375: Wobbly Goblin
24 Apr 2020Magic Keyboard for iPad impressions, getting your first job after college, and corrupting your homeowner association from the inside.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Homeowners associations
- Follow-up:
- Mac Pro wheel stability
- W5700X is a decent deal after all
- iPad Pro Magic Keyboard impressions
#askatp- Is it a bad idea to prevent hard drives from sleeping? (via Andreas Beyer Bowden)
- What was it like for old dudes to graduate from college? (via Nate J)
- PHP is nuked from orbit. The world rejoices. What does Marco do? (via Asajz)
- Post-show: Neutral
Sponsored by:
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $20 credit with code atp2020.
- Mack Weldon: Reinventing men’s basics with smart design, premium fabrics, and simple shopping. Get 20% off your first order with code atppodcast.
Chapters
- Casey’s HOA tweet draft
- Mac Pro wheels, W5700X
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
- #askatp: Let disks sleep?
- #askatp: First-job intimidation
- #askatp: Replace PHP tomorrow?
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Push-starting
Casey’s HOA tweet draft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a tweet I would like to propose to you, which Aaron told me not to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweet, but I need somewhere to get it out of my system, and this pre-show is all going to get tossed anyway, so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to use you as my guinea pig.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, wait, are you suggesting that I tweet something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, no, no. Or are you drafting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tweet that you’re going to write and running it past your review committee here?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I accidentally deleted it because Tweetbot crashed, but it was something along lines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, um, I have found potty training Michaela to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less challenging than working with the HOA board in my neighborhood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am on the HOA board in my neighborhood.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I don’t know if that holds together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As a piece of writing, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see the connection between the potty training and the, and the, the HOA board. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John you want there, there, you’re trying to compare two difficult things, but there’s no connection there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because that’s the thing, is that, Michaela, getting potty trained has actually been pretty easy so far, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so far. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the person reading the tweet doesn’t know that. Like, it doesn’t, you gotta either connect those things or leave them aside.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the idea of the HOA board being annoying and you being on it is solid. We could work with that,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco workshop that a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think you gotta, the potty training, save that for a separate tweet. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noted. Thank you. how you’re going to phrase it. You are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inviting lots of useless and annoying and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like high friction comments from two different groups. Three actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John from all parents. Toddlers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Toddlers are upset about being used in this way. Having
⏹️ ▶️ John to sit on the potty because they know it eats their bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you already know the toddlers. You’ve definitely you’re going to you’re going to hear from all the parents why this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong or stupid or whatever, then you’re gonna hear from all the people who are not in HOA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situations, who will ask you why you’re in one, and then you’re gonna hear from all the people who are in HOAs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who both love them or hate them or both. So you’re basically inviting a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useless, annoying comments that are all gonna be completely unhelpful in whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your problem is. I wanna know why
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in an HOA. Is that a thing down there? So do I.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You are? Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can’t resist nitpicking the premise. Because that’s the worst part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re asking for help, or when you’re posing a question or something like that. Like on Stack Overflow, this is the worst,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Where it’s like, you say something like, how do I get this function to work?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the first three responses are, why are you using that function? Don’t do it that way. Here.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Stack Overflow at least has rules to try to stop that. That’s not acceptable behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is behavior, but the whole system is made to avoid that happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but in this case, you’re posing a funny tweet that is basically a rant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how, well, okay. Thanks, John. Wow, tough crowd. We
⏹️ ▶️ John already established the humor disconnect. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah, yeah. But you’re basically posing a rant, because there’s no way for people to actually help you with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re posing a rant, and what you’re expecting is to get it out of your system. This is what a rant is for, get it out of your system, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have other people be like, yeah, but you’re not gonna get that. Instead, you’re gonna get other people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna just make you matter in minor, annoying, paper-cut ways. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what Aaron said.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, now instead, if you were to describe what’s going on in the HOA thing that’s annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John you, that can be the source of humor, because I bet it is annoying, and I bet there’s a lot of absurd things about it. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna leave the potty training aside, because that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco necessary for us
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to discuss the
⏹️ ▶️ John absurdities of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Basically, there’s, I’m trying to give the ultra-abridged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version, rather than the three-hour version of the story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So, um… First, can you explain what an HOA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for people who don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so a, oh God, that means this is probably going in the show. God help me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, it’s totally going in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show. This is the pre-show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home Owners Association.
⏹️ ▶️ John there any hyphens in that phrase, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna go with homeowner being hyphenated, although I don’t think it is in any of the documentation. Is homeowner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one word or two words?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Two. See, that’s the question. I think homeowner is one word. If you were to write it as two, it would get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting. Well, one way or another. So I don’t know a whole lot about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really anything, but particularly when it comes to HOAs. But I do know that my neighborhood, which is, I don’t know, 50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey houses, something like that, has a homeowners association and has since the neighborhood was built in the late
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 90s. We were told a few months ago that the existing board
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to rage quit the HOA. And if we didn’t find a series of individuals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to step up and do it instead. Some like boogeyman, deadman switch gets flipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then we have to give like the same management duties and I’ll explain what those are in a second, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is basically nothing. But the management duties of the HOA to like some third party management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company and oh, our HOA fees will go from effectively zero all year round to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey millions of dollars a month. That’s the only way this could go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it kind of like Australia’s thing but worse? You know, they have that like, you know, if If you don’t pass a budget, everybody gets fired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Isn’t that how Australia works?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah, yeah. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, but everything’s worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John And unlike a budget, there’s no actual reason for a homeowner’s association to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exist. There’s that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And but you didn’t actually explain what it’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, exactly. All you said
⏹️ ▶️ John is there is one and its rules are dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I apologize. So a homeowner’s association ostensibly is to make sure that the people within the neighborhood are self,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not governing, but for lack of a better word, governing, maybe managing is a better word, So that if one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neighbor has way too much time on their hands and notices that another neighbor hasn’t mowed their lawn very recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can go to the HOA and levy a complaint. And the HOA can say to that offending homeowner,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, we would really like you to mow your lawn, and if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t, we’re gonna put a fee or whatever, like a penalty against your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then if you go to sell and you have one of these, what is it, a lien, L-I-E-N, something like that? No, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a lien on your house?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like if you don’t pay your taxes, they put a lien. It’s basically like an unpaid loan obligation or something, like an unpaid debt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey obligation. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. So again, I’m not a lawyer. I probably have the terminology wrong, but you and I are saying the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. It may be that I’m saying the wrong thing, but we’re saying the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you pop up one level, by the way? You gave a good example of a specific case, but can you pop up one or two levels? And
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I really feel like, gets to the heart of what the HOA is there for.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco John, can you
⏹️ ▶️ John So what you describe is like it’s a governing body that the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John governed participate in in some form. And what does it do? What is its purpose? Its purpose, like you gave the
⏹️ ▶️ John example of someone has an unkempt lawn, and then it can levy fees if you don’t follow the rules. What are the rules? Why do they exist?
⏹️ ▶️ John Essentially, these associations exist to enforce conformity
⏹️ ▶️ John to a particular standard set by the
⏹️ ▶️ John worst people who live in the area, because those are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John own the land. But it is absolutely a sort of like a way of enforcing conformity
⏹️ ▶️ John to the sort of the I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how best to say it. The ruling class has decided this is the way things should be
⏹️ ▶️ John and they want the power to enforce that over everybody who lives in the area around them so that
⏹️ ▶️ John they can maintain not only the way they live but also the way that everybody else lives.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is exactly right. And ostensibly – so ostensibly the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this exists is because let’s say I never mow my lawn. Let’s just say for example I never mow my lawn. It is overgrown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s half as tall as my house. You could make an argument one way or another, but one could make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an argument that if my neighbor goes to sell their house and a prospective
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buyer to my neighbor’s house sees that their future neighbor, me, has never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taken care of their lawn, they’re not going to want that house. Or if they are going to get that house, they’re going to want to pay a lot less for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in summary, the ostensible purpose of an HOA, a homeowners association, is to maintain everyone’s property
⏹️ ▶️ Casey values. If somebody is in charge of micromanaging – I mean nitpicking, I mean paying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attention to all of the yards in the neighborhood, I mean the state of the properties in the neighborhood,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then that makes sure that everyone’s home values are as great as they can possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be because we all look the same, we all act the same, we are all step for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey husbands and wives and so
⏹️ ▶️ John that there is a specific set of rules that determine high value in real estate.
⏹️ ▶️ John As in we have decided that having a lawn with grass on it equals high home value whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a lawn with rocks on it and you don’t live in Arizona, that does not equal high home value.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no connection between the idea of what constitutes high home value and what does
⏹️ ▶️ John not. There is just a decision about what constitutes high home value and what does not. The
⏹️ ▶️ John true nature of this, the true insidious nature of it is that We’re trying to make sure we maintain property
⏹️ ▶️ John values. Okay, well what determines something that makes property values go up or down? Whatever I say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever we have decided as the social cultural norm that we will enforce,
⏹️ ▶️ John ipso facto, it leads to high property values. Nothing else can possibly ever
⏹️ ▶️ John lead to high property values or higher property values. That’s insane. It’s just conformed to our set
⏹️ ▶️ John of rules. You can imagine what the rules look like. You can imagine what the rules demand and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why they’re generally frowned upon because no one likes the idea of their property value is going
⏹️ ▶️ John down because their neighbor does something that makes the neighborhood a less pleasant place to live.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the far opposite end of that spectrum is I have decided exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John will make the neighborhood a nice place for me to live because I know what I want
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone else will do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Powell One of the good things about Nature Away – well, air quotes good. Things about HOA is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you in most cases, and in the case of my neighborhood, need to go to the HOA to get approval
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on improvements you do to your house. Now, that sounds bananas at first, but the thought here is if you say to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HOA, I would like my house to be fire engine red and be the only fire engine red house in the entire neighborhood,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re going to say no. It’s going to look out of place. It’s going to make everyone else feel weird. It’s going to make that, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see here again, we’re getting to what you’re driving at, John. Who’s the arbiter of what is weird? That sounds awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, you were talking about things like, oh, not mowing your lawn, or I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to build a giant upside-down crucifix on the roof of my house. But no, it’s like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John color is your mailbox? And everybody knows that if you have a red mailbox, property values will go down, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right. Exactly. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, paint colors. Paint colors. And not like, oh, I’m going to paint obscenities
⏹️ ▶️ John all over my house and have flashing lights. But just like, do you really want your house to be blue? Can this neighborhood really
⏹️ ▶️ John handle a blue house at this time? It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like so many other things, like governments or unions, where it’s like some amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of power is good and helps everybody, but I imagine many HOAs go overboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and either have bad standards or have too overbearing of standards, and that’s where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems lie. Aaron Powell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you let me finish my story? You’ve just told me the punchline already. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. I joke. I joke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m not actually upset because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you hit the nail on the head. the newest president of the HOA, he is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ready and willing and able to throw violation letters at everyone who doesn’t have utterly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfect manicured blades of grass. And if their driveway happens to be gravel and not like concrete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or cement or something, you better not have a single weed in that driveway because gosh darn it, that’s going to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my home value go down if you have weeds in your gravel driveway halfway across the neighborhood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been dealing with that and trying—I don’t know. Is it libertarians that are like, man, just let people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live and do their thing? Is that the libertarian point of view?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like most kind of political extremist concepts, like it, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the details. It really boils down to, let me do what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. Whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John I want and let me make you do what I want as well. Yeah. Like, like all, like all dim
⏹️ ▶️ John political philosophy,
⏹️ ▶️ John what it boils down to. There’s always some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like HOA. like, look, I’m going to do whatever I want, and I’m and I know what’s best for everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my system will be flawless and will always work and will work for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s so many pathologies in it, like a weed in someone’s gravel driveway 10 blocks away, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t actually affect your the value of your home, right? Even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you are across the street from it, and there’s one little weed doesn’t affect it. But in that person’s mind, in the mind of a person who
⏹️ ▶️ John is very upset by weeds, they don’t like seeing a weed in their neighbor’s driveway, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you would think that the reaction would be, why don’t you offer to go and weed their driveway every afternoon if it bothers you so much,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it would be much better if you could fine them for not removing that weed from their driveway, wouldn’t it? Isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John this a better system? It’s not actually a better system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so there’s a it’s a five member board and I joined the board only because I didn’t want this like mythical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deadman switch to flip where apparently are I think it’s literally 150 bucks a year, which as HOAs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go is effectively free. And, and That’s because we don’t have a pool in the neighborhood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HOAs can also, in some cases, manage a neighborhood pool. That’s only your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neighborhood is allowed to go to that pool, which in that case, that can be really nice, or maybe some other athletic facility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. But for us, we have a little teeny park in the neighborhood, and that’s about the only common
⏹️ ▶️ Casey property. And again, in a perfect world, an HOA is ostensibly going to do social events
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we’re allowed to have social events. And they manage the landscaping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the common areas and things of that nature. But in reality, a month into being on the HOA, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically trying, me and one other person, the two of us are trying to pump the brakes on micromanaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone else’s yards and driveways.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we have a good project here now, a project that we can assign to you, Casey. It sounds like you and your other
⏹️ ▶️ John right-thinking friend, the project should be to pull from the historical playbook of government
⏹️ ▶️ John in these United States and systematically change the rules that govern the
⏹️ ▶️ John HOA such that idiocy is no longer allowed. I mean, it’s the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ John of what we do normally. We change the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco rules to be idiocy. I was gonna say, this would be wonderful. Right, but like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, don’t worry about fighting over individual sort of cases
⏹️ ▶️ John of is this allowed, is this not allowed? All you care about are like the bylaws. Like how does this body function?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can a single person objecting stop anything from happening? If not, maybe that would be a good thing to add
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because then you have
⏹️ ▶️ John complete control over this body if you, as long as you stand and just object to everything. Can the laws be changed?
⏹️ ▶️ John If the change is not unanimous, you got to put that in too. Just like construct a
⏹️ ▶️ John gamified system such that you as an individual can stop anything from
⏹️ ▶️ John happening. And then also get rid of like the dead man’s switch, sort of, you know, you got to slowly change that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John without anybody noticing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe employ a lawyer to make some large thing that’s too long for anybody to read that eventually gives
⏹️ ▶️ John you complete power.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And then- Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the law of the large pull request. I’m right there with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then maybe put in some kind of consequence
⏹️ ▶️ John of inaction that causes the HOA to dissolve, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John For there no longer to be an HOA. And then see how hard people have to work to try to form a new
⏹️ ▶️ John one or something. Like, that’s the thing I don’t understand. Like, once you have an HOA, can you ever go to a state where you don’t? And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have one, is there ever a threat of one appearing? I don’t think there’s any threat of one appearing where I
⏹️ ▶️ John live. And I don’t think, you know, because you have to get everyone to agree to be bound by it, right? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And who, why would anybody who didn’t buy a house that had one of these, why would they volunteer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add restrictions to their own property? Like that seemed, it’s, I would imagine this happens a lot like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like planned housing developments where you can kind of sell them all at once under the same terms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s what happened here. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like, and that’s so common in the U S I imagine that’s, that’s probably where most of them come from. Like, HOAs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are probably similar or identical in function to things like condo boards, where if you have an apartment building,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to work together with the other owners of the other apartments on certain things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes sense when you’re building everything at once, but yeah, if you don’t already have an HOA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your property, I don’t see why a logical, well-thinking person would agree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have this imposed on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John – Which is another way of saying that it’s not actually about property values, because cares about their property values, but no one is
⏹️ ▶️ John racing to form an HOA with all their neighbors if they’re in a situation where they don’t have one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basic social norms and shame mostly fulfill the same function.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also town ordinances are supposed to cover a lot of this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, town ordinances cover safe things. You can’t have a gigantic tank full of oil on your lawn.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, but town ordinances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and building codes and everything, they also do cover some of these aesthetic things. usually as much as an HOA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can and often does cover. But things like you have to keep your lawn to some
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t cover your house in mirrors.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, like there are building codes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and local zoning boards and architecture boards, they do cover a lot of this stuff without an HOA and with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more accountable system of
⏹️ ▶️ John But those are laws that have to pass in a much more representative system of people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John sane and aren’t just, The safety-related ones and the sort of general upkeep
⏹️ ▶️ John are lenient enough that no one’s going to yell at you for a weed in your gravel driveway. And mostly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it mostly boiled down to safety or very large issues of property
⏹️ ▶️ John values of like, look, if your lawn becomes a hazard because wild animals are living in it and it’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John an unkempt jungle, like that would run afoul of whatever town ordinance says that you have to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John your property to some minimum standard, otherwise you forfeit, yada, yada, yada. That’s the level those things work.
⏹️ ▶️ John We already have a thing called government that does those things. HOA is your mailbox can’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, you’re exactly right. And as an example, this is an honest to goodness example of the HOA, what are the standards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever they are in our bylaws. We are not allowed to have our trash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cans visible from the road. Now granted, 90% of the neighborhood has their trash cans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like on the side of their house perfectly visible from the road. But like this sort of micromanagement, I just find completely distasteful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great example. On all our mailboxes, we are apparently, we must have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screw-in numbers on our mailboxes to indicate our home numbers. So our home number can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a sticker that’s where, you know, it can’t have stickers 1, 2, 3, 4. John Greenewald Because
⏹️ ▶️ John think of what it would do to the property values if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that was a sticker, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey McLaughlin John, the property values would plummet if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John had stickers.
⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald Someone would be going to buy your neighbor’s house and they’d be, oh my, we’re going to knock 50 grand off this. That guy has a sticker on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mailbox. Easily 50, probably 75. Now, fun fact, I also have stickers on my mailbox because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway. I’m leaning more towards John’s alternate plan for you here of just like slowly dissolve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HOA’s power from within. Like, you know, now that you have power, you just like slowly reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they can do, like reduce the scope of the types of things they can regulate.
⏹️ ▶️ John And make it much more difficult to actually do anything, like
⏹️ ▶️ John unanimous But I don’t know that people agree with Lula on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this—aren’t well prepared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they’re going to disregard him. So
⏹️ ▶️ John what we left out of, which is, quote, quote—hopefully not, quote, quote—whose writing on the criminal justice system
⏹️ ▶️ John just provides me with no clear guide to the should or say should be moving on from this awakening,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco instructors try so hard and they say no, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John believe in it. They almost cower in pitch darkness. So you have food for thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which you don’t want at all. You don’t want to vomit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a fair question. I probably am painting my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neighborhood to be this like super swanky, super amazing. It’s not. It’s a regular schmoes neighborhood.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the best part about the choice. It’s always it’s not in the neighborhood where everyone is a bazillionaire because those people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have problem keeping appearances. They hire giant staffs of people to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey their houses. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no right. It’s always the ones that are like we would like to think of ourselves as the good people.
⏹️ ▶️ John So a don’t let any minorities buy houses here and be make sure we have an HOA that
⏹️ ▶️ John is you know enforces a standard of beauty that very often is
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to maintain and expensive to maintain thus also keeping out those those people you
⏹️ ▶️ John know who we think don’t have enough money to live here right before when you said uh art your neighborhood had
⏹️ ▶️ John been had been created in the late 90s i laughed at that because in the northeast where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s you know as you know coming from here like all the land is already taken right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of there’s not a lot of uh housing developments that are being created from scratch uh in
⏹️ ▶️ John the 90s. And these type of ideas are definitely, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, attractive to anyone who is buying up a bunch of previously,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, barren land and turning into a planned housing development, right? Because they do want to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a sales pitch and have something that looks like a, what is it? Hill Valley from
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the future where they’re planning. Now they have a big happy family, uh, smiling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know what you’re thinking of.
Mac Pro wheels, W5700X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow-up. Tell me about Mac Pro wheel stability I read I genuinely would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much rather talk about this than spend any more energy on my stupid HOA So John tell me about the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a suggestion by several people based on our Continuing discussion
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac Pro wheels and how expensive they are and how slightly they are and how they don’t have little brakes on them lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of people suggested the idea of of putting wheels on just two of the feet and then leaving the
⏹️ ▶️ John plain feet on the other two. So you’d have two wheels in front and those little stubs in back or vice versa. That’s very clever. That way
⏹️ ▶️ John when you wanted to roll it, you could lift it so the little feeties are off the ground and roll, roll, roll. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then when you wanted to put it to stop, you could put it down. The problem is I have no idea if the wheels
⏹️ ▶️ John are the same height as the feet. I imagine the wheels are way longer, way taller than the feet. And so that wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John quite work. So what I’m hoping is that some YouTuber with more money than cents, not
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about anybody in particular here, but you know, we’ll actually do this and put on
⏹️ ▶️ John two wheels and two feet and see how it goes. I mean, I think the feet might need a little extenders. Again, I hear there are a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of YouTubers with more money than sense that also have 3D printers. So maybe they could mock something up. So then
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get the best of both worlds. A Mac Pro that rolls when you want it to and stays
⏹️ ▶️ John put when you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And HeadFX on Twitter has some thoughts about your video card, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also apparently has some drama associated with it. So take this in whatever order you would like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my video card has not yet arrived. It’s supposed to come tomorrow. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite wait long enough for
⏹️ ▶️ John that to arrive. But anyway, it’s the, what is it, Radeon Pro W570X, whatever the hell it’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was saying, previous show, that it’s, you know, you could get an equivalent PC video card,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Radeon RX 5700 XT or whatever, for way less money, for like less than half the price.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Hedifax was saying that actually, $1000 for this W5700X
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually a pretty good deal because the PC equivalent is actually an $800 card and you know just allow for
⏹️ ▶️ John the $200 MPX module overhead or whatever. It’s not the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as the RX5700XT right because that’s just a gaming card and this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John W model which has more cores enabled or I don’t know it has a bunch of other features but anyway the bottom line is for my purposes
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m going to use it to run games or whatever It is actually about the same speed
⏹️ ▶️ John or potentially slower depending on the game than the roughly $300 card. So
⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways, HedFX is right. If you wanted to get exactly the same card on your PC, it would cost you about $100.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I would never want this card on my PC. I would just get the gaming card that costs way less money. So it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John eternal struggle of buying a machine that I shouldn’t be buying that has video cards for
⏹️ ▶️ John uses that I’m not going to use them for. and I’m just trying to find one that
⏹️ ▶️ John has decent gaming performance and doesn’t cost $2,500. And so I have, I found it. I didn’t complain
⏹️ ▶️ John about the price. I ordered it the day it came out. I’m excited to install it. But apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as bad a deal as I thought it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Now what happened with your order? You said it’s supposed to arrive tomorrow, so I guess everything’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, mostly it’s just, I had a little, some weird experiences with this. So when it came out, I was in, you know, I just, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, know, through whatever channel it came through a slack channel, Stephen Hackett messaged me, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, like the second it came out, I knew that this video card was available for Oh, I remember it was like the whole day was
⏹️ ▶️ John not available for order, but then it was available in the UK. And then it was available. Anyway, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, on my bed or something when it came out, I’m like, Oh, I’m gonna order this right away. Because I didn’t want to be like getting in a line. And who knows what
⏹️ ▶️ John the coronavirus stuff, but there’d be shipping delays, I need to order this right away. So I’m like, order, order, order, use the Apple star
⏹️ ▶️ John app, try to order it. I don’t remember how I I actually ordered it, but I did, you know, use
⏹️ ▶️ John my Apple card, get the 3% or whatever. Order’s done, I get an email that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s your order, here’s the expected ship date, yada, yada. And then like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that same day, I tried to go to my orders in the Apple Store app to see when the expected ship
⏹️ ▶️ John date does again, because I’d forgotten. And the top item in my orders was my little bent piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John metal for the hard drives. Like, I’m like, I did just order this card, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I go back to the email, yeah, sure enough, this confirmation email says, here’s this thing you totally ordered. Here’s the estimated ship date
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So I got my answer. I’m like, why didn’t it show up in my orders? And being a
⏹️ ▶️ John multi Apple ID person, I’m always like never keeping track of exactly which
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID I’m signed into. Cause all of mine, like the name is my first and last name and the Apple ID and Apple doesn’t do a good
⏹️ ▶️ John job of showing you the actual Apple ID in various places. It just says my first and last name. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t, I never know in what browser, in what tab and what whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John incognito window versus on a, what Apple ID am I logged into here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you saying you might have too many browser windows open, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, I have too many Apple IDs is the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey problem. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the problem. It is.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that I use two browsers helps because I tend to segregate this Apple ID in this browser and this Apple ID is in that
⏹️ ▶️ John browser, but sometimes I cross the streams a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know where they all are, I can find anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s true. But yeah, so there’s an App Store Connect angle here that I’ll get to in
⏹️ ▶️ John a second, which is another exciting Apple ID thing. So I’m like, well, my Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John that I normally order all my stuff on is the one that I’m signed into on my phone. It’s my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID or whatever, and obviously I didn’t order it through that Apple ID, but I’m like, I got the email
⏹️ ▶️ John at that Apple ID email. I got the order email, that Apple ID email, so how did I manage
⏹️ ▶️ John to order something such that the receipt comes to my Apple ID’s email, but it is not associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with that Apple ID? So anyway, in the email, I click on the your order status link and it opens,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I click on the link, it opens a thing, and then I get a screen that says something went wrong. There was
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem with your request. Please try again. That’s not good. And I’m, I see that
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty frequently. Um, look, when looking at our status, but I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why it appears. And I’m like, well, maybe I’m, I’m logging into the wrong Apple ID on this thing. I tried on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone to click on the order status link. And at first it was taking me to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John store app and then it was taking me to a browser and getting the same thing. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how a regular person who’s not a web developer would deal with this because basically it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John impossible for me to see the status of my order. All I got was a something went wrong page. If I got an
⏹️ ▶️ John order page on my Apple ID it wouldn’t show that order, but I’m pretty sure I actually
⏹️ ▶️ John ordered it. My phone could apparently do nothing with my other
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID because my phone, like the Apple ID and system, whatever we call it, and settings, is
⏹️ ▶️ John like my phone’s Apple ID, just try doing anything with a different Apple ID than the one
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone is actually signed into on an Apple website, because it constantly sends you back
⏹️ ▶️ John and expects you to be in the Apple ID that your phone is connected to. I was like, no, I don’t wanna use that one. I wanna sign
⏹️ ▶️ John into the other Apple ID and look at that Apple ID’s orders. And the phone’s like, no, that’s never gonna happen. Like, I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John I could have signed out of my Apple ID on my phone, but I would never wanna do that because it would just destroy all my data. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John back on my Mac, I’m like, okay, well, We’re going to nuke and pave. And so I went and deleted
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the cookies related to everything having to do with Apple in one of my browsers and signed into
⏹️ ▶️ John my other Apple ID and didn’t see the order there either, and did the same thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John signed into my first Apple ID and didn’t see the order there either. But I’m like, but I’ve got an email that says I ordered this thing, so what the hell’s the deal?
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, after deleting more cookies and local storage
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of other crap, in ever wider targets of just apple.com and bigger things,
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, eventually I got to the point where I could click on the link to check my order status,
⏹️ ▶️ John and instead of a something went wrong page, I got a page that said something to the effect of,
⏹️ ▶️ John would you like to link this order to an Apple ID? I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what the hell?
⏹️ ▶️ John How did I order it and not be associated with an Apple ID? Like, how did
⏹️ ▶️ John I even physically do that? So I’m like, fine, that’s pretty much exactly what I’m gonna do. Please do connect
⏹️ ▶️ John this order with an Apple ID. So I click on the link to connect this order to an Apple ID and I get a page that says something
⏹️ ▶️ John went wrong. There must be a problem with your request. Please try again. So it was a couple of days of this, where I would click on the, I
⏹️ ▶️ John would try in every browser and every device with every set of things cleared to try to use their helpful
⏹️ ▶️ John link, the blue button or whatever that said connect this order to an Apple ID. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why, trial and error over many days and many browser cache clearings and stuff, I got it to
⏹️ ▶️ John associate this order with the Apple ID that I wanted to. And now when I go on my phone and I go to the Apple Store app and I go to
⏹️ ▶️ John orders, I see the order there. But boy, how long has Apple been selling things online?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know what happened and I don’t understand how I could have screwed things up and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why their website doesn’t work half the time. And the little corollary to this is App Store Connect, everyone’s favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John website. I never got to use iTunes Connect. I just started developing in the App Store Connect world. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spoiler alert, it’s the exact same thing, renamed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, I never saw the old one. The new one, as far as the website goes, it seems okay. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it mostly works and does what it’s supposed to. But for the past week or so, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been trying to load App Store Connect in my App Store Connect browser,
⏹️ ▶️ John my App Store Connect browser window in a particular place that I have, you know, hanging around. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it would load, and my apps would be there, I’d click on apps or whatever, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John it would show like a spinner, and the spinner would just spin forever. I’m like, huh, maybe Apple’s site is weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John or slow today. Then I’d try the same thing the next day, and it’d be like, huh, spinner in the same place. Eventually, after
⏹️ ▶️ John several weeks, and I was like, look, does App Store Connect not work anymore. Seems like something I would have heard about from my developer friends.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why can I get to App Store Connect, but anytime I want to do one particular thing, I just get a spinner forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the solution? Every web developer knows. Delete all cookies and local storage. Hey, App Store Connect works again.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not healthy behavior for a website.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know why.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, like, is it should not be possible to have a series of cookies or things in my local storage
⏹️ ▶️ John that cause your website to spinner forever over the course of weeks.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have a new toy and I think Marco has a new toy and John doesn’t believe in toys So he didn’t get a new toy
⏹️ ▶️ John before before you to talk about your new toys I have an opening statement about your new toy because I don’t have this new
⏹️ ▶️ John toy and you guys are gonna tell me about what? It’s like but I wanted to open this conversation with
⏹️ ▶️ John a brief note about a thing that thus far I haven’t heard anybody else talk about in relation to this
⏹️ ▶️ John new toy but I think is extremely relevant it’s something that I brought up multiple times over the many years that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been doing this show it never seems to get any traction with anybody except for me but
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I hear a discussion of iPad keyboards spoiler
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this and I think it’s so much more strongly now and I don’t understand why it’s not everyone’s first reaction to
⏹️ ▶️ John every single review of this device including your reviews that you’re going to give in a moment. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The iPad Magic Keyboard, the Magic Keyboard, whatever. Every time I see stuff like this I think to myself…
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it two words? I guess. Two words. Two words that have been discussed in this
⏹️ ▶️ John program many times. iOS laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I know people used to freak out a lot about this. I think they should be freaking out much,
⏹️ ▶️ John much less as the days pass. When I say iOS laptop what I’m thinking of is
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop where there’s a keyboard that contains a battery, a CPU, a GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John and a couple of ports and then there’s a hinge and then there’s a screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and you open it up and the hinges on one side you open it up and there’s a keyboard and trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything those are on your lap and that’s where the heavy part is and there’s a skinny part where
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the screen. People used to freak out about that because they would say you don’t understand man
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what iOS is about iOS isn’t about keyboards and trackpads
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s about being a tablet it’s about being a touch device you can’t have a touch laptop doesn’t make any sense
⏹️ ▶️ John stop talking about iOS laptops you’re making me angry
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and then they slowly added
⏹️ ▶️ John everything that you would want in a laptop to their existing iOS device
⏹️ ▶️ John upside down and backwards this wobbly
⏹️ ▶️ John goblin with this huge heavy thing that contains an incredibly powerful CPU and GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John combo and an amazing screen and all those guts are suspended
⏹️ ▶️ John on some weird magnetic thing with the skinny little keyboard underneath it that has to that whole thing has to
⏹️ ▶️ John weigh as much as the device itself and it’s still wobbly and it can’t open at an angle and it’s thicker and bigger than a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and it’s just driving me insane. Why can’t they just make an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop? Now Now, the one remaining argument is going to be, you don’t understand, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to be able to use it as a tablet. How the hell am I going to use a laptop as a tablet? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a solved problem in the world of very bad PCs. And I think Apple could solve it in a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John way. You can just either A, have the thing fold back on itself, or B, have the screen both twist
⏹️ ▶️ John and fold back on itself. And why do I think this is a good idea? Aside from it being a sane
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop with the weight the right place that would have that would be, you know, a much more pleasant experience
⏹️ ▶️ John as a laptop. You save so much in terms of volume
⏹️ ▶️ John and weight when you don’t have to make this is a naked robotic core thing when you don’t have to make a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with the shell and an innards and a second thing with the shell and innards and then have them connect to each other with magnets
⏹️ ▶️ John that burn so many millimeters that burn so many pounds. There’s a reason this monstrosity
⏹️ ▶️ John weighs more than a MacBook Pro. Whereas if you made it like a laptop it could be like Casey’s terrible one port
⏹️ ▶️ John 12-inch MacBook it would be so much thinner and so much lighter so thin and so light
⏹️ ▶️ John that it would be perfectly good as a folded back on itself or twisted around and folded back on itself
⏹️ ▶️ John tablet like it wouldn’t be too heavy to be a tablet with the keyboard with it all the time and when you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to use it as a laptop it would be a way better laptop so
⏹️ ▶️ John we should we will discuss this as a really cool device that you can connect your existing iPad to, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that type of thing that’s a convertible, transformable thing has its place, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really think we’re getting to the point now where an iOS laptop is a device
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes sense, and Apple could make a really good one that would still be a really good
⏹️ ▶️ John tablet and be a way better laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe they could charge $350 more for it, and that would, you know, maybe people would pay that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would. be lighter and a better laptop. And it would
⏹️ ▶️ John just… Anyway. So go on. How are your toys now that I’ve run them for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you? So Casey, I want you to go first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So this has been a little bit of a journey for me. When this was first announced,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was super excited. And I have been using the word amped to describe it. And I’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overuse that word in this episode, but I will try to avoid it. But I was really amped to get in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no small part because I really just want a more flexible display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand than the Smartfolio. Now, I like the Smartfolio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but as everyone has said a million times, there are two angles on the Smartfolio and they both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of suck. There’s basically vertical, which is only particularly useful if you’re pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at eye level, if your head is at eye level with the device itself. So maybe if you’re on your back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’ve propped it on your belly to watch a movie or something like that. And then the other, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other angle, I don’t know how many degrees it is, but it’s like, it’s just barely acceptable enough to not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actively piss you off constantly, but it’s not good enough to make you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy. Like it’s still kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of like a glowing review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s still kind of like, can I just get a little bit more, please? Just, just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a little. However, the thing is super light. I actually find it to be, this is a Smartfolio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find it to be a pretty nice keyboard to type on. It’s kind of weird, you know, it’s that like that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of fabric-y, cloth-y covering over everything, but I like it. Mine is looking a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit rough a year and a half on and I don’t think I’ve treated it egregiously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it’s starting to… I don’t even know how to describe it, but it’s looking like it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some age to it. More age than I would have expected given that I’ve only had it since the end of 2018.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I really like that thing and it keeps the iPad super duper light. Taking the iPad out of it is actually not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not hard by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not like convenient. And flipping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the keyboard around to the back, it’s fine. I think it’s a little weird, but it’s not great. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was super, super excited to get this new, this new Magic Keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I start hearing reviews, both from people who know and from just random people who happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get theirs early and everyone’s saying, well, it’s really heavy. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, well, you can’t really open it as easily because it’s like really, really stiff and oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, it’s kind of thick. And there’s a lot of like grumbling and hemming and hawing. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of got sad because I was really excited for this. And now I’m like, I don’t know if I want this after all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the other thing I should note is I don’t really care sitting here today. I don’t really care about a trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the iPad. Like that doesn’t seem to solve a problem I have. Remind me of this in like a week when I decided it’s the best thing ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But sitting here today, I don’t really feel like it’s doing much for me. But I really just wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a much more flexible way to view my iPad. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t really care what kind of keyboard is attached to it. And as it turns out, this is just a very clever and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting looking, like as a piece of engineering, I think it’s extraordinary. Whether or not you like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I think we can all agree. I think I can speak for you guys that it’s It’s a very interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cool piece of engineering. Now, I got it this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey afternoon. I haven’t spent an overabundance of time with it, but I’ve spent some time with it for sure. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is heavy, I think for, and I should state I have an 11-inch iPad Pro, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from 2018. I did not get the brand new one. It is certainly heavy. It is heavier than SmartFolio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unquestionably. I don’t think it’s egregiously heavy. I think it’s right on the borderline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between acceptably heavy and too heavy, but I think it’s fine. The keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels very different than the smart keyboard Folio, which at first I actually found a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit off-putting because like I said, I really liked the Folio, but it’s really, it’s just that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a laptop keyboard, which everyone has been saying to be clear, like this is not news, but for some reason I never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really grokked that and I never really accepted that in my brain. I still thought of it as like the smart keyboard Folio style
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but with the much cooler mount and that is not the case. It’s much more like a laptop keyboard with this very clever mount.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The mount, I do like it a lot. I still want like five degrees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more tilt, maybe even less than that. It’s definitely way better. And having more than two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey positions is delightful. But it’s still, I would,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, I would just kill for a little bit more tilt, just a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know why you don’t have it, right? You know why you don’t have that tilt. Like it’s been discussed to death. It’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John all the weight is in the top. because it’s probably goblin. If you tilted it back more, the thing would fall
⏹️ ▶️ John over. And then you’d be like, oh, this stand sucks, keeps falling over. You can’t, like you have to, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a fight between if you tilt it over more, then to get it not to tip over, you need to bring the front edge forward
⏹️ ▶️ John more. And now the front edge isn’t just covering the number keys, it’s floating over like the home row. Like it starts to
⏹️ ▶️ John not work out because that’s where all the weight is, right? And so they’ve struck a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John compromise. In fact, I’m and it’s pretty amazing how good the compromise is, even though you want just five more degrees
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. I think the range of motion and the fact that you can adjust it to any position within that
⏹️ ▶️ John range is pretty good. Like I think they struck a nice balance between like the floating idea,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we said when we first saw this thing, like that’s there so that the front edge of the iPad can extend
⏹️ ▶️ John over where the keys would be and still let you type on them by sort of reaching under it. It’s very clever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve gone about as far as they can with the weight distribution the way it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Laptops don’t have this problem, but this is the problem they’re trying to solve. We’ve got an iPad, that’s where the screen is.
⏹️ ▶️ John We want it to be tilty. We want to have a nice keyboard. We want an overall package not to weigh too much, and it’s just compromises
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and you know it’s the end of days of John Syracuse’s arguing in favor of a laptop, but be that as it may.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like typing on the keyboard. It took just a smidgen of time to get used to the new feel. I really like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. The keys are a little bit small in a couple of places. I actually forgot to bring up my smart keyboard folio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the office with me tonight to compare. It is inverted T, which I love.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The trackpad, I think, is where this thing really falls down on the 11 inch. I can’t speak for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aircraft carrier size, but for the 11 inch, I feel like the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is way, way, way too squat. It is reasonably wide,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not even in the ballpark of tall enough. I think some of that is because, some of the reason I feel that way because I’m used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these like mutant, you know, seven-story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or humongous track pads that Apple’s putting on everything these days. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably exacerbated by the fact that, as I think I’ve said a few times on the show, for the last six to 12 months, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-time on a Magic Trackpad on my iMac Pro. You know, I used to use a mouse on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac, and then I would use the trackpad on my laptop only if I had to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, if I didn’t have the occasion to use a Magic Mouse with it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this case, I like the idea of having a trackpad. I was wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before I received the Magic Keyboard if I would use a trackpad a lot, like as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legitimate alternative to stabbing at the screen. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think on the 11-inch, it’s going to be me just using it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like text selection and a few other like smaller use cases like that. I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see myself using it a whole lot as an input mechanism more than I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like how one would potentially use like a Wacom tablet attached to your computer. Like certain cases it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good, but generally speaking, you don’t touch it. Overall, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opened the box today, I was unsure given the reviews I had heard whether or not I was going to keep it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not 100% sure, but I’m like 90% sure I’m going to keep it. I do like it a lot. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went from extraordinarily excited to kind of a tepid, well, it’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be nice to, no, this is pretty good. I think I like it. And, and we’ll see where I end up after another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week or so, or I guess two weeks when I would have to return it. I’m not even sure how that would work these days, but whatever. Uh, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overall I like it. Oh, the other thing I will say is it is legitimately like, I think that the weight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is overblown. Like it is certainly heavier, no argument, but I don’t think it’s quite as dramatic as people are making it out to be, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least not for the 11. But it is definitely like, uh, not a production,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s, it’s a thing opening and closing it. I’m not trying to say it’s difficult. It’s not that it’s difficult,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like you could whip that smart keyboard folio around with like momentum and like a flick of the wrist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a Wingardium Leviosa or whatever. Uh, and you can, you could get that thing whipping around and it wouldn’t, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be fine and you could, you know, put it behind the iPad just by the momentum or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This thing is stiff. Now in the grand scheme of things, I think that’s probably a good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a bad not a bad thing, but it was a little bit off-putting at first, because it just wasn’t what I was used to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As I’m getting used to it, I think it’s fine. And as I’m getting used to it, I like the fact that it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really fricking sturdy. Like really fricking sturdy. Surprisingly sturdy. Even on my lap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mashing on the iPad screen itself, it’s still pretty darn sturdy. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overall, I think I like it. Oh, and the other thing I forgot to mention, I’m sorry, Marco, I promise I will give you a chance here. The second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C port, you know, it turns out fellas, on a computer, it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have more than one port. Who knew? It’s like super cool. I wish I’d known this six years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. It is really nice. Yet for no other reason, just to have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ability to plug in power on the other side, first worldiest of first world problems, I’ll be the first to tell you. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a USB-C power charging cable like strung through our sofa because I’m typically using either the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the laptop down there. you know, at some point in the evening. And it just so happens to be on my left side. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was enough slack to it that I can certainly like drag it across the front of the couch and stick it on the right hand side of the iPad. But now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have to do that. I can just stick it right on the left hand side. No problem. And it occurred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me like, I could plug in a phone and charge it if I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to on the other USB-C port. I don’t know why I would do that, but just go with me here. And it also occurred to me like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, I actually don’t I don’t think Xcode is coming to the iPad in any meaningful way, although there’s been rumors about that lately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know, you could power the iPad through the keyboard and then have a single cable going from iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to iPhone if you wanted to make an iPhone app. That’s a thing you could do, hypothetically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you got two ports now. So overall, I do think I like it quite a bit. I am not as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overjoyed as I thought I would be when I was super amped about it early on, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do like it. And I am now bracing for impact, Marco tells me why he hates everything about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a really good start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I will say that, you know, you said a few moments ago that you’re like 90% towards keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I think I’m about 90% towards returning it. Tell me why. First impressions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pick up the box off my porch and I think, uh-oh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yes, I agree. I absolutely agree. Because I pick up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the box and it’s like, uh-oh, this is heavier than I expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes, I completely agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, are we on an 11 for you or are you on the 13?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, I’m on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, okay. And I think it’s important, I’m gonna mention this later, it’s important to realize that all of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pre-release press reviews were all sent 12.9s. So, keep that in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so I pick it up and I think, oh no, this feels pretty heavy from the box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Take it out of the box, maybe the cardboard is heavy. Take it out of the box, nope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just really heavy. All right, now for context, I use an 11 inch iPad Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have used it with the Smart Keyboard Folio, which is still for sale, and I hope they still keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making them for reasons I’ll get into. I’ve been using that full-time since it came out a year and a half ago. And before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I used the 10.5-inch iPad Pro with its Smart Keyboard Cover. And before that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used the 9.7-inch iPad Pro with its Smart Keyboard Cover. So I’ve been using keyboard covers on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads in this size class, 9.7, 10.5, 11, since the 9.7 Pro came out, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was, four or five years ago. So my context of using it is it’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kitchen and living room and downstairs computer when I’m not at my real desktop. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s usually based in the kitchen or the dining room table,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s where we play podcasts with breakfast and if I wanna look something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up while I’m in the kitchen or wherever else. So it’s doing a lot of casual home tasks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe responding to some emails as I’m drinking my coffee after breakfast is over and like, you know, Tiff and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are on our phones and iPads sitting at the table, we haven’t gotten up yet, that kind of thing. So it’s like, you know, casual,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco casual but very frequent use. And I love keyboards and iPads ever since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. This has, before the iPad Pro with its keyboard cover, I would buy each iPad telling myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this time I’m really gonna use it, I just never would. And the keyboard changed it for me completely. I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love iPads with keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I really need to just interrupt you and say that I could not possibly agree with you more. If you’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a person who has not tried an iPad with some sort of keyboard permanently attached to it, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be the smart keyboard folio. I’m not saying this $300 monstrosity. Just having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a keyboard always attached to it dramatically changed the way I feel about the iPad and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made it considerably more useful to me. And I just wanted to say that I completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with you on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll also say my year and a half old smart keyboard folio is showing signs of wear, but not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keys, only like the rubbery part of the rear cover. Basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where my fingers touch, when I pick up the iPad by the cover, like by itself, as it’s open,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pick it up and move it as it’s open all the time, like to go from kitchen to dining room or whatever. That’s my, I’m constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picking up and moving it from one room to the next room very, very frequently every day. And so I’m just getting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting like, you know, oil and like, just kind of like rubbery stretch marks almost on some of the rubber. Anyway, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey doesn’t affect the functionality at all. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks kind of bad from the back now, but it was kind of like a black plastic MacBook after a six months of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. Roughly that level of weirdness. Anyway, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this new Magic Keyboard today. I’ve had about half a day of playing with it. I wrote a bunch of notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it. I use it a lot this evening. So it is, as people have reported,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly heavier than the Smart Keyboard Folio. The way John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco describes how he doesn’t use covers or keyboards with his iPad, he just picks up the naked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad and it’s so light, and that’s true. When you pick up a naked iPad and you’re not used to that, it’s so light,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you put it before in the smart keyboard case, and it just feels so much more bulky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like taking that same step again. So it’s like going from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the way no case to smart keyboard makes it significantly heavier and bulkier. Going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart keyboard to magic keyboard makes it about that much more bulky and heavy. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a significant increase in heft. And this is not to say this is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy in absolute terms, you know, I’m an adult, I can lift it up, it’s fine, I have no ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would prevent me from doing this. So it’s fine, but it’s inelegant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where the smart keyboard cover, I kind of grew to find that acceptable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, I’m not sure I ever would, because it’s just so dense. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, so getting onto actually using it, The magnets are, as people say, they are extremely strong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The hinge is very stable. There is, like, as you’re tapping the screen when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s open, there is a bit of wobble. Like, the iPad kind of vibrates. I think to improve that, they would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to make it a heck of a lot heavier or make the hinge even tighter. So I guess I understand why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t improve that, but it’s something to realize that, like, when they’re up on these stands, they do occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wobble when you touch them and it’s a little bit annoying. I, like everyone else, Wish the range of motion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tilted back a little bit further. It doesn’t need a lot more, but yeah, a few more degrees would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. Moving on to the keys, the keys are snappier feeling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They provide better feedback. The smart keyboard cover before, as far as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, we think it’s a butterfly mechanism, and so it kind of makes sense, it’s what you’d expect. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what made it so good was that fabric covering before. And the keys have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this covering, so all stuff is kept out of it. And then the key caps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the old one are smaller and more rounded in the corners. And so you have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space between the keys. And this is something, again, I’ve argued about this forever with the butterfly keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the laptops, that when you have bigger key caps in the same physical total footprint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have to shrink the margins around them, it makes it harder to type accurately because it makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder to find the edges of the keys with your fingers. and it’s easier in my experience to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like accidentally slip off the side and hit the key next to one that you mean to hit. So key margins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are important for typing, especially on a smaller keyboard, so you can just kind of feel where the keys are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the key margins got smaller with this move to the Magic Keyboard. So the key switches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, are nicer key switches. They move from butterfly to scissor and everything, but in the context of an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart cover, I think it was actually okay before. The keys on the smart covers weren’t great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they were way better than a butterfly key switch would suggest because of the different construction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and different size. So I’m finding myself making a lot of typing errors on this in day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And I don’t love that, especially because it’s not that the total dimensions changed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s just the key shape got bigger and flatter and the other one I think was more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accurate. The key feel difference, while it’s nicer, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that different. I’m surprised how different it isn’t. Like the way, like the travel and the feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that much different. The new Magic Keyboard is noticeably louder in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typing. Typing on an iPad Smart Cover is almost silent. The new keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s like the key mechanism is more open, it doesn’t have that fabric cover like muffling everything, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is louder. I don’t know if that matters to you. It isn’t, you know, it’s about the same loudness as a laptop, so it’s not like super loud, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does matter. It feels, because of the, I think, partly because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trackpad, and partly because of the shrunken key margins, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels more cramped than before. And this applies to both the keyboard, and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find the trackpad feels very cramped on the 11 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried the 12.9, but I think there’s a good reason why Apple seeded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the reviewers with the 12.9 instead of the 11. Part of that is because they tend to do that with any iPad, any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new iPad hardware, they tend to seed the biggest size to the reviewers. So that’s, you know, it could’ve just been that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think also this is something that on the 12.9 probably feels a lot closer to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop. Whereas on the 11, where the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard cover felt like it was exactly the right size, like the 9.7 felt like it was a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cramped. And then once they moved to 10.5, it was like, ah, okay, that was a little bit extra we needed and now it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels right, you know, now it feels good. And when they went 10.5 to 11, I think it was about the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wasn’t a big difference. So again, the 11, it felt great, right? Maybe this is because I’m used to it for so long,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this, it looks like the keys might have the same overall footprint.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the key area, I don’t think they’ve shrunken it, or if they have shrunk it, it’s only by a millimeter or two. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t be by a lot, but it feels cramped. And so again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if that’s key, if the key margins have gotten so much smaller. I don’t know if it’s because of that or because of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different shape of the keys compared to the old cover, but this now feels cramped. and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think on the 12.9 it probably doesn’t. That I think is telling. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons why I think this is probably an easier sell or an easier recommendation for 12.9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users and a little bit iffy for 11 inch users for that reason. It just does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel a little bit cramped. So going on the trackpad, actually using it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find like Casey, I find it a bit strange. It works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well in many ways. It works weirdly in some ways. I never actually used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trackpad support in iPadOS, like when it came out last month or whenever, I never plugged in a trackpad to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I wanted to wait for this to really get the full experience. So this is my first day doing it, maybe that’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did find it a little bit odd. The trackpad click, it’s not a four-stroke trackpad, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a real click trackpad, and it’s a very loud, kind of cheap-sounding click.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sounds inelegant, ungraceful. It’s not a good click. I tried it for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hated it so much I eventually switched to tap-to-click mode. To switch to tap-to-click mode, I decided, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, let me go in and change some keyboard and trackpad settings. So first I wanted to change some keyboard settings. I hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Command-Space. Great! It brings up Spotlight. You know, I’ve used a keyboard on an iPad for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew how most of this works. But just to give you some idea. So, Command-Space brings up Spotlight. Great!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I typed in Settings. Well, first I typed in System Preferences and then I realized, oh, that’s wrong. Back, back, back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Settings. And, great! Settings app comes up. Hit Enter. Good. Then, what I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have done on a Mac is hit Command-F and type keyboard. So I tried that on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Settings app has a search box. So I entered Settings, hit Command-F, and nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because they haven’t mapped it. They haven’t, like, they didn’t just bring over Mac OS. They’re doing everything from scratch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the people making iOS have to both know what the Mac does, appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the Mac does, and have the time and permission actually add that behavior to iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of those are not givens. So many Mac OS behaviors have not made it over. Some of them, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a matter of time. Some of them never will. But, you know, there is no command F in settings. It doesn’t bring up the search box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have to go up, tap it, and this is like where the trackpad really falls down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feels kind of like using the iOS simulator for developers. Like you have to like move over to a scrollable area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know is scrollable. And then you get, wait, can I scroll this with my fingers on the trackpad? Maybe many of them work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them don’t. It depends on certainly depends on the app some in some cases, but like you might be able to scroll with your fingers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found I just eventually just like reached up and dragged it with my finger normally because I like I’m like, I don’t know how to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the trackpad or it doesn’t feel right doing up the trackpad or it’s slower doing it with the trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I you know, go up to the search box. I start typing on keyboard. The only things that show up are the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessibility settings for keyboard, none of which are like the key repeat rate or you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. I wanted to change cat to escape which now you can do but I wanted to find that setting and yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually I just had to go like to general and a keyboard after I had done that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying the same process again when I would type in keyboard in the search field would then bring up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the general keyboard pane so I don’t know if it wasn’t indexed before or if it’s doing some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of predictive what I might want kind of ranking I don’t know but it just didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right the first time and the second time it worked right so again iOS this is like again like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS weird software issues are holding back things, right? I also had a reliability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue within the first half hour of using the keyboard. I invoked Siri to turn some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lights off and then after Siri had come up the keyboard and trackpad totally stopped working. Nothing worked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I tried going in and out of apps, going to the app switcher, going in and out of Siri again, nothing would make the keyboard or trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work again until I pulled the iPad off the keyboard and put it back on. I’ve had occasional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard bugs like this with every smart keyboard for every iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I don’t know if it’s a hardware flaw with the smart connector. If so, it also applied to the 10.5, 9.7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart connectors. It’s more likely, I think, to be a software bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, iOS bugs, I think, are holding back the quality and consistency of this experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, they do seem to be prioritizing this more and more over time, so hopefully this gets better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overall, I just, I don’t think I like navigating iOS by trackpad. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unquestionably a win for text editing. You know, people who do a lot of writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their iPads are gonna love this thing. And the press reviews that are so glowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it are largely that group. It’s largely people who write a lot on iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, Apple enthusiasts, who oftentimes are iOS enthusiasts and iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enthusiasts, who want to do as much of their work as possible on iPads, who are also professional writers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many of whom were already using keyboards like the bridge, you know, that are big and heavy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course they’re gonna love this thing, because it’s a really good implementation of that. But for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as more of like a prosumer or middle-of-the-road iPad power user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not doing most of my work on it. I am answering a lot of emails and tweets and stuff like that on it, but I’m not really doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant work other than that on it. I don’t think I like the trackpad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only because it’s so small and the click sucks, but I don’t think I like navigating iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by trackpad. It feels like it’s slower than using the touch screen a lot of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it feels bolted onto the OS. Like, Apple did a really good job integrating trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pointer stuff with like toolbars and buttons and everything, but it still feels bolted on. It just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly the same arguments when people say, you can’t just take Mac OS and add touch to it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that would be clunky. This feels clunky in the exact same way. It feels like I’m navigating the simulator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it just, it feels like in some, in like a couple of contexts, like text editing, it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When navigating UIs, I don’t think it’s great at all. I do like having the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multi-finger gestures for app switching and for, you know, getting back to the home screen, that’s nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the home indicator on the screen is not so far away that that big of a difference. So ultimately, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still feels like this is not a pointer device. this is a hack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a touch device. So overall, if you want your iPad to become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop, and you’ve already used big, heavy keyboard covers, and you’re really interested in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trackpad stuff, and maybe if you do a lot of text editing on your iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this is for you. I don’t think it’s for me, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I basically paid $300 to make my iPad a little bit better in some ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot worse in a couple of important ways. And I don’t think that’s a good trade-off for me, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’m gonna keep it. And I hope for that reason, I hope they continue to make the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart keyboard folio, not only for this iPad, but for future iPads to make something like that, some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, thin, light keyboard that is not as fancy as their full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hinge and trackpad model, because I just like the old way better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the thing about your usage that I hadn’t thought about until you described it in
⏹️ ▶️ John more detail now is that it’s not just a thing you use in the kitchen where I thought this would be
⏹️ ▶️ John ideal, but that you take the entire thing, keyboard and all, to other places. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though it’s not a lot of other places, it is other places. And that’s where I think this really runs afoul of it. I’m thinking of it as
⏹️ ▶️ John your kitchen computer, it’s like perfect for that because you would put this in the computer, like lots of people are describing this and I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good a way to conceptualize it as a stand for your iPad. So you’d have this stand
⏹️ ▶️ John in the kitchen, right? There, stiff, sturdy, ready to receive your iPad. And when you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to go to another room, you’d just yank that iPad off and you’d take it to another room. But you don’t wanna do that. You
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna take the whole thing, including the keyboard to the other room, because you’re gonna use the keyboard in the other room too. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re picking up the whole big conglomeration, and now the weight becomes a factor, and now you
⏹️ ▶️ John start thinking about whether you really want that trackpad and the keyboard differences and everything else we talked about, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think if you think you have a place in your life for an iPad stand that
⏹️ ▶️ John has a really good keyboard connected to it and a trackpad or whatever, then this is for you. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I look at this thing, and I guess for traveling too, like if you’re gonna travel with something and you like iOS better than macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want to essentially have a bad laptop, then this is the best bad laptop, you know, compromise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because then it’s in your backpack, yeah, it weighs as much as a MacBook Pro, but you’re taking it instead of a MacBook Pro, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see those use cases for it, but the Folio fills the need for you, which is like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John want this light thing that I can kind of bring around my house with me. And also it’s nice to have a keyboard. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John trackpad, if the trackpad was better, both in terms of the hardware, like imagine if it felt
⏹️ ▶️ John like a laptop trackpad, you’d like that better. And also the software and the software thing has obviously got to
⏹️ ▶️ John evolve. This is the very first cut at this, right? Hopefully if things go well, application
⏹️ ▶️ John developers can now up, including Apple, can update their applications to be better about the keyboard, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if the trackpad itself got better, it may become more attractive. But yeah, like as someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who doesn’t even like to have a keyboard attached to his iPad, this is definitely not for me. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I did think about it and sort of, you know, the case you described perhaps like having it on your lap and just
⏹️ ▶️ John using it as a stand to like watch video on it. I think this is way overkill for a video stand,
⏹️ ▶️ John but my current solution for watching video on my iPad, It does not have an adjustable viewing angle,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this does, so even that makes it somewhat attractive. So I’m, despite both of your reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still curious. I mean, if the world ever returns to some semblance
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can actually go
⏹️ ▶️ John to an Apple store, I would love to try this thing out and see what it’s like. Because I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John above, as you know, someone sitting next to this ridiculous computer, I’m not above paying $300 for a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it easier for me to watch video on my iPad. Neither am I. Well, it sits on my lap.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there are probably better applications of that. But anyway, like I said before, I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a very well-engineered solution within the problem space that they have been
⏹️ ▶️ John presented, with the possible exception of the trackpad, which I’m kind of disappointed to hear is as janky as it is. But everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else about it, the functionality, the way they were able to get
⏹️ ▶️ John more tilt angle out of the thing, the way they were able to fit a trackpad at all while keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard essentially the same size and have it all basically be sturdy and work well without
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of fasteners and everything. It’s a very clever and interesting product.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just that they’re fighting an uphill battle on what they should really make as an iOS laptop, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John would be extremely popular if done well. Extremely popular. Like, I don’t really see
⏹️ ▶️ John why anyone would ever want the combination of this and this stand when they could
⏹️ ▶️ John get the iOS laptop that I’m describing that is essentially like the same weight as the 12 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook was. And you can also fold over on itself or twist and fold. Do you know what I’m talking about when I say twist
⏹️ ▶️ John and fold? I’m afraid someone’s going to- They used to call them convertible tablet PCs. Yeah, like some of it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John the folding back people understand like, oh, if you had a hinge, it goes all the way around. But then the keyboard is on the back and some people don’t like, including
⏹️ ▶️ John me, don’t like the keyboard on the back. So that’s not great. It’s like, how am I gonna use my iPad as a tablet? If you
⏹️ ▶️ John allow it to twist so that the monitor is facing backwards and then fold,
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard is now sandwiched between the very skinny screen surface and the other
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it’s not, the product I’m describing is not easy to make. Like if you look at the convertible PC ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not, they weren’t, there’s a reason they weren’t popular products, right? But the same
⏹️ ▶️ John very clever, very skilled engineering that allowed this conglomeration to exist,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think would allow Apple to make a pretty good iOS laptop that has
⏹️ ▶️ John basically none of the hardware compromises you just described, the software compromises
⏹️ ▶️ John are a separate issue, that’s a separate team, but none of the hardware compromises you described, and it would weigh
⏹️ ▶️ John less, and I think it might fulfill your, like, you mentioned the
⏹️ ▶️ John floppy, rubbery parts of the folio wearing out. I’ve seen that with my kids too, because they’re monsters, and like, they
⏹️ ▶️ John all have covers on their iPads. That’s the weak point of all of these sort of smart cover type things. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t expect, like, the rubbery parts start to wear, right? And I’ve seen my
⏹️ ▶️ John kids and myself pick up an iPad that has one of these things on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, whether it’s in stand mode or it’s a keyboard folio, you kind of pick it up in a way where you’re trying to pick up two things at once, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re trying to pick up the iPad and the thing that’s attached to it. And there are magnets and they mostly hold together, but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John aware that they’re two separate items. So there’s very often the grip you do that’s like I’m gripping the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John and also a little bit of the case because I’m afraid the keyboard might fall off if I yank it too hard or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s where the super strong magnets the new one come in handy, right? But having that
⏹️ ▶️ John structure, trying to lift and carry that structure from room to room, laptops also do that
⏹️ ▶️ John better because they’re just so much simpler and more appropriately designed
⏹️ ▶️ John for the task. Heavy part on bottom, thin part on top, strong hinge in between. I mean, my kids
⏹️ ▶️ John do this again, see, monsters. They pick up laptops by the screen and carry it from place to place, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is terrible and no one should ever do. But practically speaking, it actually works and nothing falls
⏹️ ▶️ John apart. Most people will pick it up by the base and carry it from room to room. Civilized people will close it
⏹️ ▶️ John first before carrying it from room to room. That’s the approach I recommend. But the point is that a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John will endure all manner of being carried from place to place in any form without
⏹️ ▶️ John like coming apart at the seams, without the loose rubbery bits falling apart. And never will
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard separate from the screen when you’re carrying it in that way unless you’re really being rough with it. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John with any of these iPad conglomerations, it’s a concern. area another area where I think the new one seems like it does
⏹️ ▶️ John better the magnets are so strong and have so much surface area that I think I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys can correct me wrong but do you feel more confident picking up this collection of items
⏹️ ▶️ John just by the iPad screen part and being feeling more I guess you can’t because the thing goes all the
⏹️ ▶️ John way up the back right like do you do you still feel the need to do like the three finger pinch where one
⏹️ ▶️ John finger two fingers are pinching the iPad and two other fingers are like like pinching the case, or do you feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can pick it up by just the keyboard or just the screen and it feels secure?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always pick it up basically as if I’m covering up the camera with my palm. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a thumb on the front of the screen, I wrap my hands behind it, and so I’m picking it up, touching both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad and the keyboard. And that’s true of both the Magic Keyboard Cover and the Smart Keyboard Cover.
⏹️ ▶️ John Would you feel comfortable, if you have it in front of you now, like if you just grabbed it from the bottom part, let’s say, let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ John just grab it from the bottom part and carry it from room to room, would you ever do that or would you think no way?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feels like it is secure enough to do that, but I would never do it. Also, it needs two hands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that, because you need to get under it to get a good grip, and it’s so thin on the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the little curved,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it has that little hard plastic seam lip, so you can’t really get under it without using a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand to help lift it up. That’s another thing, by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way, laptops have. If you look at them, they all have curved edges, and the reason they can afford to have that curve is because
⏹️ ▶️ John they are one solid unit on the bottom. they aren’t two separate hardware products that must mate to each other,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that’s why they can afford to have a curve because that curve would be taller than
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom part in total. You don’t even have enough room to complete a MacBook style
⏹️ ▶️ John curve in the bottom of this case. It’s too thin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I always pick up my iPad and keyboard combo with one hand and it’s always by picking it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the top half on the side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s typically how I grab it as well. holding it now, and I will say that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of stability, keeping the iPad to the keyboard, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grabbing by just the keyboard, it is stable enough to do that. I feel though that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the edge of bending the keyboard. I don’t think I actually am, but that’s what it feels like, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John the weight is elsewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, the keyboard is too flimsy and that I’m gonna like bend it if I carry it this way. And the keys are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John pop off and hit you in the eye.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. I don’t think that, I don’t think that would happen, first of all, that it would actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bend, but it just feels wrong to carry it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that way. Yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t feel like something you should be doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, but in terms of will the iPad stay connected to this keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, yeah, I think it absolutely would. It is surprisingly sturdy. And people have said, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can totally rip it off with one hand. I mean, you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but I don’t know. You gotta like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wedge your finger between the two layers to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey pop it off, though. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you don’t touch the keyboard cover at all, here let me see if I can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there a, maybe try a twisting motion? I’m wondering like, in what direction is it weak?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do it if you basically like peel upwards on the bottom, it’s really hard to do though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to separate it without touching the keyboard part. Yeah, that part I agree with Casey, it is very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems much more stable than I would have guessed it would be. Like, and much more securely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attached. I was afraid that like if you pick it up or shake it around a little bit, that the iPad would fall off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stand. Because that’s kind of how the magnets always felt with the keyboards. If you would like, disconnect the, you know, like unmount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from its base, that always felt like that would happen, and that’s not the case here at all. It is surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong. So that, I’m not worried about. It’s just like, as I’m operating it now, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so damn heavy and bulky. And I think, John, you’re right, and everyone else is right, when they’re comparing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to a stand. If you think about it as a stand, with like an iPad that you rarely move,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is mostly like
⏹️ ▶️ John Or that you move without the keyboard. You move the iPad, but the keyboard thing stays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like it would be great for that, but yeah, that isn’t how I use my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all in all, it sounds like I like it, Marco is kind of meh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I’m gonna return it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I see the market for this. Like I’m not it. Just in the same way I’m not the market for the 12.9. Like the 12.9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way too big and heavy for me. I don’t like it at all. And I, yeah, I don’t think this is for me.
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#askatp: Let disks sleep?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that code. Once again, linode.com slash ATP, promo code ATP2020 to get a $20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit with new accounts. Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s continue with some Ask ATP. Andreas Beyer-Bowden writes, There’s one particular setting in the Energy Saver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preference pane that I’ve found to play a massive role in how the slower spinning hard disks perform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to have the quote put hard disks to sleep when possible, quote, enabled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I found that whenever I woke my computer, that my cursor would beach ball like I’d never seen before. Now that I’ve disabled this feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m wondering is, am I significantly shortening the lifespan of my drives and my USB RAID array by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not allowing them to sleep whenever possible? Should I just live with the sluggish performance that I experience after waking my computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or is deselecting it like I did fine? Do you guys leave this on or off?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really ever attach platters to my computer, except to like make a backup and then it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disconnected. But that being said, I mean, the drives in my Synology probably not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good example right now, but nevertheless, the drives in my Synology have been running for some as many as seven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years nonstop and it’s fine. So I don’t really have strong opinions about the Surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Surprise, one way or the other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d turn that off. So I do not let my drive sleep. Because first of all, I’m pretty sure it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing with SSDs. And I think all of my Mac connected drives now are SSDs and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been for a while. So, you know, maybe a bad example for me. But, even back when there were hard drives, the problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the reason why Finder beach balls for a while when you are waiting for a drive to wake up, is that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, when hard drives power down, they literally turn off their motors. Like, they don’t spin anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it takes hard drives, usually a good five or 10 seconds to fully spin up and be ready. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you think about it from like the programming perspective, think about like, all right, so you’re doing an operation, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally you can expect hard drive IOs to take what, maybe five or six nanoseconds, I don’t know what modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access times are. Probably longer than that, who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows? Nanoseconds? No, you’re in the wrong unit, sir. What is it, is
⏹️ ▶️ John forget, it’s been a long time. The milliseconds is the seek time, but that’s how long it takes the head, on
⏹️ ▶️ John average, to move from one place to the other. That assumes it’s already spun up, and it doesn’t account for transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Right, right, that’s right, yeah. Sorry, it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at hard drive seek times, and access times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so suppose it’s like 10 milliseconds, in a good case, for waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a hard drive transfer. But sometimes it takes 10 seconds. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what the programs are dealing with. And so typically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of stuff will beach ball if it’s waiting for a hard drive to spin up. Because you can do asynchronous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tasks to a certain degree. You can say, all right, queue this I O to happen, and then call me back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some thread when it’s ready. And that’s a harder way to program in some cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you can argue that when you’re dealing with slower storage, that’s the right way to do it a lot of times if you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even then, during that 10 seconds, the app is probably gonna hit some other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it has to wait for, because it’s still waiting for that IOP operation or something, and it’s like, all right, when you can do no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IOP for like 10 straight seconds, you’re gonna get a lot of things that just beach ball. There’s no way around it, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way around it would be so complex no one’s ever gonna program around that, especially now in the age of hard drives going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of fashion. So that’s why that happens. And I always found that so annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back when I would have direct-to-touch hard drives to my Macs, that I would turn that off because I would open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up a drive and just sit there and wait, and wait, and you’d hear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’d sit there and wait, and oh, now it’s going, okay, and it was just so annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So whether it actually has any impact on drive lifespan, the answer is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it depends. Certainly there is a savings of drive wear and tear for it not to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spinning a lot of the time, But there’s also a wear and tear cost to it spinning up and down to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and out of power save mode. So it probably depends a lot on your access pattern. If you’re only going to be accessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the files, you know, rarely, relatively rarely, and it can stay powered down most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not go through a lot of power up power down cycles, it’s probably going to lengthen the drive’s lifetime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if it’s going to be going through a lot of those cycles, it might actually make it worse. So the answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, is it depends, but the real answer is go to SSDs as soon as you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John John, thoughts? So the spinning down thing, I’ve tended to like that because of course
⏹️ ▶️ John spinning disks make noise and I don’t want them to make noise. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in macOS over the years, it’s become more and more
⏹️ ▶️ John common for the application you’re using or some component
⏹️ ▶️ John of the operating system to want to get some information about all attached drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John To give an example, it’s like, it’s not, you’re not doing anything. You’re like, I’m not going to that disk. I’m not looking for something in that disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not accessing that disk at all. Why am I sitting here looking at a beach ball waiting for that disk to spin
⏹️ ▶️ John up? Just opening an open save dialog. Even if the open save dialog is not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to show a folder on that thing, it’s just the open save dialog and it’s like pointing to your desktop, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a spinning disk. That could cause all of your disks to have to spin up because the open
⏹️ ▶️ John save dialog box or some component of it wants to know stuff about all attached volumes so it can populate menus
⏹️ ▶️ John so that when you click on them later, the menu will display and show you all of the volumes or wants to populate the sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Tons of stuff that you don’t control that you might not think is important
⏹️ ▶️ John may want information about all attached volumes and may need to get that information by causing your thing to spin
⏹️ ▶️ John up. And that takes a long time, it makes noise, and it’s kind of annoying. This is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the whole eternal debate that used to be about, There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of silly debates that have no bearing in fact, or more of sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John myths of like, does it take more gas to start a gasoline engine?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, than to just leave it idling. How long would you have to idle for it to be worthwhile for you to turn the engine off
⏹️ ▶️ John and to start it or whatever? Which maybe made some more sense in the days of carbureted engines, but today the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer, spoiler alert, is turn the engine off because it uses away more gas when it’s idling than it does to start the engine. It uses nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to start the engine in a modern car. Anyway, wear and tear is the same thing. Is it better
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to have a hard drive that is spinning for a short period of time during the day, but
⏹️ ▶️ John goes from spinning to not spinning five times? Or is it better to let it spin all day long, even though I’m not using it, but at least it
⏹️ ▶️ John never has to go from spinning to not spinning? And this gets into the more modern question of auto stop-start systems
⏹️ ▶️ John for car engines. When I come to a stoplight, is it good for my engine auto
⏹️ ▶️ John start-stop system to turn the engine off and then to turn it back on again, and then turn it off and then turn it back on again?
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that destroying the engine? And again, the answer is not as simple as people think because modern car engines that
⏹️ ▶️ John have start systems are made to do that. But on the other side, there’s no fighting the fact that there is more
⏹️ ▶️ John friction and wear and tear from doing stop-start than it is for running all the time. Anyway, all of
⏹️ ▶️ John that applies to hard drives too. Depending on your scenario, how many times you stop and start
⏹️ ▶️ John and how much that hard drive expected to be stopped and started frequently is how well
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to fare. If you applied an auto stop-start system to a car engine from the 80s, it would probably destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But modern car engines know they’re going to be hooked up to a stop-start system and have
⏹️ ▶️ John certain parts that would wear out or whatever, beefed up to handle better the situation that
⏹️ ▶️ John they know they’re going to be in, where they’re going to be constantly stopped and started. If I had to pick a kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of hard drive that doesn’t expect to be stopped and started frequently, it’s like a data center or a NAS
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive. They don’t expect to constantly be spun up and spun down. They expect to be running all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the use case they’re used for. have them in your thing, don’t allow them to spin down.
⏹️ ▶️ John My preferred solution to all this these days is to not just keep them spun down, keep them
⏹️ ▶️ John unmounted. Because then, your open and save dialog box, if everything goes well, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly spin those drives up. They’ll just always stay spun down, and they’ll stay unmounted.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS is very clever, though. And very often, it can mount your drives behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenes in a way that is not even visible in the Finder. And somehow, you’ll hear them spinning up. like, wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John I unmounted that. Why is that spinning up now? That can be managed for the most part. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s my recommended solution. If you have a hard drive connected to your Mac that you mostly don’t use, leave it unmounted.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you want to use it, mount it. There are many utilities and menu bar things and all sorts of other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, right down to just having alias in your sidebar that will allow you to quickly and easily mount
⏹️ ▶️ John a drive. Like I even have stuff in Quicksilver. I have like command space and then drive names to get them mounted quickly. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a million ways to quickly mount and unmount drives. That’s the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would recommend against the spin down thing except maybe in laptops with spinning disks, but honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John who has one of those these days? So yeah, the answer is don’t leave your drives mounted.
#askatp: First-job intimidation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Nate J. writes, I recently graduated with a computer science degree. As I look for a job and sharpen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my skills, I find it easy to become overwhelmed and discouraged. My level of skill seems puny compared to what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is out there. With seemingly thousands of frameworks, languages, and technologies that are all built on top of each other, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find it hard to know what to focus on. So the questions are, what were some experiences you gentlemen had right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after getting out of school, and what advice would you give to a programming newbie? Everyone says to build projects and put them on GitHub.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a decent coder, but But I always hit a wall when trying to think of what novel projects solve a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while being within my skill level. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my favorite story to tell about this, which I’m sure I’ve told a couple of times during the run of this show, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I got to my first job out of school. So I went to Virginia Tech for computer engineering,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which at the time was basically half electrical engineering, half computer science. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did plenty of computer science stuff, and I got a job writing software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I got there, and my first day, they said, OK, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re using Perforce for source control, and here’s the server and all that. Why don’t you go grab the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source and take a look through it? And I said, I’m sorry, what’s source control? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had never had the occasion to use it in college. And at that point, I’m sure it’s different now, but at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Virginia Tech didn’t teach it because, you know, source control was a thing. It had very much been a thing for decades, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just wasn’t part of the curriculum. And it was quickly apparent to me that I had a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot to learn. To give more concrete advice, though, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, as Marco discussed last episode, there are so many levels and layers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to everything that’s built today. It’s daunting. Like, even for me, and I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, wrote my blog engine in 2014, it scares me to think about doing that again in 2020
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there’s so many layers and so many levels and so many things. Now, the reality of the situation is you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use any of them. As Marco said last episode, you can use JavaScript without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jQuery. Like it’s a thing. It’s a thing you could do. So you don’t necessarily have to go that deep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into all these bananas, multi-layer cakes and whatnot. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to learn really anything, and I’ve said this for years and I’m not the only one who said it, you need to have a specific problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to solve. And yeah, you may not be able to come up with novel projects that solve a problem, but you’d be surprised how difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a to-do list can be. You know, once you get past it only being on one computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the to-do list only existing in memory, you know, you’d be surprised how complex something as simple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as that can be. And so I would say find something that you would like solved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe some app that you but isn’t exactly the way you want it and try to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. I don’t know that. Marco thoughts on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I should disclaim that with a few exceptions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like meeting my wife, I did almost everything else in college wrong. Same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in retrospect, or even at the time I knew it was wrong. Like many things I just, I just did wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What matters in the job market, especially when you’re first starting out more than anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is who you know. We all like to think everything’s objective when it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes to applying for jobs, but it’s not, not even close. What matters is who you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the best thing you can possibly do as a college kid are get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internships or other work experience during the summers or even during the years if you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you know more people in the field. Because when you graduate and you’re ready
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a full-time job, that’s gonna be the people who are gonna be most likely to hire you, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far. You can apply blindly, as I did, to all the big companies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all of them will probably ignore you like they did for me. Part of that was because my grades sucked, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another story as well. One of the other many things I did wrong in college, also didn’t quite graduate on time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so there’s a lot of things I did wrong, but this is the biggest thing, is that basically every summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just go and work a regular job somewhere, like at Staples or whatever. I wouldn’t actually try to get work in the field.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of that was because it’s hard because a lot of internships are unpaid, and that’s a really crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing in general for society to have these unpaid internships because that basically creates an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gap where people who can’t afford to not get paid all summer therefore can’t get these job opportunities, and that’s a whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hate unpaid internships. I was fortunate enough never to have to take one. The one internship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got was just basically doing like Excel macros at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, Ohio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I lived. And so, and that wasn’t really anything like software engineering related, it was just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a computer-y job loosely at an office building. You know where they hired me? Because my mom knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a guy who worked there. Like, again, it’s all about who you know. After college, I got hired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not by Google, Amazon, Apple, all these companies I was applying to. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all ignored me. I didn’t even get a call back from most of them. Amazon dicked me around for a while, but it ended up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going nowhere. None of those places would hire me. The place I got hired was because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone I knew in my comp sci class got a job at this little company in Pittsburgh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco She knew that I was decent at CS stuff from school, and she recommended me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I went and interviewed, and I did okay in the interview, and that’s why they hired me. It wasn’t anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my resume or anything, because I didn’t have anything useful on my resume. Like, I was a college kid. Later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, I talked to the people who hired me at that first job, and for some reason, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the subject of hiring came up. And I learned one of the reasons they hired me and were willing to overlook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my terrible grades is that I had done side projects. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all I had to show them at the time was a half-working Square
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Earth slash Tank Wars demo that I’d written in C++ in DirectX for Windows. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, here, look, here’s something I did. And it kind of works, and it kind of puts some rendered polygons on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. But it did something. It was pretty basic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also, during the interview, they had given me a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly straightforward programming test. It was one of those like, you know, because the job was going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programming in C. That was the job. So it wasn’t unreasonable for them to ask me stuff to program in C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they asked me during the interview to write, it was one of those things like, one of those exercises of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write a quick function here that counts the number of duplicate lines in the input. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically involves, you have to do memory allocation. You have to do realloc potentially, because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know how many lines of input there’s gonna be. Realloc might fail if it’s out of memory. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these little implementation details they can check for to just kind of gauge your level of do you know what you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all? This was not on a whiteboard. They actually sat me in a private office, gave me a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a compiler, and said take as long as you need. So it wasn’t a super high pressure thing. Like just here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a text editor and a C compiler and a command line, just write this and let us know when you’re done. So it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very humane way to do this. I’d been in other interviews before that were not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that humane, that were more like Google style, like do this hard math problem on this whiteboard in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front of us right now, and I failed all those miserably. So the one thing I didn’t check during the program was I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check the result of reality to see if it failed, but otherwise I got everything else pretty much correct. And they said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I was the only applicant who even came close. And I thought that was absurd because these people were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all way smarter than me. I learned, I thought I was hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shit when I got out of college because I was a programmer and I was smart and boy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did I learn how much I didn’t know during those first couple years of that job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my god, because the people I was working for were way smarter than me and people I was working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for and with were way smarter, they’re all way smarter than me. Every like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know 22 year old has to kind of have that beaten out of them. That kind of like I think I’m hot shit, I I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know everything, this is stupid, why do you do it this way, like all that stuff. You know, I had to have all that beaten out of me slowly with just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embarrassment and being put in, you know, over my head a little bit. But anyway, I learned throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that job and throughout some experience later also that most programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who apply to most jobs don’t know how to program. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t mean well, I mean at all. And part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, we were discussing during last week’s intro my whole like complaint about the PHP stuff, whatever that was. Part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the feedback that we got both from you guys during the show and then from the audience is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco testable systems and hierarchies and hierarchies of classes and everything are in part made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to take a large number of very low-skilled programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and try to get some kind of useful output out of them and try to control them in some way and try to make their code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat usable as output. people programming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a profession, as the job, they’re being paid full time to do it, can’t program,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or barely know how to do it. So what most people don’t realize is that if you know what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing at all, you are in the top like 5% or 1% of applicants that any job opening is gonna get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How you compare to the people within that 5% or 1%, you know, you’re comparing yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the whole world. It’s like when you look at Instagram, and you’re like, man, that person is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good photographer. I’m never gonna be as good as them. I am just crap as a photographer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t realize that you are comparing yourself to the top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco echelon of everybody in the world whose stuff is showing up or who got popular on something or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. You don’t have to be the best programmer in the world. You just have to be the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmer in the room sometimes. Not even all the time. Right? You just have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the best programmer in your office of one. Like, there is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential of making good things, being a good programmer, being a useful programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a full-time job as a programmer, where if you’re just an okay programmer, you’ll do great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t have to be the best of the best. I’m not. I’ve made my entire career being a decent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not amazing programmer. That’s all I think I’m, I’m not trying to be overly modest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. I think I am a decent but not amazing programmer. And if you’re looking at stuff and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, I mean, I know some of this stuff, but a lot of this is over my head, you’re still way ahead of everybody because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you care. And that is more important than any other thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, you’d be surprised how many people applying for how many jobs don’t even really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to care. So if you show up to a job interview, first of all, try to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know as many people in the field as possible, as I said earlier, it’s much more about who you know. who you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will get you into the interview. It won’t necessarily get you the job, but it will get you to be called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or interviewed at all. That’s like the main challenge in most of these, most big companies, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t even get them to call you or to consider you or to look at your resume. But if you can actually get somebody to look at it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through whatever connections you might be able to pull, do that. And once you’re in the interview, realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you just care, if you just show that you are enthusiastic about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field, that you actually are genuinely interested in this, you’re not just doing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you wanna make money, like you genuinely are interested in this, and you show that you have the capability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to learn, then don’t worry, and they won’t worry if they’re any good, about whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the specific stuff they’re doing. Because whether or not you know the framework they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using, or the specific technology they’re using, first of all, it’s gonna change next week anyway, and second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, It doesn’t really matter to good programmers. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn it. You’re going into a new job, you’re gonna have to learn their code base anyway. Even if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a language and a framework that you’re familiar with, you’re still gonna have to learn their code base. So there’s gonna be a learning curve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to any new hire to any programming job, no matter what it is. No matter what their skill level is, no matter what the language and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything is. So don’t be intimidated by that if you can help it. And if they care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, then they don’t know what they’re doing. Now, there are many companies who hire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for programming jobs who don’t know what they’re doing, who aren’t good at hiring, who are not good interviewers of candidates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t take it personally when you run into these, because if you apply for more than a couple jobs, you’re going to run into these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I applied to so many crappy, terrible companies because I didn’t have anything else to apply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to for a long time. I had so many, I must have had at least three or four hilariously bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interviews from companies who barely knew what they were doing. One company wanted me to rewrite their entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product from, I think it was Pascal, to C++
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or C in two weeks. And the question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they asked me for the interview was what kind of computers do I have at home? Please list them in their specs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that was a company here in Westchester. Yeah, I didn’t go to work for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, so there’s a lot of bad tech jobs bad interviews out there too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, do what you can to be an enthusiast, to care, to show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can learn, to have side projects at all, that’s going to put you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the top 1%. The hardest part is getting that interview. Once you get it, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any of this stuff, if you are interested, if you care, you’re going to have a pretty easy time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting the job or at least getting an offer. So the hard part is just getting that interview in the in the first place, and that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people you know, internships you can have, that will help you in that kind of thing. The good thing also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that this is mostly only temporary. This is mostly only for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first job. Once you have your first job, you will meet a bunch of other programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who will have worked with you and possibly for you. So you will have a bunch of people who are now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contacts in the industry. And you might be working on something people have heard of, or you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to do stuff on the side release libraries or make blog posts or talk at conferences, something like that. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be ways to get your name out either to the general public in some kind of public way like that or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least the people you’re working with. And then once you have that one job and have worked there for a while, as long as you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally mess it up, which you won’t because you care, then you can use those people to get all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future jobs and you can use that resume and that work experience to help you get everything else. So this is mostly only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a challenge for your first job or two out of school. Once you have that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is much easier to build upon because you start building that professional network and you start building that resume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with more important stuff than just, well, I was in college, you know. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good luck, this will work. You will probably run into crap situations and crap offers like my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird rewrite of a whole product with your computers that you list at home job. Thank God I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take that job. But this will work out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just care and you’d be surprised how far ahead that puts you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Powell, Jr.: When I was interviewing to have somebody join
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a team that I was either working on or in charge of, one of the things that I was always looking for—and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, this is not unique. This is not a new invention. One of the things I always looked for was an eagerness, an eagerness to learn.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like you said, Marco, no matter who is coming in to interview for this job, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they had worked there before, left and came back, at the very least, we’re going to need to learn the code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if somebody’s coming in thinking they’re hot stuff and saying, oh, React Native is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only way to go and all this like Swift and Objective-C stuff, it’s garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let me talk to you about how we’ve architected our Swift codebase. Are you ready? You know, like, as long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you’re not hyper opinionated and you’re willing to learn, that will put you in front of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot, a lot of people. John, what are your thoughts? As the oldest of the three old men, what do you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Grieco And the person who’s had the most jobs, right? Uh…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t know if that’s true,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually. I’ve had my fair share.
⏹️ ▶️ John John Grieco No, most jobs, yeah. How many places have you worked, Casey? I’ve never got more than Marco. That’s not easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Grieco Let’s see, one, I think five, six, something like that. But you tend to stay places for a pretty long time. John Grieco It might be a tie. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m around seven. Anyway, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John to go ahead and close this out. stay places for a pretty long time. It might be a
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m around seven. Anyway, I should look at my resume and see how many people I have. I can’t actually enumerate
⏹️ ▶️ John them anymore because I’m too old. So the bit about making something,
⏹️ ▶️ John a project or whatever, the reason that’s such a useful thing, not the whole idea of like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to have this amazing GitHub resume with a thousand things and a million stars and whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John just the idea that you have literally ever made anything ever is because that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John quick way for people in the industry to tell essentially whether you can program
⏹️ ▶️ John at all like Marco was saying, right? Because if you do any project,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will, you know, if you actually do it yourself, right, you will be forced to deal with all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that have to do with the project. Oh, some language thing is stumping me. The build
⏹️ ▶️ John system is being weird. I found a bug and I can’t figure out how to fix it. Does
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature work? Is this feature any good? Like tackling all those annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John details yourself and getting something, anything, literally anything out the end that does a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can say here you go it’s like okay well we know now that you can actually program again
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming you did that all yourself you will have had to tackle all these tiny little problems to make
⏹️ ▶️ John basically any application. In the absence of that it’s surprisingly difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell in the moment whether someone can program or not. That’s why they make you type things
⏹️ ▶️ John and write programs either on a whiteboard or on a computer. They’re trying to figure out if you can program but that even the one where
⏹️ ▶️ John they give you a computer in a room I feel like even that’s unfair because to get a finished completed
⏹️ ▶️ John working non-trivial program often takes more than the amount of time you’re willing to sit in a room and do a thing right
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why having done a project is a good proxy for that. So I don’t think it should be a prerequisite
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think it’s important to you not to the person who’s gonna hire you, but to you, just to show yourself, A, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John like being a programmer, and B, can you actually do it? Make a thing that does a thing. Not a school
⏹️ ▶️ John assignment, not a homework problem set, something, anything that does a thing, and
⏹️ ▶️ John polish it, like it’s an actual finished product of some kind. That will be
⏹️ ▶️ John informative for you. So an experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had getting in. I would say it’s not even that high of a bar. One time we were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to hire somebody at Tumblr, and we were interviewing a bunch of programmer candidates, and we asked everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please bring in some code you’ve written. Any code that you can show us. Any code. Just bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with you. I think one applicant did. Like, it was shocking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nobody could bring any code they had written. And you could say, well, you know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their code for previous jobs they weren’t allowed to bring. Fine. You’ve never written and can’t now write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any code that you can show us. Literally anything. Shockingly few people could even
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And a working thing is even better than just the code. It’s like, here’s the code, but also by the way, here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though it’s Marco’s weird thing that throws polygons on up and does a thing, he had an idea for a thing and he made it. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John number of weird little hurdles that you had to overcome to get to that point is surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high. We weren’t even asking for that. We were asking for like two pages of code, just something we can look at.
⏹️ ▶️ John they couldn’t even do that. So for the experience I had getting out of school, it’s related to this question.
⏹️ ▶️ John I started working for the company that I eventually got a full time job at when I was still in school again to Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John point about contacts or whatever. How did I get the job out of school because I’d already been working for them part time as a student.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a great way to get a job out of school. Um, and I was doing web development,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, and I knew everything there was to know about web development because there was like nothing to know because the
⏹️ ▶️ John web was brand spanking new. It’s like 1991 1992 whatever. Like the web was new. knew anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John the web. Tim Berners-Lee didn’t know anything about the web. There was so little information at the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you got in on the ground floor, it was possible to know everything there was
⏹️ ▶️ John to know, basically, about the web. And so that’s where I’m coming in as. I certainly didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John everything there was to know about all these technologies that predated me. I was still learning the basics of Unix, the basics of C and C++,
⏹️ ▶️ John the basics of Perl. Like, you know, I didn’t know how to do decent X Windows programming, all my X Windows applications
⏹️ ▶️ John would crash and I didn’t understand why and it was a mess, right? but because the web was new, I
⏹️ ▶️ John knew everything about it. So I was primed to have a crisis just like is being described in this question. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it just seems like there’s so many things out there, right? Because I was doing web dev, I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I feel overwhelmed by other stuff, but I’m gonna be a web dev, and I know everything about web dev, so I’m all
⏹️ ▶️ John set, right? So I get my job out of school, and I’m doing web dev, and I’m doing it with the cutting-end
⏹️ ▶️ John technology of the time, Perl CGI scripts, right? It’s like where it’s at, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apache, Perl, CGI, it was super cutting edge stuff. And I knew all of it from top to bottom, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Written my own web servers in C, had written, you know, CGI engines, I knew all the nuts and bolts, I knew who
⏹️ ▶️ John HTTP worked and all, you know. And the three web browsers that were out, I knew all about those,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Everyone’s good to go. But then, sure enough, you know, the next wave of web
⏹️ ▶️ John tech came, and it was like, forget about CGI scripts, forget about Perl, forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apache, forget about, certainly forget about C and C++. The future of web development is
⏹️ ▶️ John all about Java and XML and this thing called SOAP and WSDL
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and a million other acronyms. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John warning. Right, and I was like, well, wait a second. I already know everything about web
⏹️ ▶️ John dev and you’re telling me you’re gonna throw 17 pounds worth of phone book sized
⏹️ ▶️ John tech manuals of new technology that I’ve never heard of on top of me and saying, guess what, supposed web
⏹️ ▶️ John developer, do you know this stuff? And my answer was no, I don’t know that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I know a little bit about Java. Isn’t that that thing that was gonna run on set-top boxes? What the hell are you talking about? And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you know about XML? And do you know about all the, it was like, and do you know about SOAP? And I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John as an actual working web developer, took one look at SOAP. I’m like, are you kidding me? Like, what,
⏹️ ▶️ John so A, it didn’t appeal to me. And B, it was like, there’s all this knowledge. So I panicked. I bought tons of books
⏹️ ▶️ John about XML. I bought the XML, the annotated spec, so I could not only learn XML, but learn what the people who made
⏹️ ▶️ John XML thought about XML. I brought the big Java books. I got the Java in the nutshell. I got the big Java Enterprise Edition.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got the Java beans thing. I got like, because I’m like, I’m like, oh my God, if I’m going to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John as a career, suddenly I’m miles behind. I thought I knew everything and then I don’t know anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the lesson I learned from this experience was that, two things, one,
⏹️ ▶️ John new technologies will always come along to replace old ones. Two, it’s not the end of the world
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t enter a field knowing everything about it. In fact, it’s almost impossible to ever do that unless you happen
⏹️ ▶️ John to be at college just as the web was appearing like I was, right? That’s never gonna happen, you know, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna happen for you and your technology, right, so don’t worry about that. And then three,
⏹️ ▶️ John very often new technologies come and everyone thinks it’s the next big thing and they suck
⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re awesome and you never learn them, but you’re still okay. Like it’s not possible to know everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that overwhelmed feeling you have, you both need to get
⏹️ ▶️ John used to it and also not worry about it. Like it’s not like you can ignore it. You can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, well, I never lean to learn a new thing. Because you will, but the whole point is, you will learn new things. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s okay, you’ll learn them at the pace that regular humans learn them. It’s unreasonable,
⏹️ ▶️ John getting to Marco’s point about bad jobs, it’s unreasonable for any employer to expect
⏹️ ▶️ John you to immediately know everything about a new technology that comes down the pike, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You won’t and you can’t, and if they expect you to, they’re a bad employer and that’s a place you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to work, right? So don’t worry about that. Just worry about the basics.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I program? Do I enjoy it? And am I
⏹️ ▶️ John able to learn new things in any capacity? And then my final point that hasn’t been brought up here is
⏹️ ▶️ John for getting jobs and having done a lot of hiring, especially for like big companies that need to hire a lot of programmers,
⏹️ ▶️ John the bigger your company is, especially if you’re not one of like the big, you know, top three brand name
⏹️ ▶️ John companies. If you’re just like a big company that needs to hire a lot of programmers, And there are a lot of them out there, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John big companies have a lot of code and they need a lot of people to wrangle it. But they’re not Apple, Google, or Amazon, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or Facebook. You can’t hire for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just can’t say, we need someone who knows insert technology platform framework or whatever here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because you will narrow your pool of potential applicants so much if you demand that you, well, you have to know Angular.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you have to know, but it has to be Angular 2, right? And you have to know this version of Node.
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have to know this version of Unix and you have to know this database and like you’ll never find anybody. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hire that way. Instead, what you hire for are things other than A, can you program, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is really important criteria for programmers, right? That’s always there. But B, are you someone
⏹️ ▶️ John that the other people who work here want to work with? Are you a decent, nice,
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable human being? Are you pleasant to work with? That’s one of the most important
⏹️ ▶️ John questions is like, would you want to work with this person? Would you want this person on your team? And that question has
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing to do with if you can even program. Has everything to do with what are you like as a person?
⏹️ ▶️ John How are your communication skills? Do you seem like you’re pleasant? Right. Do you, do you seem like you’ll be able to show up
⏹️ ▶️ John on time? Right. You know, just basic sort of human factors,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, in practice, if you are, you know, Marco had a good phrase of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I think six months ago, if like, if you are reasonably smart and care,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you’re, you’re way ahead of almost everybody, and again, I didn’t mention any skills there. And part of caring is,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you care how other people are feeling? Do you care about how you present
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself? And, you know, so you just need to be, you need to be a nice person. Like if,
⏹️ ▶️ John if no one wants to work with you in group projects at school, this is a bad sign, right? Because work
⏹️ ▶️ John is a never ending group project, right? Unless you want to be a lone wolf and start your own company and
⏹️ ▶️ John just do your own thing, fine. But if you’re going to work in a place with other people, you need to be able to get along with other
⏹️ ▶️ John people, no matter what you’re doing. It’s nothing to do with programming. And I feel like the longer I
⏹️ ▶️ John spend in companies doing hiring, the more important it is to me to say, all right, this person
⏹️ ▶️ John has never programmed and never seen a computer, but I’ll hire them any day if they are smart
⏹️ ▶️ John and can communicate and I would like to work with them. Because again, in big companies, we’ll teach
⏹️ ▶️ John you whatever. We’ll teach you, for example, working in a company that use Pearl, like we’ll teach you Pearl. We
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t expect you to know Pearl. We know nobody knows Pearl. Like you’re a new graduate from computer science,
⏹️ ▶️ John but are you smart and personable and seem like you can learn things? You’ll learn our stupid technology stack.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s no problem. Like as long as you’re willing to learn it, welcome aboard, we’ll teach it to you, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, can you program and are you a nice person? So I would concentrate
⏹️ ▶️ John more, like after you do your first project and say, yes, I can program and it’s a thing I vaguely enjoy doing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John really do want a job in this field. Find that out for yourself. And once you find that out, Make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John your performance in the interview, like, there’s only so much you can do on the tech side, so delve into it as
⏹️ ▶️ John much as you want, but make sure that you come across as a person that people say, I’d like to
⏹️ ▶️ John be on a team with that person. It seems like they would be nice to work with. If they’re not thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you’re not gonna get hired, unless the company’s really bad at hiring, again, because lots of companies say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hated this person, but he solved our programming quiz, so I guess we have to hire him. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you don’t wanna work with those companies. You
⏹️ ▶️ John really don’t. Uh, and you don’t want to work with those people either. So be excellent to each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the, uh, the Jules John software guide to interviewing or something like that. It is excellent. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of my favorite takeaways from it, and not everyone can do this, but one of my favorite takeaways from it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in so many words, and he does a much more eloquent job of it default to know. And if you’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just bold over, say yes. And like one of the things that he drills in, in this post, I’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show if I can find it is, you know, Oh, this person’s good for that team over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a no. I got one of those. I got one of those like this team doesn’t want you, but this other team might take you. Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. You can come here and work on a trial basis. Yeah, I got one of those. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was fun. Yeah, that’s a no. Like, and it’s a very well done post. Like I said, I’ll see if I can dig it up. But you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read that. But even if you’re interviewing, you know, to get a job rather than being the interviewer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a really, really good post.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we have to mention FizzBuzz again, because some will mention if we don’t, like, that’s The whole point of the fizzbuzz thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John that people are always trying to find a quick way to answer the can you program question in fizzbuzz. One of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still forget what the details is like, if it’s divisible by 15 type fizz, if it’s divisible
⏹️ ▶️ John by 5 type buzz, and if it’s divisible by both type print something else. It’s like the simplest
⏹️ ▶️ John program you can have and you would say, surely there is nobody who cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John program this, but that’s not the case, right? That’s their quick litmus test of can you program.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, it being so popular, people just probably memorize how to do FizzBuzz and they can still fake you out, which is why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John even better if you’ve made something yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say just kind of career direction wise, John mentioned a lot about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when he was entering the workforce, the web was just getting going and that was a big deal. And that was a big deal for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was entering the workforce in 2004 and moved within the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workforce in 2006. And that was peak time for Web 2.0. That was when all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Ruby on Rails movement happening and like web 2.0 was a really big deal. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always a good idea with your career to to enter a field that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in its ascent. You know and and computer science and programming this field this field is so big there’s always gonna be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different ways of different types of things. I would say today is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably not a good idea to enter the field of writing generic web apps because that you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that era while it’s still here and it’s still big the ascent of that that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long since passed and it is now in the stable state, maybe a decline over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. I haven’t followed it too closely recently. You know, 10 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps were really young and were taking off like a rocket. And I think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have probably leveled off. If they haven’t already leveled off, they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to shortly. And they’re in a stable state now. There’s lots of jobs, you know, writing app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code. But what would be best, ideally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is definitely try not to enter something that’s declining. Unless you want to be a COBOL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmer, in which case you’ll be employed until the end of time. But otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t get into something that is declining if you want… First of all, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to make a lot of money, you can get stock options and growing stuff and make more money there. But also, if you just want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better job security and more exciting jobs to do, So getting into something while it’s young is generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better for that. But so right now I don’t know what that is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m now old and boring and I’m no longer looking for those young things, but it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something more related to ML and data analysis kind of stuff if I had to guess. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. But if you can get into something that’s earlier in its growth cycle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and its lifespan, that’s generally better than hopping on something that’s already in its
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it depends on what you want. Like if you want that experience of the excitement of the new and the more risky reward, but some people
⏹️ ▶️ John come out of college and they wanna just get a stable job so they can go work for a bank, which I wouldn’t recommend because I hear horror
⏹️ ▶️ John stories from it. But anyway, banking is not an industry that’s going away anytime soon and they always need people who know how to program. So if that
⏹️ ▶️ John appeals to you, go for it, right? But if you want excitement and a potential upside, yeah, look for
⏹️ ▶️ John an industry that’s young and in the upswing rather than going to work for a bank. Again, I can’t stress this enough to not work
⏹️ ▶️ John for a bank. I have so many friends, programmer friends, who have gone to work
⏹️ ▶️ John for banks. I have never heard a single one tell me a good story about working in finance with computers. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the company that gave me the terrible interview where I filled all the math questions that they had me do on the whiteboard, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the same company as the one that told me their team didn’t want me, but some other team would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take me on a trial basis. Yeah, they were a bank. They were a big New York bank that became a mayor at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes like boutique banks, if you work for like a hedge fund or some other weird like super rich person thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally they have interesting programming jobs and they pay lots of money and it like makes up for it. But like just a generic
⏹️ ▶️ John bank, like the sort of base level of finance, too many people I know in an industry and they just all tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me bad, bad stories. I mean, I work in healthcare and that also has a terrible reputation,
⏹️ ▶️ John well earned for computers, but there’s lots of good companies in the healthcare
⏹️ ▶️ John computer space. The products aren’t great, but the companies are reasonable places to work. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John knowing people so you can ask them, hey, do you work for an insert company here, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a gaming company, also a terrible industry, but you know, you can ask them, what’s it like to work for
⏹️ ▶️ John a bank? What’s it like to work for a hotel chain? What’s it like to work doing data analysis for a fast food chain?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is your fast food chain different from other places you work? That’s why another reason knowing people is good, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just because they can get you an interview or a job, but because you can ask them what it’s like and get the real answer and not just like
⏹️ ▶️ John from the outside before you get any real jobs in the industry it’s very difficult to gauge
⏹️ ▶️ John what a job would be like. Like when you’re in college having not had a real programming job you might think what would it be like
⏹️ ▶️ John to work at you know Apple and Facebook. Maybe you have some idea from like you read articles and stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like what would it be like to work for a bank for example, to work for
⏹️ ▶️ John a high speed training company, what would it be like to work for a networking company, what would it be like to work for Akamai
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have an idea in your head of what’s that like and I almost guarantee that unless it’s you
⏹️ ▶️ John know very public company like Apple or Google or something where you constantly see what it’s like to work there
⏹️ ▶️ John you have no idea what it’s actually like until you talk to somebody who really works there and even if you talk to somebody it’s like well I work
⏹️ ▶️ John in the whatever department and that’s a hellhole but the other department in the same company is much better so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know it’s funny what you’re describing is Capital One which is it might be officially based out of the DC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area but effectively is based out of Richmond and from what I understand Capital One is reasonably forward thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it comes to their tech stack, but it’s still an enormous, enormous business. And from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’ve gathered, typically people are well compensated, both in terms of, you know, salary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all and total comp. But beyond that, I’ve heard from many different people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in technology and outside that it’s all about what team you’re on. And some of the teams are really great and really lovely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And some of them are just friggin nightmares.
⏹️ ▶️ John actually. We heard the same thing about Apple for that. Remember, there was just a story going around of like whatever it was, like that wing
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple that handles like IT stuff and like they hire a bunch of contractors that like that was the group you
⏹️ ▶️ John do not want to work in and Apple is really bad, right? But of course we all know other groups in Apple that are awesome to work
⏹️ ▶️ John in, right? So the bigger the company, the more likely it is that there are pockets of terribleness
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe pockets of greatness or whatever. So yeah, it’s – assuming you can ever leave your house
⏹️ ▶️ John and search for a job, it’s a Tough old world out there.
#askatp: Replace PHP tomorrow?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is. All right. Final ask ATP. Assaj writes, hypothetical.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PHP is killed off from support tonight and tomorrow. You realize you need to write a new server system. Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are you writing it in? I’m partial to Ruby or Go myself, says Assaj.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is an interesting question. I mean, in reality, this would never happen. For lots of reasons. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, not only is PHP very popular and widely used, And also, what does it mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be killed off from support? PHP is open source. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough people use it that somebody, some company or companies or entities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would pick it up and would just start, they would fork it or they would maintain it or whatever. And so it would be maintained for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so that would be fine. But if I go with the spirit of the hypothetical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually assume that I really shouldn’t be writing new PHP code immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security issues, then what do I do? The very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first thing I would do is really consider whether I need to be running my own servers anymore at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. I wrote the Overcast backend before CloudKit was released.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, right before, which is kind of frustrating. It was like a year before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But now, you know, now that I’m pretty much only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focused on Apple platforms, I’m never gonna make an Android app, and I don’t care about the web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that much. So really, if I’m just gonna serve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iOS app, and by the way, frankly, most podcast app users don’t need Sync
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. Most podcast app users use it just on their phone. And that’s why a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of leading apps don’t even have Sync, and it’s fine. They don’t really lose a lot of customers over it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most people don’t even use this feature at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, you can use CloudKit from the web, by the way. The CloudKit team wanted me to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you that. Yes, I have written a CloudKit web login. So you can actually, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco linked publicly yet, but if you go to overcast.fm slash login underscore iCloud, you can log
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in with CloudKit instead of using an email and password. Anyway, I would very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first investigate, do I need a backend anymore at all? Can I do most or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of what I need to do with CloudKit and just, you know, whatever small features I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose from not having a web backend, oh well. I would be saving thousands of dollars a month would not have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant backend to maintain. So maybe that would be worth
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I thought you were keeping to the spirit of the question. The spirit of the question is, you need to write a new server system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And keeping with the spirit of the question, you said, but what if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t? Yeah, well, if I need to totally start over with my server-side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system, the first thing is that Stack Overflow answer, do I need to be doing this? Why am I using a server-side system?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the spirit of the question, is you need to write a new server system. He wants you to pick a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language. OK. There are things about it. So Ruby, I don’t love the Ruby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style. I don’t know if I would choose Ruby. One thing I love a lot about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP is that running the servers for it is incredibly easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because PHP does not have persistent processes for each request, or for different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requests. So like, you make a request, and even though it’s optimized and has opcaches and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it seems to you as the programmer is there’s no shared state in memory of the PHP process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when you make a request, you get a PHP process that happens for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco individual web request and then that’s it. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff you don’t have to worry about. For instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory leaks are just not a thing in PHP. Like you don’t have to worry about that unless you’re running long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running scripts, and I have some, but for the most part, like there’s things like that that you don’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. There’s things like shared mutable state and parallelism. PHP has no built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parallelism. There’s no multi-threaded code support at the language
⏹️ ▶️ John level. Don’t forget my favorite thing from the P languages, Python, PHP, Perl.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s segfaults, it’s not your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There is basically nothing you can do in your PHP code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it segfault on a regular basis, unless there’s a serious bug in PHP or a module you’re using. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not your fault. Yeah, it’s not your fault. It generally isn’t your problem. And chances are, Facebook has already hit it and fixed it way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before you did. What I love about PHP is that there’s a lot of classes of problems I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to think about. just by running PHP servers that in other languages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where there’s like an app process that handles requests, you know, multiple requests in parallel or in series or whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have like persistent long running processes, you have to think about a lot more things that in PHP I don’t. And a lot of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that other things have, like, oh, the app server crashed. That literally never happens to me. Like I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had that problem. It can’t really happen with a properly configured and running PHP instance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a lot of stuff that I just, it’s just easy to run PHP servers from a practical standpoint.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of the new languages don’t have those luxuries because they’re more sophisticated, they’re more advanced. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just made for answering web requests, they’re also made for writing whole applications and everything else. So they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger scopes of what they do, but that also means that when you’re running servers, you have more types of problems to worry about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would want to pick something that is simpler, that doesn’t necessarily have all that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco baggage. At the same time, I really do like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old established languages established languages like PHP, like Perl even if I have to say it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Ruby, Python, these would all be certainly worth considering because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ease of running servers for old established things, I’ve talked about this many times before, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running old boring server code or server packages and languages and stuff because old boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software tends to work a lot better and with less fussing from me because I hate being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sysadmin. I I do it because I have to to do the rest of my job. I don’t love any sysadmin type work I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. I do it because it’s required to do other stuff I care about. And so I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spend as little time doing sysadmin work as possible. I don’t want to have to babysit the servers. And I don’t want to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be woken up in the middle of the night by some process crashed and something is broken now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to do any of that. And so sticking with older, more boring, more established
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools, not using cutting edge frameworks or languages or OSs or anything like that, databases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly, you know, that’s my style. So I would look mostly at the old stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like Go for certain things. I do use Go for my crawlers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not for the whole stack, just for like the part that pulls the web pages and tells the PHP code, hey, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed has now updated, go check it. But Go is weird in a lot of ways, and I find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it cumbersome to write significant Go code. Like there’s a reason why I kept only a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple part of my app in Go, and the whole rest of it’s still PHP. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if I would pick Go. And then there’s the question of Swift. Because I’m learning Swift slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, because I have to for this other half of my job that I care more about, and I certainly would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only learn one new language instead of two, and really master that one, instead of splitting my knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continuously and splitting the tools continuously. So I would actually, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it goes against everything I just said, I would consider Swift simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could consolidate language knowledge and tools and just master one new language.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, because it would be like cutting edge and weird and not meant for this task at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure I would stick with that. There’s also the option of going for the more abstract like app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform kind of languages where you write something in JavaScript or something and it just runs in some weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abstracted like node, not in the language, but some kind of app server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco node, like Casey’s Weird Showbot thing, wherever that runs, there’s that kind of, run it on Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Engine, there’s always those kind of options. Frankly, what people do with those never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strikes me as anything compelling. Not that your server sucks, but the experience of running it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds awful. Like when people, the problems people have to deal with, those things crash,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t seem like they’re particularly performant or economical. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably wouldn’t do that either. One of the things I care a lot about is hosting things cheaply.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not because I’m a cheapskate, it’s because I wanna keep the cost of the entire business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low enough that I don’t have to outsource things to other services and that I don’t have to charge for sync
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. Like I wrote my push notification stuff last week, that’s what I was talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can send push notifications for nothing because I write my own low-level code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t bring in a whole bunch of packages, I’m using fast, easy languages that don’t need much. You know, like I don’t need to call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to some other service that’s gonna charge me a fee or take a percentage of my income to do simple stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push notifications, subscription management, stuff like that, you know. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to still not fully answer the question, I guess, I think the first thing I would ask is, do I still need the server backend?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I really, really need one, I would take a quick look at Swift, probably running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away screaming, and then go to something boring like Python.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode and Mack Weldon, and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental. accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John twitter you can follow them at c-a-s e-y-l-i-s-s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s Casey Liss m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a-n-t Marco Armin s-i-r-a-c
⏹️ ▶️ John u-s-a-c-a-r-a-c-u-s-a It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t mean to Accidental, check podcast so long
Neutral: Push-starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We did delay this week partly for my kid’s birthday and partly because of magic keyboards arriving for me
⏹️ ▶️ John today. It wouldn’t delay for my new Mac GPU. I know. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hell is it gonna come? Tomorrow, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. Although I don’t know if that’s actually true. I ordered a car battery too and that car battery is
⏹️ ▶️ John having a lot of delivery exceptions. It’s hard for me to tell whether anything is even in motion but someday
⏹️ ▶️ John I might get a car battery. Delivery exception? What does that mean? Well it means there’s been an
⏹️ ▶️ John exception to delivery. All right, well, is it ever going to come? I don’t know, delivery exception.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am kind of surprised that you can get a car battery delivered.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was surprised that, what do you call it, my local dealership wouldn’t deliver a battery. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they’d deliver anything. I’ve ordered all sorts of parts for my cars, but they wouldn’t deliver a battery. So I had to go, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John every place online. They’ll probably deliver a whole car. Yeah. The battery is 30 pounds and filled
⏹️ ▶️ John with hazardous materials, and I had to pay hazardous material fee but it was still cheaper than the alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ John and I didn’t want to leave my house. Yeah I found this out from I’ve been driving my car every like week or two just
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep it driving but letting it sit a little bit too long in my driveway
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t start so I had to jump it and then realized…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh slow down slow down slow down why’d you jump
⏹️ ▶️ John it? To get it started.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah why wouldn’t you push start it
⏹️ ▶️ John man? I’m not gonna push start it off my driveway into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey street. No, no, no, no, no. You just let it roll. I remember your driveway having a small
⏹️ ▶️ John incline. I know how to push start a car. I’ve done it before, but given the choice, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John much rather start at the civilized way with electricity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, but where’s the fun in that? That’s like one of the few advantages anymore of having a six
⏹️ ▶️ John speed. I was all excited to clean the battery terminals, but you know what? You could eat off of them. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so clean. Oh, God. No, but seriously, that’s like one of the only fun things about having a stick anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, I prefer it for a lot of fun reasons, But academically speaking, you know, that’s one of the only fun things you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can still do with the stick that you can’t do with a regular car.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like that. It seems mean to do to the car.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t like it. Ah, so much empathy for the
⏹️ ▶️ John machine. It’s a fun start, but exactly. Anyway, but yeah, my battery is what, six years old now, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve never actually done a push start. So do you literally just like get it rolling and then how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you start the spark
⏹️ ▶️ John plugs? Compression. The magic of compression will ignite. It’s like a diesel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you still are turning the key to start at some point just to turn on the spark plugs and everything? Like how do you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that? Yeah. So well, so first of all, have you never seen the karate kid? No second of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you not seen the karate? Holy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t be but this was like our time to watch those kinds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, you’re right anyways, so yeah, so you put that well back when we had cars with keys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and engines and And for some of us engines, ah, yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was gonna say, this is a problem I don’t have. To push start the car, you put the car in second gear, typically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you put it in run, and it’s just not gonna do anything because you didn’t crank the starter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you probably can’t crank the starter, otherwise why would you be push starting it? And you skateboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the side, well, actually, at this point, you would not be in gear, hypothetically, or you have somebody push behind you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you’re skateboarding out the side or both, Then once you’ve gotten to like five ish miles an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour, you know, enough that you’re getting a pretty good clip for having pushed the car, um, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get in the car, if you’re not already in it, you know, push down on the clutch, put it in second gear, make sure it’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run, dump the clutch, pop the clutch. And if necessary, give a little juice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. And hopefully everything will start coming to life and, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will start. The car, because if you think about it, what does the starter do? a starter is spinning the flywheel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with an electric motor. Well, if you connect a spinning transmission to the flywheel by taking your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey foot off the clutch, guess what you’re doing? You’re spinning the flywheel and hopefully starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the motor. It’s the same thing, just a much more aggravating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process. All right, and then I guess that’s driving the alternator, so that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mm-hmm. Or whatever sparks. Yeah, yeah. Whatever power, are spark plugs DC or AC? I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe. DC, yeah. Why is something called an alternator that generates DC?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a good question. Because I guess everything’s in a car is DC then. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why is it called an alternator? I presume it’s about the power generation, not the consumption. But like, not to say it’s generating
⏹️ ▶️ John AC. Or we could be entirely wrong about whether it’s DC. Who knows? I don’t know that much about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. I think everything in a car is DC, but I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John work. The interesting thing about push starting a car and the excitement of it, well, first of all, I think the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that, Casey, that you could like have your foot out the thing and be pushing your car along is a fantasy
⏹️ ▶️ John for my youth, because to get my cars moving at all, you’d have to be outside the car, pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John against like the A pillar with all your might, you know, totally outside the car, two feet
⏹️ ▶️ John on the ground to get it rolling. And then you have to jump in the, hopefully now just starting to move car, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ John way more exciting part. And then, so you pop the clutch and you’re hoping the engine roars
⏹️ ▶️ John to life. But what if the problem wasn’t just that it was a bad battery, but what if there’s something else wrong with your crap box?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you have a car that you are now rolling in that has not started even though you dumped the clutch.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then hopefully your brakes, you know, you’re able to stop the car with either the parking brakes or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John force you can muster into the hydraulic system from, you know, that’s what old cars are a little bit better in this regard than new ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are all reasons not do this. Use, you know, jumper cables attached to your battery
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll work much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. Now, do you go, do you, I haven’t jumped a car in a couple of years now, but do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connect all four cables to the batteries or do you do the right thing and actually ground on one
⏹️ ▶️ John side? So here’s the thing about the right thing that we learned as kids. Good luck finding
⏹️ ▶️ John an unpainted piece of metal in the engine bay of a modern
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey car. Good luck. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that. The BMW had a post, a specific post, specifically for grounding, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John for jumping. If there’s a specific place in my accord for it, I could not find it. Like, there’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John painted metal. And in case you’re wondering, no, it does not work through the paint. Like, I tried it. I’m like, well, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they just, maybe it’ll work and maybe the little, no. I had to do it to the terminal, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t find an unpainted piece of metal on the engine bay. I didn’t look at the owner’s manual. Maybe there is some post
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m supposed to look at too. But bottom line is the reason they’re telling you to do that is like outgassing and exploding batteries and yada
⏹️ ▶️ John yada. And it’s like, again, in modern cars, much less likely than before. Not that I, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ John kids read your owner’s manual, that’s the actual way to do it. But I couldn’t be bothered. The real challenge was,
⏹️ ▶️ John the real challenge was, hey, do you know where the jumper cables are? I was so excited. I found
⏹️ ▶️ John the jumper cable box, guess what was in it? Not jumper cables. Like, oh, come on. It’s like a trap
⏹️ ▶️ John set. I think my dad did that. I think he was cleaning up in my garage and he found a bunch of cables and he found a box.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was like just a bunch of household extension cords. It was like the exact right weight for it. I opened it up, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of extension cords. Like, oh. Like finding stuff that you haven’t used in years and years, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John in my house, is not easy. So that was the hardest part of the whole thing, was finding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where were they? Did you not have them in the note or
⏹️ ▶️ John it was? didn’t have them on the squirrel list. I looked, you know, I haven’t seen them in ages. So where were they? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, I didn’t, I didn’t even end up finding the jumper cables. What I found was my car starting thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I had from, that’s even older, that basically has the equivalent of jumper cables in it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, six of one, half a dozen, the other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot see you push starting a car today. Like I could, I could totally see you doing it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in your twenties.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally want to see you push starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a car. Oh, I definitely want to see it. I just don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John it happening. If I had to, I could do, but I would only do it in an emergency situation. That’s the only time I did
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the past too, emergency situations. Like the stupid, the dome light in my stupid Volvo wagon,
⏹️ ▶️ John just leaving the dome light on while you’re at the beach at night when you’re not supposed to be, like you come back to the parking lot and the
⏹️ ▶️ John dome light drains your battery. That’s what, I don’t know if that dome light was like halogen, I
⏹️ ▶️ John understand how it could, then it was like, you’re not leaving this beach unless you push start this car and that’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the dark. Oh, that’s fun. No hills, no hills, this is pancake flat parking lot. You know what it’s like.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re out on the barrier beach and it’s just one big flat parking lot. That’s why you gotta be
⏹️ ▶️ John pressing against that A pillar with all your might and running as hard as you can and then jump in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not about to try it, but I wanna know what happens with a push start car, like mine, for example. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have a key. You put a push to start with a button? Sorry, yes, yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if I literally don’t have enough juice to even get it to run? Like presumably there could be a state where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has enough juice to activate like the car computer and so on and so forth, but it just can’t turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over, right? But what happens if I don’t even have enough juice for that? Like, could I
⏹️ ▶️ John push start it? Yeah, that’s the problem with modern cars. You need some minimal amount of electricity for anything to work, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John old cars were so mechanical. Like, I don’t know if the compression ignition is a real thing or just I’m imagining
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I always imagined in cars with primitive, in older cars, like from the 70s with primitive
⏹️ ▶️ John systems, that you really didn’t need much electricity at all to get the party going,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But whereas now, like you said, What if you can’t even boot up the systems that
⏹️ ▶️ John are required to disengage all the interlocks to allow electricity to flow to the spark plugs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, at this point, like any modern car, you have this similar situation as like, you know, if something goes wrong with your Apple product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The answer, if anything goes wrong, is contact your nearest service center.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, right. Yeah, you can still jumpstart cars if you can find the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? In fact, I looked at the battery terminals on my wife’s car were not clean. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, let me find what the state of the art technology in battery terminal cleaning is. That was a YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John rabbit hole that was not fruitful. Because if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John bad advice about things that are your car, just look on YouTube. Like, you name it, it’s in there. As you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at stuff, you’re like, this can’t be the way to do it. This is the way that you’re doing it, person on YouTube, but you do not
⏹️ ▶️ John seem authoritative. Let me continue searching. Marco’s car doesn’t move when his battery’s dead either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing you can do about that. than that. Push it all you want. It’s not going anywhere. I would
⏹️ ▶️ John just contact Monero Service Center. They’d come and bring you a second Tesla that you could get in and drive away. They would!
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the funny thing. But they painted it ugly red stuff on the side so you won’t keep it.