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To be fair their podcast has two programmers and a stay at home dad so it makes sense why he only had focus on his kids. The app isnt worth .99 cents though wi

by ProAm 5y ago

To be fair their podcast has two programmers and a stay at home dad so it makes sense why he only had focus on his kids. The app isnt worth .99 cents though with questionable utility and a plethora of other apps that do this for free.

greedo 5y ago
To be accurate, all three of the hosts are programmers.
- ProAm 5y ago
  Two of them are working programmers though and, in my opinion, much stronger programmers. I just think it's clear why he thought this was a valuable app idea.
  - greedo 5y ago
    I've listened to ATP since day one. My impression of Siracusa as a programmer is limited to the few apps he's released. But he could be a fantastic programmer at his "jobby-job." Or he could just be average. We have no way of telling, despite how intelligent both his writing and his speaking on the podcast might convey. Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, yet we don't know how good a programmer he is. He's made great money, and has strong opinions, but again, we don't know how good a programmer he is. Casey used to have a "jobby-job" before leaving the corporate world. So he too might be a good, bad or excellent programmer. We don't know. It's kind of like how you don't really know someone until you live with them. For programming, it's until you've worked with them and seen their code. All three of the hosts might be world class; or they might be average. But there's no way to determine who is the strongest programmer of the three. We can debate who's been more successful selling their code, but we don't know where Siracusa works and code/app sales are a poor metric for code quality.
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      We obviously can't know, but hearing someone talk about something gives you an idea. My impression is that Casey is quite weak (as in average), but meticulous. Siracusa is almost certainly the one with the best understanding of theory, but hard to say how he is practically. He could be very good at what he's doing. Marco also doesn't seem very strong in raw programming (he resisted Swift for half a decade, complains that it's hard to deal with, says that architecture is only for beginners etc) but obviously he can solve whatever problem he is faced with, even quite complex ones. And this is obviously what matters if you are an indie developer. That and product sense, which he is also very good at. He probably has the perfect skillset for an indie developer, better programming wouldn't make him any more successful.
      - greedo 5y ago
        I think Marco's resistance to Swift doesn't indicate anything about programming skill. Based on his low level audio programming (he hates to rely on code outside of his own), he's quite an accomplished programmer, unafraid of complex problems or reinventing the wheel when an existing library doesn't satisfy his desires. I doubt he would survive well in the world of unit tests, CI/CD, Jira and managers though. And I envy him for being able to avoid that.
        perardi 5y ago
        Yeah, gotta defend Marco here, though I have my quibbles with him on this show. (He has the most first-worldiest of problems.) He has gone in deep on performant low-level audio code, and how it integrates with the system APIs. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff with programmatic drawing of icons in his apps. He did a lot of good caching work back in the Instapaper days, when cell connections were almost like dialup. He seemed to be reluctant to learn Swift, because Swift would have gotten him…what? I think he thought that Objective-C was mature, tested, comprehensible, and battle-tested in production. And it wasn’t going to change out from underneath him…which you sure couldn’t say about Swift for the first few years. You eventually had to adopt it, as Apple is moving to Swift-only, but I think Objective-C let him accomplish his goals, and a lot of the good security stuff in Swift is maybe not super relevant to his app development. (Ugh, PHP, though…)
deleted 5y ago
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by ProAm 5y ago

greedo 5y ago

To be accurate, all three of the hosts are programmers.

ProAm 5y ago
Two of them are working programmers though and, in my opinion, much stronger programmers. I just think it's clear why he thought this was a valuable app idea.
- greedo 5y ago
  I've listened to ATP since day one. My impression of Siracusa as a programmer is limited to the few apps he's released. But he could be a fantastic programmer at his "jobby-job." Or he could just be average. We have no way of telling, despite how intelligent both his writing and his speaking on the podcast might convey. Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, yet we don't know how good a programmer he is. He's made great money, and has strong opinions, but again, we don't know how good a programmer he is. Casey used to have a "jobby-job" before leaving the corporate world. So he too might be a good, bad or excellent programmer. We don't know. It's kind of like how you don't really know someone until you live with them. For programming, it's until you've worked with them and seen their code. All three of the hosts might be world class; or they might be average. But there's no way to determine who is the strongest programmer of the three. We can debate who's been more successful selling their code, but we don't know where Siracusa works and code/app sales are a poor metric for code quality.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    We obviously can't know, but hearing someone talk about something gives you an idea. My impression is that Casey is quite weak (as in average), but meticulous. Siracusa is almost certainly the one with the best understanding of theory, but hard to say how he is practically. He could be very good at what he's doing. Marco also doesn't seem very strong in raw programming (he resisted Swift for half a decade, complains that it's hard to deal with, says that architecture is only for beginners etc) but obviously he can solve whatever problem he is faced with, even quite complex ones. And this is obviously what matters if you are an indie developer. That and product sense, which he is also very good at. He probably has the perfect skillset for an indie developer, better programming wouldn't make him any more successful.
    - greedo 5y ago
      I think Marco's resistance to Swift doesn't indicate anything about programming skill. Based on his low level audio programming (he hates to rely on code outside of his own), he's quite an accomplished programmer, unafraid of complex problems or reinventing the wheel when an existing library doesn't satisfy his desires. I doubt he would survive well in the world of unit tests, CI/CD, Jira and managers though. And I envy him for being able to avoid that.
      - perardi 5y ago
        Yeah, gotta defend Marco here, though I have my quibbles with him on this show. (He has the most first-worldiest of problems.) He has gone in deep on performant low-level audio code, and how it integrates with the system APIs. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff with programmatic drawing of icons in his apps. He did a lot of good caching work back in the Instapaper days, when cell connections were almost like dialup. He seemed to be reluctant to learn Swift, because Swift would have gotten him…what? I think he thought that Objective-C was mature, tested, comprehensible, and battle-tested in production. And it wasn’t going to change out from underneath him…which you sure couldn’t say about Swift for the first few years. You eventually had to adopt it, as Apple is moving to Swift-only, but I think Objective-C let him accomplish his goals, and a lot of the good security stuff in Swift is maybe not super relevant to his app development. (Ugh, PHP, though…)

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