you understand things or not. It’s bullshit.

The people who have the privilege to get through this red tape just kind of shrug and accept it’s a necessary evil. Some of them even embrace it and will fight with you tooth and nail about why it’s important for someone to know something they haven’t used in five years.

Yes, I could go and learn algorithms and data structures. I am holding my nose and accepting that this is probably something I must do in order to get better jobs, but that doesn’t mean that I should endorse them because I have the privilege of being able to take a few months off of work to learn something that’s nearly completely useless.

By filtering out anyone who comes from a non-traditional background, we’re ensuring a monoculture in programming. We want diversity, but only if the people we bring in think the same way we do. That’s not true diversity.

We need people who never went to college. We need people who learned by hacking and being tenacious and getting something working. We need people who come from diverse backgrounds who can bring new perspectives to what we do so that we can use technology to make people’s lives better and not just find more invasive ways to gather user data for targeted marketing.

Over the last year I have not felt that this community values those voices anymore. I went into iOS over web and Java because I felt that this community was welcoming to anyone with a curious mind and drive to do better and based on the responses I am getting from people I don’t feel that way anymore. I want there to be opportunity out there for people who are like I was four years ago. In order for that to happen, we need to change how we do our hiring practices or we’re all going to be poorer for it.

Thank you.

Game Development Journal 3: Learning to Embrace Higher Level Abstractions

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For the last few months I have been working on a project that required me to write a simple game and apply Gameplay Kit AI to the project. I chose a simple tic tac toe game because it’s simple. It’s tic tac toe. Three year olds play this game. It should be easy to implement, right?

Wrong.

I have been bashing my head against this stupid game for months because I was trying to figure out how to do it in Sprite Kit. (To be fair, I have also been rather burned out and little things have been incredibly difficult for me to deal with. Please do not judge me.)

Sprite Kit is good for a lot of things. It’s good if you are doing a platformer game like Super Mario Brothers or if you’re creating an endless runner. Sprite Kit is not as good at doing things like tic tac toe or card/board games. I was looking through my books and tutorials to try to figure out how to tell the app that a square area of the screen represented a specific square of a tic tac toe board. Most materials are glorified rewritten documentation or they focus on the easiest examples they can possibly figure out, which includes spawning enemies and having sprites removed from the screen when they collide with one.

This was driving me batty. I knew there had to be a way to do this, but I felt like I was fighting the framework because the framework wasn’t designed to do what I needed it to do.

This problem was completely roadblocking me. I couldn’t think about how to write the programming logic until I figured this out. I knew I should worry about the UI after I got the logic finished, but this thing was completely blocking my ability to conceptualize how to approach this problem. I was incredibly upset because I knew there should be an easy way to do this but I couldn’t find it in any Sprite Kit examples I was seeing.

My mental block finally crumbled a few days ago when I realized I should not be using Sprite Kit for this project. I should use UIKit. Instead of trying to figure out how to programmatically tell the app that a square area on the screen represents a square on a tic tac toe board, I should just create nine buttons.

In Paul Hudson’s Hacking with Swift book, he recreates the Four in a Row Gameplay Kit example with Swift. I looked at the Apple example and found it incomprehensible, so I was incredibly happy to find he walked through how to implement and design that example more clearly.

One thing he did in that example was he did his entire user interface in UIKit with stack views. One thing he showed that I didn’t know you could do was to create a tag for each button in the stack view and connect all of the buttons to the same outlet and action.

I have my name on books. I speak at conferences. I have worked for some fairly prestigious places. For the last year or so I have let my pride get in the way of me doing things I need to do to be a better developer.

I do not have a lot of experience. I was at Indie DevStock this weekend and I heard most of the other indie developers I look up to had 15-20 years of programming experience. I have three. I think I am a pretty good programmer for only having three years of experience, but I know that I could be a lot better than I am right now.

I have tried to find a normal job so that I can pay my dues and learn from people with more experience than I do, but with one exception, that has not happened. I encounter other people who are like me. We feel like we need to pretend like we know what we’re doing rather than acknowledge that we need to work on our fundamentals and that working on fundamentals honestly takes a lot of time. If you’re working at a company that expects you to work sixty hours a week and you have to spend all your time pretending like you know everything, you don’t have enough mental or emotional energy to go and learn stuff that you may have known at some point in the past but you don’t remember now.

Also, honestly, we feel intense amounts of pressure to convince everyone that we’re a programming ninja. No one can just be a good, solid developer. Everyone has to be a 10x engineer. Everyone has to be a ninja. We’re all competing with one another to prove that we’re hot shit and that attitude is actively stunting the growth of members of our engineering community.

When I first started out, no one knew who I was or anything about me. I knew I could not get a decent job if people didn’t know who I was. I went to a lot of effort to network and make connections. I wanted to attend a lot of conferences, but couldn’t afford to go. So I needed to find a job so that I could make enough money to attend conferences to find a job. That didn’t work. There was a work around, which was to be a speaker.

I didn’t want to be the dumb-ass pitching beginner talks to conferences on stuff I figured everyone already knew anyway. I decided to go big and started talking about GPU programming with Metal and GPUImage. I had some grasp of how these things worked, but I couldn’t think of anything I could do with them. I just wanted to know them.

I tried to learn these things without any real context for where they should be used. This is not a good way to learn something. It’s mentally exhausting and draining. You feel stupid and your mental state deteriorates. You feel like a failure but you can’t give up because you want to prove that you deserve to be around everyone else.

I recently had a conversation with Warren Moore where I told him I wanted to learn Metal better but I couldn’t think of a project to do in Metal that I couldn’t do in Scene Kit. He told me that was the point. They weren’t intending for everyone to jump into OpenGL or Metal. Scene Kit was designed to do almost everything you need to do and only once you exhaust what Scene Kit can do should you drop down to Metal.

I felt like this was the most obvious thing in the world and I have no idea why it took me two years and a few nervous breakdowns to finally figure that out.

I have been so obsessed with trying to convince everyone that I deserve to be here that I have been focusing on the wrong things. I make things more complicated than they have to be. I don’t look for the simplest solution. I jump into the most complicated thing I can so that I can find an excuse to learn something that may not be the right tool for what I want to do. I do that at the expense of getting comfortable and familiar with the easy solutions that allow me to get things done more quickly.

I have been on a path that leads me to places I don’t want to go. I want to be a great programmer. Knowing how to render a triangle to a screen in Metal does not make me a great programmer. It makes me a clever programmer. Writing clean code that anyone can read and understand at the highest abstraction level makes me a great programmer. Knowing the higher level abstractions well enough to know what they can and can’t do and when to drop to a lower abstraction makes me a great programmer.

Right now I am not a great programmer. I am a good programmer. I can do 90% of what most jobs need me to do, but I want to work towards being someone who is respected in the community for being able to solve problems.

I don’t want to keep seeking out really low levels of abstraction and create convoluted reasons regarding why I am using them when I could do things much easier in another way. That’s just stupid and I am not doing it any more. That path leads to mental ruin and despair.

Game Development Journal 2: Getting Stuck in Boxes

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This post isn’t specifically about the project I outlined in the first post, but it is a persistent problem I keep running into, even though I know the problem is there.

I am working on a tutorial for Ray Wenderlich and I have been running into issues with it.

My issue is that I have program-specific logic. I am creating a very simple game, but one thing I didn’t think about was the fact that you have to explain every little thing to the application. There are so many connections your brain makes automagically that a computer doesn’t know. You have to figure out how to tell the app how to think. This is the underlying issue in machine learning, but on a much larger and complex scale.

One reason I wanted to do a game application over a more useful type of application is because of application specific programming logic.

One thing I find frustrating, that is actually a feature of iOS, is how many frameworks there are. Sometimes I feel like when I am writing an app that you are choosing a framework, reading the documentation, and then just setting a few properties on that framework to make your app do something. So like, if you are doing something in SpriteKit, you’re choosing the image for the sprite, then you choose where it’s boundaries are, and you set a bunch of properties on the SKSpriteNode.

I have found that I get into a mindset where I feel like the only tools I have in my toolbox are ones that are pre-baked by someone else. If there is’t a framework for it or a property for it, it doesn’t occur to me that it can be done. The app is basically a giant state machine where your Swift/Objective-C code is just some glue holding together a bunch of pre-baked parts.

Whenever I am presented with a problem that requires a lot of program specific logic, my brain freezes up. It gets used to the idea that I just go pull a piece of code out of a box and it does what I want it to do. When I have to actually engage my brain in figuring out what my application has to do it’s like exercising a muscle I forgot existed. It’s incredibly weird.

I know that all of programming is supposed to be about figuring out what you want the application to do, but most of us don’t think that way. There are so many fucking blog posts by people trying to come with convoluted reasons to create hieroglyphic looking Swift closures that you need a Rosetta Stone to interpret. Most blog posts and tutorials are around talking about the components of a framework and not what you can do with it. Every game development book I see talks about how to use the tools of something like SpriteKit or Unity, but not how to think through how you would solve a problem.

The thing that prompted my last blog post was my expressing frustration that programming books talk about tools but not how to use tools to solve problems. I got a bunch of sanctimonious assholes telling me that if I read a book on algorithms it would somehow magically solve all my problems and telling me that if I read a half dozen different books that somehow I could cobble together all of the stuff I need to do what I want.

I think there is a better way.

I feel very frustrated that we, as a community, don’t talk more about how to think through how to solve a problem. Yes, there are multiple ways of solving a problem. So why not talk about it? Talk about how you tried a few different ways and you ultimately chose one specific way because it was the shortest or the most maintainable or the most reusable, etc…

We don’t do this because it’s hard.

It’s a lot easier to write a blog post saying you did something simple with SpriteKit that looks super impressive but doesn’t give anyone a visceral understanding of what they can do with it.

One reason I am running into problems learning Metal is because I don’t know what I am supposed to do with it. Almost anything I need to do in Metal can be done with something like SceneKit. I keep trying to learn the framework with no context as to why it’s important and what problems it solves. I get people hassling me by telling me it’s up to me to figure out why it’s important and that’s bullshit.

Programming isn’t an objective thing where every single app is a special snowflake. They all require us to think through why we’re doing what we are doing. I have fallen into a pit the last year where I have just automated that process in my brain where if I encounter a situation that doesn’t fit into a neat box my brain can’t deal with it. That’s fine for most of what most employers need, but I don’t want to be like this anymore.

I miss thinking about how to solve problems. I miss working on a portion of a project where I actually get to touch things and see how they connect rather than being told to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain because the code base is so fucking massive and poorly documented that no one knows how it works.

I am trying to shake away my mental cobwebs and remember that programming doesn’t have to be an automated process or something where you get into a pissing match with other people to make the most convoluted code you possibly can without breaking the compiler.

One of the goals with this series of blog posts is to explain a problem I am trying to solve and walk people through my thought processes in the hope that we, as a community, put more effort into talking about how we approach problems rather than seeing who can be the first person to get something running on the Apple Car, whenever it comes out.