Month: June 2021

Quotes · You

“You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.”

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I’m going to wrap up my recent Maslow kick with one last little kick in the butt.

You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.

Abraham Maslow

You see people play it safe all the time and end up in the doldrums of easy choices, eventually stagnating and even sinking right where they are.

It’s like when your favorite band tries out a new sound. Sometimes the result is a career changer. Sometimes it’s annoying or just so very very bad. But it is almost certainly better than doing the same crap forever.

Software Dev

Why asynchronous programming is (was) hard

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One of the most difficult things about mobile development is asynchronous programming, which means doing different things at the same time. This is not the normal flowchart-style sequence of traditional programming.

Weirdly enough, with Swift completion handlers, an asynchronous function exits before it finishes. Or if you’r not careful, it might never finish at all. 🤯

Oh no! This is entering annoying quantum mechanics territory. 😭

If none of this makes any sense to you, then you’re not alone.

All of this is why I love the following video from WWDC 2021. Nate spends the first eight minutes showing how downloading an image and generating a thumbnail quickly becomes “verbose, complex, and even incorrect” in traditional Swift programming. (Side note: I like how Nate apparently worked hard on his hand gestures as well.)

The payoff: Nate then explains how async/await will let you write asynchronous code basically like “regular code.” 🤩

Quotes · You

“What a man can be, he must be.”

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Good ol’ Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist who gave us a pyramid and a hammer, is at it again with some pretty sensible insights.

Abraham Maslow.jpg
Abraham Maslow

This time he’s riffing on Aristotle’s function argument about what the heck we’re even doing here. Basically, we’re here to be useful.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.

(Apparently he was an old-school fan of the “he/him/man” pronoun. 🤷🏻‍♂️)

It’s one thing to find your purpose — and those who do so should consider themselves fortunate. But the real trick is to actually do something about it.

It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

Thank you for the reminder, Mazzy. Can I call you that? Because here’s another Mazzy who found her purpose.

Quotes · You

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

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This Abraham Maslow fellow doesn’t just have a pyramid, he also has a hammer. Here is the popular phrasing of Maslow’s Hammer.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Maybe Maslow

I love this saying. People often “hammer away” at something the wrong way, wasting time and failing to learn a new skill.

It’s easy to make this mistake.

As a software engineer, I’ve seen this 1000 times. “Well, we have a bunch of web servers, and we need a mobile app, so… let’s make our mobile app using web tech!” At first, it seems to make sense. But you end up with a crappy app, lots of extra work, and maybe even some unhappy developers who leave because they care about their career too much. They want to use Xcode because that’s a great tool for making apps.

(But beware, Xcode could become your next hammer. 🤷🏻‍♂️)