Apple for developers: A checkup
Happy Saturday and welcome back to the newsletter! As always, read on for some of the best software engineering insights, opinions, and news, from Triplebyte’s Compiler blog and around the web.
//From Compiler
Should I use SwiftUI in production? Here’s a code-to-code comparison to help you decide.
The new Mac M1 processors are the topic of choice in Apple world again this week, and I’ll have some more on that later in the newsletter (especially whether they’re right to power developer machines right out of the gate). But first, here’s an up-to-date look at the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s young SwiftUI framework – for coding universal apps that work on Mac, iOS, tvOS, etc – to help you make a call on whether it (quirks and all) is finally right for your developer workflow. read()
6 common interview practices that can shake up engineers – and how to steer around them
Technical interviews are already highly imperfect measures of ability. And they drive engineers crazy. But on top of that, certain interview practices themselves can seriously challenge an engineer’s sense of legitimacy – even when they perform well enough to land the role. Here are six technical interview practices – like testing for higher skill level than the job requires and having toxic interviewers – that can lead engineers to needlessly question their value, and how candidates can anticipate and steer around them. read()
How much is your startup equity really worth?
Looking for some quick clarity on how your equity or stock options could play out? We just finished adding the historical performance for all Y Combinator startups to Triplebyte’s Equity Value Calculator. Give this tool a spin to help you better understand the wide range of valuations that your equity can have, and the likelihood of each! read()
//Around the web
💻 Running (or not running) your favorite developer tools on a new M1 Mac. Now that Apple’s new ARM-based Macs have hit the streets, we’re finding out how well they play with all kinds of existing developer tools. DevChannel on YouTube has a great series of hands-on videos with the M1 MacBook Pro variant to show IntelliJ IDEA and VSCode working great, Android Studio functioning with performance issues, and things like Eclipse and Docker (more on that here) not working at all yet on ARM. Further searching around the web shows that the processor pivot is hit or miss at the start for devs, but workarounds and imminent updates seem to suggest that the M1 future we have been promised has the potential to be OK – or better. (More on this below.) watch()
⛏ “I shouldn't be out enjoying myself. I should be working on Bootstrap!” A WIRED article from this week included interviewers with developers about their love/hate relationship with working on open source software. Among them was Jacob Thornton, the creator of the Bootstrap library. Even though he and co-creator Mark Otto still maintain the project today, the guilt of not always being able to keep up with their side gig, one that was exploding in popularity and free users, nearly pushed them to give it up. The point of this article is to shed light on the fact that open source work is often a thankless job, regardless of how important it may be. Though, unfortunately, not many devs need that story told them, this is a cathartic read none the less. read()
⌨️ Computer science students try to PWN Counter-Strike cheaters. "It's not fair to the other players." That’s how Erik Jonsson, a PhD candidate from the University of Texas at Dallas’s computer science department, feels about players who use cheats in MMOs. It’s why he and some of his peers are putting their academic efforts toward tracking previously undetectable foul play in games like Counter-Strike. The tldr: The team is training a model to pick up on how data traffic differs from players in the game who have cheats enabled, thus creating an ML that can sniff out (and maybe boot) cheaters. This is important work that can we can all stand behind. read()
📈 OK, compiling code on M1 Macs is actually really fast. Please thank iOS dev Paul Hudson for putting together this thread of code processing and packaging comparisons between the new M1 Apple processor and an Intel i9, in which the Apple silicon takes the cake in every instance.
//Jobs
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