“inessential: On the Many NetNewsWire Feature Requests to Show Full Web Pages”
I really like the way Brent thinks about software design and development. (Not surprising, since I really like the apps he’s made 😁)
@baldur This kind of blog post is so refreshing; you can tell that he's really taking his time to think about it. I love where the app is and where it seems to be going—such a good experience so far!
@martinfeld @baldur Brent has been one of my favorite dev-bloggers for more than a decade now; he’s so great at explaining things and has a considered perspective from years of experience.
(And back in the era when I pretended to be a developer on IRC, it was great to be able to just link to one of his posts whenever someone had the same issue/question and let his/NNW’s respected position do the heavy lifting of convincing/explaining ;-) )
The ability to explain and present things simply is such a great skill and you’re right to point that out as one of his strengths, @smokey. (Also, you ‘pretended’?)
@martinfeld Yes, pretended. People used to pop on to IRC and ask questions, and outside of certain hours when our main developers were online, I knew enough about the codebase in general, so I could point them to the right general area. Then, thinking I was an actual developer, they’d start asking me technical questions, and I’d have to say sorry, not actually a developer ;-) (although toward the end, out of necessity, I did start writing code by copy-paste and trial-and-error, but I still had only the vaguest idea what I was doing, nothing about memory management or MVC or anything like that ;-) )
@martinfeld It was very liberating and powerful being able to make the computer (or, in this case, Camino) do what I told it to do, and I loved Objective-C because its syntax was the first “real” programming language that ever clicked with me and just “made sense” looking at it.
That said, I think programming is a lot less scary than it seems; it’s just different and needs a good, gentle intro for people who aren’t already steeped in that world.
@smokey That’s interesting! Listening to different tech podcasts, I’m always curious to hear what different people use and how the underlying technology makes all of these apps and services possible. I’ve had a bit of a look at Swift but haven’t had the time to really pursue the language. It seemed to make sense at a basic level—at least to the uninitiated like me.