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Podcast Episode · Smart Girl Dumb Questions · November 18, 2025 · 1h 12m

This episode is full of sound nuggets and touches on so many things, music, creativity, AI

girls using iPod Shuffle's as hair clips

The how, where, why, and when we communicate. Long form asynchronous? Real-time chat? In-person? Video? Verbal? Written? Via email? In Basec

#artificial intelligence #nvidia #Youtube

#40: Break Into Tinder Architecture (7 minutes)

#apps #architecture #software

Musings of a Computer Scientist.

I asked a couple of machine learning friends what the most influential piece on the subject was and they all linked me to this article from 2015

A 13th-century Arabic cookbook reveals the culinary life of al-Andalus.

#cooking #andalusia

Ads have an impact on how your app is perceived

When I initially started Tamera I added Google Ads in the free version without giving it much thought.

I didn't make them intrusive, I used 3 small banners in 3 different screens making sure they didn't interfere with the user experience.

My thinking was: it's another incentive to upgrade to the Pro version, I didn't realize at the time the other negative impacts of ads.

Until a user emailed me saying: "Tamera isn't a privacy-oriented app since the Ads collect user data".

Talking about it with a friend, this statement popped in my mind:

Ads are not just about monetization they also impact how your app is perceived.

I know tech-savvy circles consider Ads a product smell and the only place where people tolerate them is inside Games.

Four months ago, I decided to experiment with removing all ads.

For context: my ad revenue from Tamera wasn't huge, I was averaging $3/day ($90/month) so it was easy to experiment with.

The first thing I noticed was obviously the drop in ad revenue but it correlated with another metric: Daily active users was growing.

And most of those users were using the free version. I realized that ads did bother a good portion of potential users.

3 months later I'm seeing unexpected benefits:

Downloads grew by almost 35%! I didn't run any campaigns or anything. This is just from people using the app and talking about it.

Subscriptions didn't grow as much but still they grew by almost 10% over the same period.

Conclusion

When you remove Apple's cut, I didn't recover the lost revenue from ads yet but I'm convinced this is the right way.

Actually, I went and removed ads from all my apps. Even the ones that don't have any other monetization mechanism.

People are judging your app based on the design and features but also from a privacy point of view.

If you're looking for a privacy-oriented minimalist camera app, Tamera is a 24-hour camera.

#ios #apple #startup #programming #ios 16

17 Equations that changed the World

The Reward cigarette

I’m smoke free for almost 7 years now.

When I meet friends that still do, their first question is usually how hard is it or what’s the hardest thing that happens when you quit.

In my case, it’s the reward cigarette. I’m a programmer by day and by night and I got used to reward myself with a cigarette.

It’s like the shower after a workout. You get used to it and take pleasure in it.

There’s plenty of literature about reward mechanisms and you need to identify what those are for you and break them.

All you have to do, is do what it takes.

Michael Wolfe's answer: Let's take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I'll whip ou

I regularly get that question from Product Managers or people outside the industry. This answer is a long form of one I like:

Making software is like peeling an onion, you don't know how many layers are left until you start.

2021 in books

As always my goal is to read 1 book each month which amounts to 12 books per years. But I've always setup a goal higher than that.

In 2021 my goal was 20 books.In 2020 I've missed it by 1 book.

But 2021 was great for reading! I've reached an all time high of 23 books read (almost 2 per month)!

Here they are:

https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2021?ref=yyib21_strip

Learning modern JavaScript is tough if you haven’t been there since the beginning. The ecosystem is growing and changing so rapidly that…

The more you know… 😎

Productivity++

CoreData and discarding changes

At the end of the latest Swift by Sundell podcast, John and Donny talk about discarding changes in CoreData without hitting the database.

This is actually really easy to do with the proper setup.

John suggest creating an intermediary Struct that we can either throw away or convert back to our NSManagedObject and save it.

That's when Donny jumps in to correct him about introducing too much overhead with this method and that CoreData supports that with the right setup.

I agree with Donny and since this is a common feature, I wanted to share a concrete implementation.

Let's take a concrete use case:

A user wants to change his profile info (email, name or phone) and we want the ability to publish those changes or cancel and discard them.

I created the following ProfileViewController gist to illustrate the steps.

Create a child context

If the user cancels, rollback the context

If the user saves, save the child and notify the parent

#ios #coredata #swift

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