Recently, while watching a Tsoding stream, I saw something that piqued my curiosity. Alexey demonstrated how one of his applications could render a video just by calling into the ffmpeg binary directly, instead of using it as a source code dependency or even a static or dynamic library linked to his program.
WWDC ’19 is over, and what a week! Let me start by saying that this is probably the best WWDC ever. We have seen the announcement of game changing technologies for the Apple developer community, but even ignoring those big announcements, the rest of smaller details make on itself a great WWDC.
I’m so thankful to have people like Jonathan Blow that is able to challenge the status quo of our industry. Software quality is decaying and we’re part of the problem. If you still think that caring about this things is a waste of time watch this talk, it may help you open your eyes.
This post is just a dump of the things that came to mind while watching Jonathan Blow’s libraries discussion. I’m not an expert on any of this but I find it so fascinating that my mind can stop thinking and taking notes when watching Jon streams.
Without entering in the dicussion about MVVM I just wanted to quote here an interesting paragraph of the linked post. It’s mainly for my own memories, as it’s something related to a topic that I’ve had in my mind for a while and I want to have this words saved somewhere that I can refer back when I’m lost in the forest of Patterns.
One of the most interesting parts of software is decoupling. Although not the kind of decoupling that we are all used to in our code, but the kind that decouples parts of a system from itself at execution level, a dream where software can talk with each other. Sadly that is not really extended nowadays at an application level, so any little piece of software that tries to do something like that calls my attention.
Swift, Rust, Go, and the rest of tomorrow’s languages, can you marry modern thinking, build a community with simple as a core design goal, and save web development from itself?
That’s the reason why I have to wait 30 seconds for Word to boot.
About elegance in code:
I absolutely recommend you to go and read the linked article. This posts by the Artsy devs are so great for me since I’ve been following closely the development of their Apps since they are open source. And by closely I mean really closely, believe me.
developers have become complacent in being wasteful for the benefit of their own development ease instead of considerate of the time and resources they are taking from customers.
The author of the linked post gives some reasons on why Swift is a good language for an introduction to computer science class. I’m really interested in Swift being a good language to teach and I found the post really interesting.
I’ve been reading and talking with people that when explaining functions like map, filter or reduce they start with “it loops over the collection and…”. When I ear that my mind starts thinking in why people doesn’t care about the concepts behind things.
Kind of following the thoughts on the exploration phase post.
Today I found this great post by Zach Holman. He presents some points that can contribute to make you a better developer. I was reading it with attention cause I always liked how Zach explains things and then I read this part:
If you like this post I recommend you to read a more recent article about the same topic: Solving the String problem with Swift 5.
Think it two times before starting a career in programming.