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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.

by ProAm 5y ago

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…)
      - greedo 5y ago
        I love how Marco just feels like throwing money at one of life's problems is the best solution. I think he would be the first to tell you the role of luck in his success. Yes, he worked long hard hours at Tumblr, and eventually that paid off financially when Tumblr was sold. He was smart to scratch an itch when the iPhone first came out by releasing Instapaper, and smart to realize when it was time to sell it. He was smart to realize his itch for a good podcast player might be universal. So I think he's an incredible businessman who is really only limited by his unwillingness to yoke himself to a corporation. His use of Obj-C and PHP are just as pragmatic to me. He's an expert at Obj-C and possibly at PHP, and why change? Let Swift mature, see if Obj-C becomes deprecated, and then move on. He can obviously learn new languages since he's dabbled in Rust etc. I do wish ATP focused more on tech stuff and less on how to live your best life on Fire Island. But I enjoy it every week.
- scarface74 5y ago
  > yet we don't know how good a programmer he is You know he is good because… > Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    He's undoubtedly a world class indie developer, but we were discussing his abilities as a programmer, in the sense of writing good code. True, it's not necessarily important or valuable in life, but that is what we were talking about. Most of the people I worked with at my FAANG job were excellent programmers, surely better than Marco, but none of them would have any chance of even coming up with a decent idea for an app, let alone carry it through and launch it. So they are absolutely useless as indie developers. It's just different skill sets.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      Our definition of a “well written app” is different. An app to me is well written if it is meets a need well enough to be successful. I would be much more impressed by an Indy developer who has a successful sustainable business without being slimy than a “FAANG” software engineer that got in because he can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope. I also know we are both talking hypothetically. If you listen to him about some of the low level audio processing he does, he’s definitely pretty good. Before I get the expected replies, no I’m not “jealous of FAANG SWEs”. I work for BigTech myself after a very slight pivot from enterprise development.
      - Grustaf 5y ago
        The interview is the least demanding part, working as a software developer at an ambitious company has nothing to do with binary trees. What does it matter which skill is more impressive? Obviously there are way fewer successful indie developers than top tier developers, and obviously life as a successful indie is way better. Yet, there is such a thing as writing high quality code, which is more or less orthogonal to being a successful indie. And that was what we are discussing. It's a bit like being a fast runner and being a good football player. There's some connection, but it's not like the fastest runners are the best players, or the other way around. Different skills. As to low level audio, I know what you're referring to, and it doesn't say that much really. My co-founder at my previous startup wrote a bunch of DSP code that worked, and was probably more complex than the pause removal, but he was still a pretty random developer. His code was sometimes surprisingly bad. Marco's strength is to not shy away from anything, even if it sounds scary or complex. DSP sounds complex, but it's not string theory.

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.

by 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…)
    - greedo 5y ago
      I love how Marco just feels like throwing money at one of life's problems is the best solution. I think he would be the first to tell you the role of luck in his success. Yes, he worked long hard hours at Tumblr, and eventually that paid off financially when Tumblr was sold. He was smart to scratch an itch when the iPhone first came out by releasing Instapaper, and smart to realize when it was time to sell it. He was smart to realize his itch for a good podcast player might be universal. So I think he's an incredible businessman who is really only limited by his unwillingness to yoke himself to a corporation. His use of Obj-C and PHP are just as pragmatic to me. He's an expert at Obj-C and possibly at PHP, and why change? Let Swift mature, see if Obj-C becomes deprecated, and then move on. He can obviously learn new languages since he's dabbled in Rust etc. I do wish ATP focused more on tech stuff and less on how to live your best life on Fire Island. But I enjoy it every week.
scarface74 5y ago
> yet we don't know how good a programmer he is You know he is good because… > Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  He's undoubtedly a world class indie developer, but we were discussing his abilities as a programmer, in the sense of writing good code. True, it's not necessarily important or valuable in life, but that is what we were talking about. Most of the people I worked with at my FAANG job were excellent programmers, surely better than Marco, but none of them would have any chance of even coming up with a decent idea for an app, let alone carry it through and launch it. So they are absolutely useless as indie developers. It's just different skill sets.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    Our definition of a “well written app” is different. An app to me is well written if it is meets a need well enough to be successful. I would be much more impressed by an Indy developer who has a successful sustainable business without being slimy than a “FAANG” software engineer that got in because he can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope. I also know we are both talking hypothetically. If you listen to him about some of the low level audio processing he does, he’s definitely pretty good. Before I get the expected replies, no I’m not “jealous of FAANG SWEs”. I work for BigTech myself after a very slight pivot from enterprise development.
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      The interview is the least demanding part, working as a software developer at an ambitious company has nothing to do with binary trees. What does it matter which skill is more impressive? Obviously there are way fewer successful indie developers than top tier developers, and obviously life as a successful indie is way better. Yet, there is such a thing as writing high quality code, which is more or less orthogonal to being a successful indie. And that was what we are discussing. It's a bit like being a fast runner and being a good football player. There's some connection, but it's not like the fastest runners are the best players, or the other way around. Different skills. As to low level audio, I know what you're referring to, and it doesn't say that much really. My co-founder at my previous startup wrote a bunch of DSP code that worked, and was probably more complex than the pause removal, but he was still a pretty random developer. His code was sometimes surprisingly bad. Marco's strength is to not shy away from anything, even if it sounds scary or complex. DSP sounds complex, but it's not string theory.