I find that a small amount of willful belief in magic goes a long way when learning something new.

As an experienced coder, I fall into the trap of prematurely analyzing how something works and constantly peeking under the hood while learning a new library, language, or abstraction. While the desire to disassemble toys to find out how they work is great, it often gets in the way of education.

I often have to force myself to accept magical behavior in order to keep progressing in my studies. Don’t look behind the curtain. Don’t worry too much about how that animation works, or how that sound is generated, or how that data got communicated. That level of curiosity is for later. For now, just accept things at face value—as simply magical—and continue your learning journey.

Remember that your goal is to be a knowledgeable novice at the end of the learning process. Don’t try to be an expert right away.

Don’t let experience get in the way of wonder.

• #FridayDevAdvice

The NSItemProvider class in Foundation is a powerful abstraction for making data available across processes that are otherwise isolated from one another. I hope this post can be a one-stop reference for developers who want a solid understanding how item providers work, and how to use the API in a modern way.

NSItemProvider is a data promise

An NSItemProvider is a promise to provide data. A provider constructs an NSItemProvider object and registers available data. It then passes the item provider to some system API which will make it available to some consumer which will load the data. The provider needs not provide any data up front—data is requested only when a consumer attempts to load it.

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• #programming
• #ios
• #osx

This is actually a great way to illustrate how much a billion dollars actually is!

According to Bricklink, a 1×2 Lego tile weighs 0.26 g. If each tile represents a dollar, this set would contain four billion tiles, clocking in at over one million kilograms. Delivering this number of bricks would require 49 standard cargo containers (each nominally rated at 21,600 kg).

Even if each tile represents $100, the largest denomination that US paper money comes in, we would still end up with more than 40 million tiles, weighing more than ten tons. Imagine holding a tiny Lego tile that you can sell for $100, and looking up to see that you have ten tons of it stored in a warehouse. That’s how much $4B is worth.

A billion dollars is an incredibly, mind-blowingly vast sum of wealth for one person to own today; an amount so huge that most people don’t really comprehend how large it is.

And once you realize how much $4B actually is, realize that Bill Gates has 29 times that amount, and Elon Musk has 62 times that amount.

• #humor
• #opinion

At some point in your life, you will encounter a crisis. Something so alarming will happen that affects you, your work, or your loved ones, that it leaves no space in your brain for processing anything else. When I find myself in one of those situations, I find that these principles help me navigate the situation.

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• #FridayDevAdvice

If you’re a library or service developer, be keenly aware of Hyrum’s Law, which states:

With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.

Your primary job is to deliver a feature, not an API. The API is merely a way to deliver that feature. Breaking your feature breaks your client’s product, even when the change strictly adheres to the API.

Consider every change across the API boundary (except maybe adding new API) a potentially breaking change. Have a communication channel to tell (known) clients about your upcoming change. Invite clients to test your change with you. If deploying to a service, watch your deployment, and revert it at the first sign of trouble.

With a popular enough API, there will be clients you haven’t heard of that depend on your implementation. Give yourself way more time than you think to roll out your changes.

• #programming
• #FridayDevAdvice