The Turing test is dead, and we killed it. The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. From the 1940s 1 to the 2010s people programmed computers, and computers could only do what they … | Continue reading
When I wrote The Future Will Be Signed almost six years ago the latest in AI advancements was Google Duplex. If you're like me and have never used Google Duplex, it's a feature of Google Assistant that could make calls on behalf of a person and automatically perform a task, such … | Continue reading
Sometimes I think about all of the societal issues I cared about 10 years ago: privacy, government overreach, and platform accountability. More and more as I look at the technological landscape it feels like none of that care seems to have mattered. When I worked on the Societal … | Continue reading
To set expectations for you my dear reader, this blog post was written for me, not for you. It's very long (quite long), but I'm still proud of it enough to post for the world to read. The frigid days of December are often unbearable in New York City, but those same freezing temp … | Continue reading
Is coding a science or an art? — Matthew Garlington (@dejadu13) May 21, 2022 I've seen many versions of this question posed over the years, and to Matthew's credit it's a very good question. As you can see in the replies people translate their lived experience writing code and an … | Continue reading
Hard to believe it's over. My time at Twitter wasn’t perfect but it was incredibly special and there's little I would change about it (though less crypto would be cool). I was able to provide constant feedback about products across the entire platform and the entire organization, … | Continue reading
Crafting a great interview process is difficult1, especially for software development where a company is often trying to assess years of specialized knowledge and potential in only a few hours. The best interviews are said to feel like a discussion amongst peers, where each side … | Continue reading
Tell me who you are in 160 characters. I'll wait while you try and achieve the level of nuance necessary for the task. This constraint is why you end up with generic Twitter bios that don't tell you much about someone and all look like: Father, cyclist, biz-dev, and fighting ever … | Continue reading
The work of writing maintainable code is an ongoing endeavor and some of my favorite problems to solve are ones that build maintainable systems. Maintainable systems are ones you can learn once, easily manipulate, and ideally take from project to project. My favorite part of buil … | Continue reading
For a long time I've told people that I love technology and all it enables, yet dislike the technology industry and working in tech. People often find my statement hard to rectify, probably because they see the two as inextricably linked. Technology is an ever-changing process, o … | Continue reading
GraphQL has been on my list of technologies to learn for a few months now, and last week I came across Majid Jabrayilov's post, feeling pretty excited to tackle the subject. The post was very good, but it didn't answer the one question I've had as I've gone through numerous exerc … | Continue reading
Apple's been in the news quite a bit lately over concerns that many apps on the App Store are little more than scams. Some of these apps aren't even functional, they don't provide anything more than a screen with no functionality, only a button to purchase an indefinite weekly su … | Continue reading
I recorded an episode of the Empower Apps podcast, where Leo Dion and I discussed a wide range of topics. We spoke about everything from how we scale app development to thousands of people and millions of users at Twitter, communication, documentation, people working together, an … | Continue reading
I've been thinking about privacy lately. No, not online privacy, but about how APIs can balance exposing the right amount of implementation details without revealing too much. I'll walk through a task I find myself doing often when building iOS apps, creating a view controller wi … | Continue reading
If you haven't checked out Part I, I recommend reading it because if you don't, none of writing below will make sense! | Continue reading
As iOS developers, a lot of our work involves taking models from a server, and transforming them to be displayed on an iPhone or iPad. This sounds like a job for some declarative architecture. 🤔 | Continue reading
Maybe the real friends were the friends we made along the way. I quit using Facebook years ago, and only follow ~70 people on Twitter, which leads some to assume that I don’t find keeping in touch with people to be a top priority, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. My t … | Continue reading
Throughout history technology has aided humanity. Not the other way around. From the invention of fire, to the creation of the wheel, the printing press, and the personal computer, technology has acted as a multiplier for what humans can do. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, … | Continue reading
When 2018 started I set out to read 10 books this year. Much to my surprise I ended up reading 25 books in 2018. The most important reason I was able to get through 15 more books than I'd expected was that when the year started I set a goal for myself to read at least 15 minutes … | Continue reading
As a mentor, I give a lot of advice. I give a lot of advice that comes from a breadth of experience. But my experience is rooted in the present, to remember how I felt earlier is an exercise in empathizing with a past version of myself. And memories are a fickle thing. In fact, t … | Continue reading
The people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what’s happening. George Orwell, 1984 | Continue reading
I recorded an episode of @learnswift_fm with Steven Sherry a couple weeks back. We had a great chat about contracting, computing history, philosophy, Smalltalk, and even a little bit about Swift. I think you’ll really like it, and recommend giving it a listen. | Continue reading
How many times have you been called into a meeting only to realize five minutes into it that you’re likely going to speak for sixty seconds… if you’re lucky? You potentially hold one piece of valuable information, and the rest of the discussion doesn’t concern you much. There are … | Continue reading
I was asked Is the code quality at an early stage startup higher or lower than the code quality at a bigger company? This is a really good question to ask if you're a developer looking to join an early stage company. To answer this question though, I'd like to take a step back. | Continue reading
It has become quite common for companies interviewing engineers to give candidates take home tests. These consist of an interview problem (or problems) which they can work on in their free time. This gives the candidate the benefit of not being under pressure in a high leverage i … | Continue reading
Cryptography is becoming more important in our every day lives and there’s no way around it. Whether it’s the calls from governments to ban encryption, come up with “responsible encryption”, or to violate norms and laws, cryptography is playing a role in shaping our society. I’d … | Continue reading
Cryptocurrency is all the rage these days. From Bitcoin to Ethereum to Ripple, to some silly sounding thing someone will come up with tomorrow, it's something people want to know about. At the risk of sounding like a super noob, what's a good introduction to crypto? From the basi … | Continue reading
As I was on hour six of debugging how to read an object from the database, my brain suddenly noticed the slight difference in two lines of code. The compiler error had been off, too vague to help me realize that I was never hinting the correct type to the function. Generics had s … | Continue reading
Two meta-skills that help a programmer grow more than just practicing their coding. Thinking about thinking, and focusing on focusing. — Joe Fabisevich 🐶🐳™ (@mergesort) July 26, 2017 | Continue reading
This is a blog post by Jasdev Singh, originally published on jasdev.me. I'm re-posting here since it's directly tied to me taking over his project, Public Extension. | Continue reading