Lori M Olson OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
Here’s a great thread on Twitter ⬅️ from a few weeks ago about the biggest mistakes in open source. The thing is, a lot of these ‘mistakes’ are applicable to a lot of different topics in software and application development. The particular one that caught my eye, since I was teaching it that same week in my 6 Pack Apps course, was ‘trying to start too big’.
Starting too big is practically a recipe for failure when you are first creating a mobile app, and is one of the first things I teach. It’s much better to start small, and then grow after you have something that works and that people use. Or, if you made a mistake, it’s also a lot less expensive in terms of both dollars and time to pivot from that small start. So think about how to break your awesome app idea down to the smallest, most useful thing first!
FITS — Featured in the School
So this week Lori (and Amir Rajan!) are both speaking at RubyConf in Houston. If you are there make sure you look either (or both) of them up and say hi! Amir’s talk is at 11:30 am today (Wednesday, Nov. 30) titled Building a Commercial Game Engine using mRuby and SDL. Lori’s talk is on Thursday (tomorrow, Dec. 1) at 10:45 am, titled This Old App. And while you’re at it, check out the rest of the conference program.
TALK — Talk of the Tech
Here are our selections from the two most widely used RubyMotion/DRGTK chat spaces, respectively:
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Discord — Every once in a while and for reasons which are often hard to fathom, a developer emerges from the background noise to some acclaim. Some might even say achieve legend status. Yukihiro Matsumoto AKA Matz—the ‘father of Ruby’—seems to fit that description. For that reason, it’s always kinda fun when you do something that gets his attention.
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Slack — Corey Condardo recently reported
Operation not permittederrors while running motion doctor with macOS 13.0, RM version 8.7. While that might sound really bad, turns out there is a simple and easy fix.
TWIL — This Week I Learned…
From a recent tweet by Martin Fowler we learned about Conway’s Law. No not that Conway. This one: Melvin Conway. In any event, he (the latter, not the former) had a law named after him and Martin just tweeted about it. And we have to say, it’s pretty interesting.
GAME — All Things Gaming
Whenever we see the NASA animations of the Mars landers, we are always impressed at how realistic they seem. We willingly suspend our disbelief that they somehow managed to get a chase plane up there to film the descent through the Martian atmosphere. That’s aided in part by some super-realistic camera shaking at just the right moments. Well, now you too can have realistic camera shaking as demonstrated in this tweet from Amir.
As it turns out the secret behind an authentic-looking camera shake is—and we can almost hear you groan when we say it for the umpteenth time—math. Too bad there wasn’t YouTube when we were in Calculus 101 otherwise we might not have flunked it. But there is YouTube so you, too, can travel across time and ‘attend’ this enlightening lecture by Squirrel Eiserloh: Math for Game Programmers: Juicing Your Cameras With Math.
APP — All Things App
As regular readers already know, Lori is no fan of JavaScript. You should see the just-sucked-a-lemon face she pulls when we have the gall to say something like “hey, check out this neat thing that React does”. It’s not a good look. In any event, Lori may be askin’ for a heapin’ helpin’ of humble pie 🥧 because she recently mentioned ArrowJS along with the comment that she found it “surprisingly easy to understand”. Just so you know, Lori’s lukewarm endorsement is the equivalent of a five star rating from anybody else.
SPOT — Spotlight On…
And to continue on the camera shaking theme for a moment, Amir has incorporated it into his Broad Sword of Justice, which was his Boss Battle Game Jam Submission. Okay, we’re convinced.
HAHA — And They All Laughed
“Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house 🏡 Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; 🐭 The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, 🧦 In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; 🎅🏼 The children were nestled all snug in their beds, 🛌 While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads…” Except you. You’ll be doing this, instead.
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“Instead of waiting to start big, start small so that you can grow big.” — Nicky Verd