Notices by Rob Napier (cocoaphony@mastodon.social), page 2

@crazybutable @inthehands IMO it's an unhealthy shop if the designers systematically know more about the customer than the developers do. That suggests developers who are too isolated, and need to be more engaged with the product and the users.

I've had great experiences with designers who've incredibly improved my work. But I've never personally seen great software from orgs where design held unilateral approval decisions. Those are the orgs I've most often seen make terrible "x-platform" UX.

@inthehands @crazybutable I think we often forget that part of the job is learning the space we're working in. If we refuse to learn anything about our client's experiences, we cannot deliver them good software. No amount of checklists will fix that.

A common example I've used is a car. You expect any car you buy will have a steering wheel, brakes, headlights, and the like. You expect the car manufacturer to know you need them even if you don't ask. They can't say "I don't know your use case."

@inthehands My definition of "requirement" is a thing that, if it were impossible to deliver, we would cancel (or at least seriously reconsider) the project. If its impossibility causes the "requirement" to vanish, then it was never IMO a requirement.

BUT! devs often forget that minimally delivering just the "requirements" may still result in a worthless product, and the goal is a worthy product. Checklist-obsession is not useful. The goal is to delight; not barely meet "requirements."

Every so often some question on SO is just a rant about Xcode and says something like "the worst IDE ever created" and I'm just floored thinking what a tiny slice of our history this person must have experienced. They've tried a few IDEs from JetBrains and think they've sampled the world?

Come with me, summer child, into the world of Qualcomm firmware IDEs. Custom IDEs built by Nortel. The cult classic of USCD Pascal (with its admittedly primitive glory, but you don't want it to replace Xcode).

@ZachWeinersmith I spend an unfortunate amount of time helping new coders with ChatGPT-generated code. Repeatedly, the code is worse than nothing. It takes them down the wrong road (often a nonexistent road), making it harder for them to find the right approach. Code-reviewing AI code is very difficult because its mistakes are not like the mistakes human coders make.

You should not use an AI to write code you couldn’t have easily written yourself. You must be able to carefully judge its output.

I was really hoping that Xcode 15 would include some incremental build performance improvements, but I'm not seeing any so far. SWIFT_USE_INTEGRATED_DRIVER=NO is still 2-3 times faster. ~20s to recompile a one-line change, which isn't great, but it's workable. With the integrated driver, it's about 1m for every build, not counting getting it onto the sim/device, etc.

Worse, AppIntents extraction is now more aggressive, and adds an extra 70s even if AppIntents is not linked. FB12215849

It looks like "Extract App Intents metadata" is happening in Xcode 15 even if you don't link the AppIntents framework. This can add significant time to every build, including incremental builds (in our project, ~70s). FB12246243

The build setting LM_ENABLE_LINK_GENERATION=NO disables App Intent extraction entirely. I don't believe this is documented anywhere; I reverse engineered it from Xcode.

🎶 SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData 🎶

<deep breath>

Sing it with me! (You may pick your own tune.)

🎶 SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData SwiftData 🎶

Please stop posting AI-generated answers to StackOverflow. Please. Most are just low-quality. Some are filled with subtle mistakes. If the asker wanted an AI-generated answer, they would have gone to an AI, not SO. You typing it into ChatGPT for them helps no one.

And they tend to be really obviously AI-generated. It's not as hard to notice the style as I thought it would be. ChatGPT doesn't write like most SO contributors. So I throw the question in myself, and see if I get answers like yours.