My SwiftUI app Super Headache is built with my own async/await-based TCA-like framework. It was so intellectually satisfying to build. These beautiful puzzle pieces that connect together in these magical ways. But I have a strong distaste for it because it feels too much like engineering for the sake of engineering.
@kyle sometimes I also feel like I over-engineer or over-modularize, but then I have to add a new platform or make a big structure change and I realize it was worth it
@ristkof Folks have been saying the touch target is off for some reason on iOS 17 but I haven’t had the time to look into it. It’ll be fixed by the time iOS 17 is released.
We all like to spend our time in interesting ways and sometimes that can work against our bigger goals, like building products that solve problems for real people. YMMV.
@kylebshr Yes and yes: I exclusively build well-architected products 😎 After a couple years of maintenance and introspection I realized this particular choice had the wrong balance.
@kyle there’s no shame in building things for the sheer joy and aesthetic of it.
too often our industry is focused on productivity and loses sight of the art of programming.
usefulness is nice. but it’s not everything.
and you never know. someday down the road that may become something useful.
@isaiah You’re reading a bit too much into what I wrote. I love programming and everything I release publicly is beautiful and perfect. The specific thing I mentioned was the wrong balance for me and impeded my ability and willingness to help more people, which is also important to me.
@kyle my (post-realization) test for if it was worth doing (in terms of development time/effort) is: does it increase the ability / decrease the iteration time to implement new features/fixes after people’s feedback?
Often the most direct way is not the most workable. The opposite can also be true. As you say, YMMV.
Being a good programmer (whatever that means) might mean identifying these optimizations early. Sinking time into “toy” projects is perhaps the only way to intuit it for the future
@dhritzkiv That’s a good metric with a lot of room for introspection; one facet is surely finding intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and “enjoying how you spend your time” surely factors into the former. Everyone needs to do their own vibe check to know if they have the right mix.
@kyle@dhritzkiv And that mix can change over time. The learning and pleasure you got from doing it may have been worth it to you then, but now speed of feature addition (or whatever) may be more important.
Play and learning feed into all that we create, in my opinion, and have high value.
A challenge is to know when to set aside the product of those modes and work for different goals.
I try to separate my play or learn from my goal-oriented stuff. Let’s me play more freely.
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