Where you see quality crisis I see job security! Honest question, when it comes to enshittification of software quality.. have you ever had to use a Meta framework? How many times have they rewritten their mobile apps to use some architect's bespoke code pipe dream? The quality crisis has always been here, now there's just more of it.
>> It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason
So do many developers. I've lost count how many times a code review had to be rejected or cleaned up because of copy and pasted code and I'm going to admit, sometimes it's just quicker to duplicate a little code and leave a comment for 'next time'.. we've all done it.
.. like this one time I had a PR and the developer created on loooong linear method, couldn't figure out how to share between targets and copied and pasted the same bad code somewhere else. Somehow it got through and when asked why this was on production the answer was 'it worked'.
>> no time for elegance
This happens, your experience in is generally your quality out. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be elegance. I've worked at major product driven companies where elegance took a back seat to getting release out the door.
Having worked on an interactive novel in 2012 (NSString and attributes), low level glyphs (API deprecated) on a rogue-like, two chat apps (with markdown support for formatting) in SwiftUI, and an idle game using a mix of iOS tricks but all wrapped in SwiftUI.. I’m going to agree with how I summarized this response: skill issue.
So the author used the latest and greatest development tech to create a unique little demo in their custom language. I'm unsure your point. You know what I don't use to program with anymore? Punch cards and Borland C++. The industry has evolved for better or worse.
No credit for the art direction and inspiration? Brogue?
Or did I miss the attribution?
* Edit: I’m not looking for the downvotes or to stir things up. I’m simply calling out that this is a small niche community we notice these things, we’re very free with our code, and copy is a compliment, but so is attribution.
The author wasn’t so much inspired the by Brogue style, but copied it directly down to the animations and ASCII.
Keep in mind, you’re claiming to be an experienced mobile (iOS) dev. Your fallback when things don’t work (let’s say, auth) are your years of doing iOS. Fastlane is handy (I don’t use it anymore re: Xcode Cloud) but in the past it still fell victim to Apple Store changes and updates.
Worse is going to be the job listing, no native iOS developer is going to touch it. It’s possible a rn + ts developer might find it an interesting challenge and maybe even have some iOS experience. I guess it all comes down to what the job qualifications are in said listing. But is your startup going to know this when/if they need to do a backfill?
But here’s the caveat to what I said. If the rest of the team you’re working in is also using the same language and maybe has some familiarity in react native it’s probably not so bad and someone can step into your shoes if necessary. Also, if your implementation is fully transparent and this is what the startup paid for, then I’m going to say more power to you, you built them what they needed and you did it your way.
That startup is going to LOVE you when they need to backfill your position and every potential iOS developer hire runs in the other direction.
* This is coming from someone doing iOS since the store opened in 2008. I've pretty much seen ALL the bad decisions at some point. There are projects I will not take no matter what the pay is.
I can’t speak to OS development but industrial coding there’s a lot of experimenting and throw away. You generally don’t write a lot of code for the platform you’re building on (PLCs, automation components). It’s well tested and if it doesn’t hit industry standards (eg. timing, braking) you iterate or start over. At least that was my experience.
When it comes to general software development for customers in the everyday world (phones, computers, web). I often write once for proof, iterate as product requirements becomes clearer/refined, rewrite if necessary (code smell, initial pattern was inefficient for the final outcome).
On a large project, often I’ll touch something I wrote a year ago and realize I’ve evolved the pattern or learned something new in the language/system and I’ll do a little refactor while I’m in there. Even if it’s just code organization for readability.
My thought to who you replied to exactly. Am I going to invest several days to read an AI slop novel? No. But I will take several minutes to read a blog post and likely have read many that were AI generated or assisted.
Before AI there was a general consensus that creative areas (eg. Cities) were becoming a homogenized experience. A Starbuckization if you will. I can’t help but wonder what gets lost when using tools like this.
Different strokes for different folks. You don't need to please everyone, but it helps if you can move 15 million units with three developers. I don't play Candy Crush but yet somehow this little cash cow keeps getting updated and I'm not one of the 2.7 billion downloads!
There are additional links and details about LazyVStack highlighted in the content. I thought the top level article focused on Lists would be more helpful for you.
I’m on a phone which means digging through Apple docs or WWDC-ascii isn’t fun. But for my recent Insta-like infinite feed on iOS this was very helpful:
To be fair a LazyVStack handles cell reuse and unloading automatically which is why offscreen content that was previously viewed further back on the list will only maintain the root level state (children in the view hierarchy may and will lose state in order to save memory and energy). How that data is loaded and how you key off Identifiable is also important.
Apple’s own documentation discusses this in detail and for large data sets recommends the Lazy approach. If you’re using List you’re in for some issues.