synth.dev

ios dev journal (etc.) for more: weien.org for tweet: @weienw

[weienw]

Book Notes: Nine Lies About Work

Nine Lies About Work, by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

Lie #1: People care which company they work for

Truth: people care which team they’re on

8 Predictors of team performance:

I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.

At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.

In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.

I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.

My teammates have my back.

I know I will be recognized for excellent work.

I have great confidence in my company’s future.

In my work, I am always challenged to grow.

1/3/5/7 are “we predictors”

2/4/6/8 are “me predictors”

“What distinguishes the best team leaders… is their ability to meet these two categories of needs for the people on their teams.”

Lie #2: The best plan wins

Truth: The best intelligence wins

Liberate as much information as you possibly can.

Watch carefully to see which data your people find useful.

Trust your people to make sense of the data.

Plans are overly generalized and quickly obsolete. Coordinate your team in real time, relying on the intelligence of each team member.

This is an argument for weekly 1:1s. “Frequency trumps quality.” If you can’t do weekly 1:1s, you have too many people.

Lie #3: The best companies cascade goals

Truth: The best companies cascade meaning

In the real world, there is work. In the theory world, there are goals.

“Cascade meaning through our expressed values, rituals, and stories… We should let our people know what’s going on in the world, and which hill we’re trying to take, and then we should trust them to figure out how to make a contribution.”

Lie #4: The best people are well-rounded

Truth: The best people are spiky

See also: Lionel Messi’s left foot.

Competencies are impossible to measure.

Excellence is idiosyncratic.

Lie #5: People need feedback

Truth: People need attention

Ignoring a team led to 1:20 ratio of engaged:disengaged

Negative feedback (focus on fixing shortcomings) led to 2:1 ratio of engaged:disengaged (40x improvement to ignoring)

Positive feedback (attention toward what employees do best) led to 60:1 engaged:disengaged (30x improvement to negative feedback)

Feedback is a kind of attention

fMRI scans show that negative feedback triggers fight or flight and impairs learning.

Tell the person what you experienced when they had a moment of excellence. What you saw, and then:

How it made you feel, or

What it made you think, or

What it caused you to realize, or

How and where you will now rely on them

Lie #6: People can reliably rate other people

Truth: People can reliably rate their own experience

“Running out of 4s,” forcing the curve

In order to add precision to Potential and Performance, orgs create lists of competencies…

But it doesn’t work. Adding performance review training doesn’t help. 54% of variation in people’s scores can be explained by the personality of the rater (Idiosyncratic Rater Effect).

Recommendation: ask questions that produce data that are Reliable, Variable, and Valid. Good questions generate a bell curve of responses. Bias is inevitable so we’re best off framing questions around the rater’s personal experience of working with someone.

Four example questions: (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ )

Do you always go to this team member when you need extraordinary results?

Do you choose to work with this team member as much as possible?

Would you promote this person today if you could?

Do you think this person has a performance problem that you need to address immediately?

Lie #7: People have potential

Truth: People have momentum

Truly people-maximizing exercise:

What’s your actual dream job, irrespective of company, industry, or line of work?

Find that job on LinkedIn. Look at the skills/experiences/qualifications listed. Figure out the gap. Make those skills/experiences/etc part of your current job.

Lie #8: Work-life balance matters most

Truth: Love-in-work is what matters most

List which parts of your work fall into “loved it” vs “loathed it”

Follow the red threads, weave them into your work. The “loved it” bits are your strengths.

Lie #9: Leadership is a thing

Truth: We follow spikes

The leaders we love don’t actually exhibit a list of leadership qualities.

You can’t practice the qualities (inspirational, visionary, strategic, good at execution, good at decision-making, innovation, executive presence, etc.) and thereby grow your leadership.

No two leaders create followers in the same way. We follow a leader because they are deep in something.

[weienw]

Book Notes: How to Win Friends & Influence People (HTWF&IP)

How to Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

I saw this book hanging around when I visited my parents' house. It’s so famous, but I’ve never read it. I cracked it open somewhere in the middle and found that I couldn’t stop reading. Carnegie’s style just sucks you in. And then there’s historical tidbits everywhere, plus the book itself is basically a historical artifact, so you feel like you’re reading a management book that belongs in a museum.

The afterword in my version talks about how before this book (1936), there basically weren’t any books on people management. So Carnegie kinda blew everyone’s minds with this stuff.

1. Major Themes

Don’t criticize or argue or say they’re wrong.

Praise a lot. Be really friendly.

Figure out what people are interested in, leverage that. Let them do the talking. Ask questions.

Smile/say their name/be a good listener.

These seem obvious but also counterintuitive because today’s corporate culture is much more into FEEDBACK (e.g. Radical Candor). Carnegie’s not that into Feedback. He’s much more into judo moves that somehow “inception” other people toward desired behavior.

Instead of directing or arguing, you ask questions about the person to draw out the deepest kernel of who they really are and then, voila, inception, they realize what they should’ve done all along about their big problem and you never had to fight them on it. You “let the other person feel that the idea was his or hers.” Hmm...

In contrast, later in the book, Carnegie advocates for starting with praise before critical feedback (which is super unpopular nowadays), and also says to “Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.” But everyone today’s beggin' for direct feedback! Makes me wonder. Do they really want direct feedback? Who’s right here?

2. Stuff I Dog-Eared

On page 164 Carnegie talks about admitting that you’re wrong – but in such an emphatic way that the other person ends up defending you. “…[W]hen I began to condemn myself, the only way he could nourish his self-esteem was to take the magnanimous attitude of showing mercy.” I’m into it.

Page 185: I didn’t realize that the Socratic method is not simply “ask a lot of questions,” but – “ask questions that the other person will answer with ‘yes’.” Socrates “asked questions with which his opponent would have to agree. He kept on winning one admission after another until he had an armful of yeses. He kept on asking questions until finally, almost without realizing it, his opponents found themselves embracing a conclusion they would have bitterly denied a few minutes previously.” JUDO MOVE

Page 216: There’s this crazy story where customers aren’t paying bills on their car mechanic servicing. “I made it clear that, until I had heard the customer’s story, I had no opinion to offer… I told him… that he knew more about his car than anyone else in the world; that he was the authority on the subject… I let him talk…” and so on, until they let the customer decide what to do with the bill. The end result – they paid their bills and became ever-more loyal customers. JUDO MOVE but also, seriously? This works?? (This chapter ends with: “Appeal to the nobler motives.” Basically, assume the other person is “sincere, honest, truthful,” etc…).

3. Summary

I think what’s most powerful about Carnegie’s advice is what’s hardest to practice. It’s resisting your own ego. You can’t do all of the above without first quashing the desire to appear smart/helpful/wise/right. Try being a competitive wrong-admitter and still hang onto your pride! It can’t be done. So, the way of HTWF&IP is, like many classics, simple but not easy!

Bonus: A Couple Pages That I Scanned for Later

I ended up adapting these “Questions for Myself” into my work journal, to help me think about what I did well/not well each week.

I love thinking about this trait – whether or not someone likes people. It’s something I look for in interviews but I never thought to put it this way.

[weienw]

Book Notes: Creativity, Inc.

Creativity, Inc., by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

1. Notes Day

One of the last chapters in is called “Notes Day” and it’s all about how Pixar worked to revive a culture of candid critique when they grew to like 1200 employees (contrasting with their original ~40 or so). They basically hosted a company-wide one-day “conference” where people got in groups to discuss organizational issues/ideas, and made sure that those discussions had action items + owners + stuff.

I love that they frame this exercise in terms of a very clear goal. In their case:

"Reduce time needed to make a film to 18,500 person-weeks. What innovations will help these productions meet their budget goals? What are specific things we can do differently?"

I’d love to see AC problem solve with targets like this.

2. “Success Hides Problems”

This is a principle that Pixar learned that I think AC is still learning. If our organic growth has been so good for so long, what is the incentive for accountability or excellence?

3. This Awesome Story from the Making of The Incredibles

[weienw]

Basics with Excellence

Gracie tells me that I have a tendency to make things more complicated than they need to be. 

For example, she says that it was not necessarily important for me to choreograph a custom “first dance” for our wedding. And that when tasked with bringing bread to Thanksgiving dinner, that I needn’t bake so many different types of bread. Or that our first family trip since having a newborn would be tricky enough without setting my sights on Banff National Park (“maybe a beach somewhere would be good, too”). 

I admit I have a weakness for grand gestures, for thinking that dramatic projects are better than mundane ones. Maybe that’s why I can’t shake the possibility that the opposite is more true, that excellence is best achieved through the basics. I’ve been collecting instances of this idea – of “basics with excellence” – and I think the examples I’ve found form a compelling argument.

For starters, here’s what Dr. Atul Gawande had to say about Shouldice Hospital:

Consider hernia repair. In most hospitals, hernia operations take about 90 minutes and cost more than $4,000; in 10-15% of the cases, the operation fails and the hernia returns. At the Shouldice Hospital, a small medical center outside Toronto, however, hernia operations take 30-45 minutes, the recurrence rate is 1%, and the cost is around $2,000. The secret of the clinic's success is that the 12 surgeons at Shouldice perform hernia operations and nothing else; each surgeon repairs between 600-800 hernias a year--more than most general surgeons do in a lifetime.

And I love the way that Chris Tomson, drummer for Vampire Weekend puts it:

I feel like it’s almost cooler and more badass as a drummer to be egoless about it. It’s not about hitting this sick drum fill, it’s not about showing off, “Oh, I can do this cool thing with my chops.” But serving totally the band context and the song… If a show went by and I was not particularly noticed, that was a successful show for me.

For Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, the name of the game is consistency:

We don’t talk about how many games we’re going to win, winning a division, winning a championship, none of that stuff. No goals, none like that. Our goal is to get better every day, to practice every day, to treat the game with respect, and if we can come out every practice and every game, learning something that we did well or that we did poorly, we can go from there. But I think wins take care of themselves.

During World War 1, an American newspaper reporter observed the German army march through Belgium and described it like this:

Behind them, so close upon each other that to cross from one sidewalk to the other was not possible, came the [cavalry], infantry, and the guns. For two hours I watched them, and then, bored with the monotony of it, returned to the hotel. After an hour, from beneath my window, I still could hear them; another hour and another went by. They still were passing.

Boredom gave way to wonder. The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a mountain.

Finally, theologian C.S. Lewis considered “basics with excellence” not just a secret to success, but an antidote to the futility of seeking power and glory:

If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. 

This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know.... [But it will] in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

Over the last few years, I’ve been fortunate to experience one more example of “basics with excellence” as a software engineer at ActiveCampaign. Building products at ActiveCampaign means delivering small iterations of business value over time. And it really works.

On Team Mobile, we do this by publishing new iOS and Android updates to customers every two weeks. Sometimes the changes we’ve made are under the hood or are mostly just bug fixes. But the small changes add up. Three years ago, we didn’t have phone apps at all; today, we’ve got mobile features for both sales and marketing and we’re finally sending out push notifications. We’re proud to have made apps that can deliver delight to our customers.

Our results are a testament to our values, to our conviction that “Together We Ship Correct Quality Software.” And I still have a soft spot for the spectacle. But I’m coming to see that the biggest wows come from doing the basics with excellence, over and over again.

[weienw]

when in doubt it's always a calendar's fault

Tom Burns, re: an API bug that was only happening when the device was in French. (...It was the date format!)

[weienw]

No Team is an Island, Entire of Itself

The secret to building a highly-performant team is team cohesion. There is simply no better predictor of team success. And it’s not really a secret — Google published their findings on this topic right here. At ActiveCampaign, I’m part of the Mobile team, and this year, we went hunting for team cohesion. We set our ...

Here’s a post that I wrote for the ActiveCampaign blog.

---------

The secret to building a highly-performant team is team cohesion. There is simply no better predictor of team success. And it’s not really a secret -- Google published their findings on this topic right here.

At ActiveCampaign, I’m part of the Mobile team, and this year, we went hunting for team cohesion. We set our sights on shipping iOS and Android apps every two weeks. We rallied together for beers on Friday afternoons. We made a point of celebrating our team’s big wins. We started calling ourselves “Mobile Island.” And we fell in love with food jokes. For example, this is Chip the Burrito Bowl:

Also, in September, one of our Android developers organized an after-work event that would live in infamy. Her invitation went thus:

"Prepare your senses to be indulged in one of the most world-class flavor profiles of this century and an event that will have you horizontal for days -- The Fast Food Crawl."

For two hours, we devoured value menu items at Arby's, McDonald's, Taco Bell Cantina, and Burger King. Well before we reached BK, it was clear that our gastrointestinal and cardiovascular systems had paid a great price.

In return, we knew we had obtained our prize. We had team cohesion!

And yet, something was wrong. No sooner had we recovered from The Crawl, than we learned that we had gained a reputation for exclusivity and even indifference to the other engineering teams at ActiveCampaign. This news was disturbing. Could it be that in our quest to cohere with each other, we had detached from the rest of the department?

In the following months, we made some changes. For starters, we worked to be more intentional about getting to know others across the company. Our manager encouraged us to tackle side projects with other developers, designers, and product managers. We signed up for more internal training alongside our colleagues.

We also dropped the name “Mobile Island.” After all, to be an island is to part from the main, and contradicts one of ActiveCampaign’s values, Cultivate Inclusion.

These are baby steps, but it has made a difference. We’re seeing that team cohesion can be bigger than just one team. This idea reminds me of a diagram my college philosophy professor once showed me:

This diagram illustrates the Chinese concept of ren, which more or less means fulfillment through helping others. Or, as Confucius put it, “...the man of perfect virtue, wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others; wishing to be enlarged himself, he seeks also to enlarge others.” In the Confucian model, the individual exists at the center of a series of concentric circles, surrounded by family, community, state, and beyond.

Team cohesion, extended outward, can cultivate good for the whole world.

This year, Team Mobile saw how a group can unintentionally cohere with themselves to the exclusion of others. We’ve also seen how we can properly celebrate what’s special to us, like the McRib. In 2019, we’ll aim to share great team practices with the larger ActiveCampaign team. Beyond that, we’ll set our sights on our community and the world.

[weienw]

Spinners!

Spinners! 

It seems like the prevailing UX guideline these days is to create designs that never show them. But from time to time I get a hankering for one. I encounter an odd waiting time. I shamefacedly sneak in a UIActivityIndicator (a small gray one, of course) and decide that I like it.

So, new rule of thumb! If the user wasn’t thinking about a wait time, don’t add a spinner. Maybe blank space is perfect here, just for a moment while my Shared Tyes are being loaded.

...Otherwise, consider adding a spinner. Plus, isn’t the little spinner-button quite charming?

[weienw]

If you're seeing a stubborn error like this one:

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[__NSCFType cancelButtonTapped:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x796eecc0'

...you might have some UI element in your xib (perhaps a UIButton) hooked up to a nonexistent method. Go to your xib. Delete the problematic outlet. Be at peace.

[totenotes]

[weienw]

totenotes:

More proof that we are not just here on holiday: one of the first things I did after we booked our travel dates was RSVP to CocoaHeads Paris, which took place on Thursday evening. Normally I attend CocoaHeads Chicago, to meet up with local Mac and iOS developers, but this week I had a chance...

[weienw]

Something New

For a confidence boost, try something new, that is also these two things:

Something that appeals to you

Something you never thought you could do

I've been doodling faces and figures during church for a couple years now. I think it originated as doodles inspired by Vi Hart's old videos, like this one. These doodles were kinda Zentangle-ish, so I didn't realize that I was actually drawing, for a while.

For the longest time I never thought I could draw; my sister was the artsy one in the family. But now I think I'm getting the hang of it, enough to participate in #inktober this year. And it's really fun.

I think cooking can be great for this feeling, too. For example, I learned how to whip cream from this video, and it's so easy despite somehow feeling advanced.

And then, today, I made a sourdough bread using just flour, water, salt, and some "starter" (wild yeast) imparted to me by Micah, who also provided advice and encouragement to get going. I'd been feeding the starter for a few weeks before I got the nerve to try this scary-looking recipe.

But it turned out to be fun, delightful to eat (as well as give away), and put me in a rather jaunty mood. If I can bake an artisan-style bread, why should I be afraid to, say, make a computer game? Or put work towards a future career in writing? Or ask a creative hero of mine if I can work with them?

[weienw]

Killer Queen Arcade, the Microcosm

As I approach the arcade cabinet, the first thing I notice is the din, a mix of fists pounding and nervous bursts of shouting. One player throws his head back and roars out his frustration.

“Dude, you are loud,” says one of this teammates. “Sorry, sorry,” he roars, before zoning back into the game.

The game is Killer Queen Arcade, “the world’s only 10-player arcade strategy game.” The mob crammed around the circular arcade cabinet is just the standard two teams of five, “Gold” on one side and “Blue” on the other. Each team faces one of two screens broadcasting the same match, but their positions opposite each other allows for a certain amount of covert strategizing.

There’s a lot of need for strategizing, because victory is achieved by being first to do any one of the following:

Gather berries and return them to the team’s hive (called an “Economic” victory)

Kill the enemy queen three times (“Military”)

Ride the giant snail into the team’s snail goal (“Snail”)

Also, the screen is large enough that it’s common for one team to quietly complete one of the goals while the other team is preoccupied with a different goal. It’s the sort of game that is really, really difficult to explain.

“…you’ll catch on quickly,” they tell me, as a spot opens up on the Blue team. There are three others also playing as Drone characters, as well as a central Queen player. They all look really excited, like hounds ready to be loosed.

“So, Econ?” says one of my fellow Drone players. Her eyes literally glitter with arcade light as she looks expectantly toward our Queen player. He ponders for a moment, then nods.

“Yeah,” he says. Pointing to my side of my screen, he adds, “You, and you, focus on berries.” He gestures to another teammate, whom he instructs to “go Knight” and guard a certain quadrant of the screen.

After a countdown, the game starts. In the initial frenzy, it takes me a while to even locate my Drone character on the screen. And yet, soon, I forget my embarrassment, I forget about the joystick and button under my hands, I forget the faint swirl of body odor around me. Soon, there is only me-the-Drone, the berries to gather, and avoiding the other team’s Queen and Knights. It becomes hard to recall that there are five human people on the other side of the cabinet, playing against us.

Then, with a clamor of shouts, the round is over. We’ve lost; our Queen was killed three times. He tries to apologize. I want to apologize, too, for being bad at berry gathering. Surely my team must be disappointed to be stuck with the new guy. But instead, they’re smiling. I’m smiling. We all can’t wait to play again. Who needs apologies when there’s a rematch to be had?

This openness toward newcomers is striking. A community has sprung up around this game, and it’s excited to grow. I learn that most people here in Chicago have not been playing for very long. And, as they say, everyone catches on quickly.

After a second round, I stagger away from the game, back to the bar area of the Arcade.

“You’ve got the PTSD,” notes Sean, who initially explained the game’s rules to me. Later, I see what he’s talking about, as another drifts toward us, fresh from a few rounds of Killer Queen. He’s got the same glassy grin on, and is doing a jazz-hands-sort of gesture, as if to steady himself.

When I return for another game, I’m on Blue again, with some different players, including a new Queen. Before each round, this Queen waits for us Drones to quiet down and lean in before he quietly distributes our responsibilities. We win several matches in a row, and before long, he is able to direct us just by pointing here or there on the screen. There’s something beautiful here, how five sort-of-strangers can reach such coordination so quickly.

It reminds me of this tech community, that meets up to eat pizza and just be in a room together, that jumps at the chance to help someone troubleshoot their project, that invites designers, developers, artists, everyone to gather round and momentarily lose themselves in Queen, Drone, Knight.

[weienw]

Snow*Mobile 2014 Thoughts, Part 2: A Good Talk

It’s WWDC week, and it’s time to upload my final batch of notes from February’s Snow*Mobile. At that conference, I made a list in order to help me understand the following question:

What makes a talk “good”?

“If you can’t be funny, be interesting,” says Harold Ross. And you can tell, perhaps from the sound of soft sighs, that an audience enjoys Interesting, even as much it clearly enjoys Funny. And based perhaps on those sighs, I noted that the friendly conference-goers at Snow*Mobile seemed to really embrace…

New perspectives. Even a beginner’s perspective, freshly told, or framed as a helpful reminder, can be well-received. Similarly, people enjoy hearing new approaches to familiar tasks.

Anecdotes, which can be personal stories and make the speaker relatable, or can be the stories of others, serving as a sort of “deep trivia.”

Elegant code demos that convince us that, “hey, that [language/task/framework/etc.] doesn’t look so bad.” (Tangible code samples have the power to inspire!)

Rapid-fire slides. Maybe this can be done very badly, or maybe it just feels enough like TV that we just yum it up every time. (I suppose that if you have over 100 slides to speed through in 20 minutes, you’ve probably really rehearsed your material?)

Surprising statistics. (For example, humans are bad at telling the difference between .46 and .4633 ems, but they are great at pattern matching, and they emit appreciative noises when you feed them surprising statistics.)

Academic-style research, adding depth to a point that might otherwise just be speculation.

That said, tokenistically adding depth to a talk can be for the worse, too. There were at least a couple talks that would have been much better off reincarnated as a blog entry or tutorial. In fact, we could call this an example of “talk smell," when a “Presentation Has Too Many Steps.” Or when the speaker has to admit, “I know this is kind of a lot to take in, just bear with me a little longer,” in which case the code demo is probably de-inspiring the audience. Intangible code samples have the power to dishearten!

I’ll keep thinking about interest and inspiration this week as I attend AltConf. I admit that what makes a talk “good” is probably more than just having the right ingredients, but this kind of classification is a helpful place to start.

[weienw]

Snow*Mobile 2014 Thoughts, Part 1: Surprises

Whenever I’ve told someone about going to Snow*Mobile, the stories that I bring up are always the ones where I was surprised.

At this Madison conference in February, I learned, for instance, how difficult it is to anticipate how “good” someone’s session will be from just the presentation title and description.

After all, a sleepy mixed-mobile crowd of developers, designers, and creatives was fully prepared to snooze through the final afternoon session, ostensibly on Bluetooth LE/NFC or something, snore, snore, when Mitch Muenster got up, swept through his introductory slides, informed us that he had embedded an NFC chip into his left hand, and caused our collective stomach to turn with a picture of a biohacking surgery gone horribly wrong.

But there were less-dramatic surprises, too. I didn’t anticipate that Matt Luedke would enthrall us with slides on Responsible Game Design before getting into his SpriteKit demo; neither did I expect that Pamela Pavliscak’s UX talk would have so much immediate relevance to my daily tasks that I’d soon forward her slides to my coworkers.

And yet the stories that I’m still thinking about are the ones where I’m not sure if I should be surprised at all.

For example, I left the conference thinking about popularity (measured by social media follows?) and maturity (perhaps measured in aplombness) and deciding whether I was surprised that a tech person can seem to have one without the other, and whether amassing reputation currency requires that one have both.

And when I asked Orta Therox about his significant involvement with CocoaPods, I was surprised not because he could speak to the concrete benefits to working on open source projects, but because of just how many benefits he could detail, social capital, included.

That makes me think that the scale of something expected can itself be unexpected, which also raises some questions. What made me think that this conference had “good diversity” (both among speakers and attendees)?—was it that I expected to see less of it? And again, when I was moved by this kind cohort of developers (thanks, Jim and Brad), who firmly but encouragingly convinced me to lose my Rock Band virginity at the Game Night bash, was it because I imagined a colder shoulder?

Are Madisonites particularly diverse and friendly, is tech becoming more of those two traits, or are my reactions a result of lowered expectations? In other words, is surprise more a product of witnessing real change/difference, or of misunderstandings dispelled?

[weienw]

I pulled into the emissions testing bay, and was greeted by a cheery, stubbly smiler.

"C'mon out," he said, and when I reached for my laptop bag, he added, "Just leave it, I ain't gonna touch anything!" "I'm gonna work on it," I said, trying to paste a smile over my nervousness. He seemed to have some kind of speech impediment. "You ain't gonna have time to! Now c'mon, yah slowin' me down."

(And he did, impressively, finish the vehicle emissions testing process in probably just a minute from that point.)

As he plugged in the scan tool, he asked me what I did for a living, and then replied:

"Programming? Me, too! I studied it at DeVry -- Java, C languages, allathat. And COBOL, you probably don't even know COBOL!" "Well, I've heard of--" "Sure, sure, that's good stuff. Good ol' DeVry. I tellya though, it's been 10 years since I've done computer programming. But I gotta do this, gotta make money somehow. I wish I could make hundreds of thousands doing programming, but..." "Ah, sure, maybe sometime you'll be able to, again." "Actually, I hear it's comin' back around." "Yeah, I known that Mobile's pretty big." "Yeah? Hmm," he said, gesturing for me to return to my vehicle ("Fire her up!").

"Looks like you passed!" he said, a moment later, handing me the printout. "And if you ever need help coding, come back here and find me." "Okay," I said, and pulled away, and thought of this Anil Dash post, and felt bummed.

[weienw]

AVAudioPlayer

Thanks to the wonderful Octave project for introducing me to AVAudioPlayer. It's a great little way to add some sounds to your app. Here's an example for how to get started:

- (void) playSoundWithFilename:(NSString*)filename { NSString *file = [filename stringByDeletingPathExtension]; NSString *extension = [filename pathExtension]; NSURL *soundFileURL = [[NSBundle mainBundle] URLForResource:file withExtension:extension]; NSError* error = nil; self.audioPlayer = [[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:soundFileURL error:&error]; [self.audioPlayer play]; }

Not hearing anything?

Did you add your sound file as a member of your Target? It's a silly thing, but I've missed this more than once... not sure why the checkbox sometimes defaults to false while dragging sound files in.

Has your AVAudioPlayer instance been released before it can play your sound? Using something like a "self.audioPlayer" property (as above) might be what you're looking for, so your view can handle keeping it around for you.

[weienw]

I'll start my WWDC wishlist with a request for UITextView/UITextField improvements.

Our story begins with a desire for a multi-line UITextField, you know, setNumberOfLines, setLineBreakMode, that sort of thing.

Doesn't exist.

Fine, we'll use a UITextView, then. Except you have to use this ugly, non-foolproof hack if you want your return key to behave like it did with a UITextField. Oh, and if you were using that nice placeholder feature, hope you like one of these awkward options. (I eventually settled on using this one Edit: No, that one ended up having a weird setHidden bug. Currently using this'n).

Ergh.

[weienw]

If you're adding a bunch of subviews to another view, and any two or more of those views overlap, at all,

the order in which you add them matters.