Daniel Hall

iOS engineer | keyboard worrier

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@DonnyWals And yet, amazingly, it’s still a total ripoff for developers that offers no benefit other than the “privilege” of being one free app out of millions. Or the honor of being a paid app that gives 30% of revenue to Apple while being otherwise ignored. All for a bargain $99/year!

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@bxlewi1 I completely agree. Hard to express a strong argument against the flaming pants assertion.

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@zats @krzyzanowskim I really enjoy SwiftUI overall, but your point is 100% valid. I challenge anyone to consistently predict what a chain of modifiers will / won’t do without previewing or building to see what happens at runtime (i.e. “The JavaScript Experience™️”)

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

Engineers who are incapable of trusting others inevitably become bottlenecks.

Therefore orgs who keep engineers with trust issues or a low opinion of others in key positions will always move slowly.

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@birbirisidir @crypto_bonesNFT @KevinNaughtonJr If the the business needs changed, it’s not a refactor, it’s a new feature or a rewrite. The problem is when unit tests have to be modified as part of a refactor. Then you can’t tell if the existing behavior was truly maintained or if there has been a regression.

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@birbirisidir @crypto_bonesNFT @KevinNaughtonJr Not exactly — it should cause your existing test to fail, not require the test to be modified. If the existing test can’t validate the refactored code, how do you know that the code meets the existing requirements? Only the code should be fixed until the existing test passes.

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@birbirisidir @crypto_bonesNFT @KevinNaughtonJr Changing a test is the same thing as writing a new test. If a unit test can’t remain constant when the code it tests changes, then it’s not a refactor it’s a rewrite. That means more risk as well as a major purpose of unit tests being lost: the ability to refactor safely.

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

I still don’t understand—what is the benefit of having AI help you write something that has already been written?

Are our jobs simply to generate pages of safely plausible text, not to create and describe new ideas and solutions?

[Paul Couvert @itsPaulAi]

No need to spend time writing Word documents.

Google has just integrated AI directly into Docs.

It's like having ChatGPT integrated directly into your document.

Here's how to access and use it today:

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@BigCatJared Haha — that would be truly game changing!

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

What people get wrong about ChatGPT writing code is that they only show examples of generating new code for a given prompt. That’s cool but 95% of coding is writing within the context of existing code. AI isn’t super useful until it can write correct code for any given codebase.

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

When this happens, the wrong thing to do is to double down on solving your internally-created problems in ways that will become new problems. Instead, realize that you are focused on the wrong problems entirely & radically reassess how to streamline and get back to the right ones

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

An informative article about the evolution of the Facebook iOS app & architecture. While the process of evolution is unavoidable, I’m struck by how each solution becomes the next worst problem & how much work went into fixing the wrong problems

1/🧵

https://t.co/Yx3851Hnkn

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

At Twitter, I would estimate that at least 80% of iOS dev time and effort were absorbed by internally created processes, tools and problems which had little or nothing to do with creating good user experiences.

4/🧵

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@DXZDB @elonmusk I mean, yeah it was totally a joke based on $TWTTR hitting one of Musk’s haha price points back then. Not at all a serious prediction, but I’m still willing to retroactively claim credit for calling it! 😉

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

Whoa! Was I the first person to predict @elonmusk buying Twitter?!!

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

And just like that, Twitter becomes a potential acquisition target for @elonmusk

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@bob_burrough Interesting perspective! Wouldn’t that at least replace human jobs in the Growth, BI, Revenue sorts of areas? Or do you just see AI as always being limited to a tool used by a human, rather than a replacement for a human function?

[Daniel Hall @_danielhall]

@bob_burrough That’s because it’s a hobby though, isn’t it? And not a survival necessity? If a company commercially produced winning chess games, it would almost certainly use AI players and not humans in order to have the most successful business model.