I am currently working on trying to figure out AV Foundation. AV Foundation, very much like the rest of Core Audio, is not very well documented. It has been broadened and expanded the last few years and a lot of the material out there in the world is from 2 years ago, which is a century in Apple development time.

I feel unsure about how I am proceeding with this. I go into the Apple documentation and see that there is a programming guide! Cool! This will be easy.

Then I look online and I see developers talking about how the guide is really out of date.

I ask a developer what to do. His answer: Watch the WWDC videos and visit the developer forum.

I get ready to do that and I notice that the guide was just updated less than two weeks ago. Great! That means it is up-to-date and comprehensive, right? Not necessarily. Watch the WWDC videos and visit the developer forum.

I don’t want to bother anyone. I feel bad that I am asking things that keep getting the same answer and I worry that people think I am dumb or I am not listening to what they are saying. I don’t want to be a time suck to people who are high level developers who need time to actually do work.

I don’t know if this is just a stage everyone who is interested in audio programming goes through, where you think, “There has to be more than just this.” Yes, somehow people who are experts on this stuff don’t know that there is some super secret easy guide to doing these things that I am going to magically find because I am a special unique snowflake who doesn’t have to deal with the same issues as everyone else :p

I really want to be a self reliant person who can look things up and figure things out. I keep hearing from two different camps of people. One camp says never to ask any questions because it will make you look stupid. The other camp says that asking questions is a good thing to do.

Earlier in the year I could not get a VM working on my computer. I took it to my teacher. He tried one or two things for a little less than a minute then immediately got up and started asking the teachers around him about whether they encountered that error before and how they would fix it. Five minutes later we resolved the issue and it was working.

I think it is good to ask questions, but I get wary when I notice that I am getting the same answer to a lot of the questions I am asking. I hope that if I can show that I listened to what I am being told and can follow through with it that hopefully my earlier obtuseness will be forgiven. Apple development is a small community of people and audio development on the Apple platform is an even smaller community of people and I don’t want to be known as the person who can’t figure things out.

Okay. Existential crisis over. Time to get to work!