Why is the quick fix so seductive? What happens when we get too involve in them? This week I talk about the real costs and the culture it creates.

In the middle of trying to get five projects done, I’ve been hearing a lot about Imposter Syndrome. A week or two ago came an article on LinkedIn about Impostor Syndrome in programming. Ever since I’ve seen an article pop up here or there. I’ve known this all too well for so much of my life it resonated with me.

For those who want the shortest version of a definition, I defer to Musician Amanda Palmer. When I read her book The Art of Asking, I found wasn’t alone in this anxiety, though she called it the Fraud Police:

The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of “real” grown-ups who you believe—at some subconscious level—are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying: We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.(1)

If you’ve ever been successful at something and then look around you and think that your coworkers are so much smarter and better than you and you don’t deserve your success, you’ve been hit with Impostor Syndrome. When you get into a panic when you are afraid someone will find out you don’t know everything about your topic, you’ve been hit with impostor syndrome.

I think, on an everyday basis, I do feel like every one of those in some way or another. I’ve felt that way for much of my life. But somehow I got control over it. I’d like to explore what I do and think.

Before I do, I want to point out a few things. The most critical is you can’t know everything. In any discipline, there always more to know that is knowable. What compounds our ignorance is what I’ve called the Red Queen Dilemma, referring to Lewis Carrol’s Character in Through the Looking Glass.

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Technology does this to all of us. Standing still is falling behind. Moore’s law makes it impossible to learn enough. By the time you learn one thing, the world changes on you. A year ago, my Book Practical Autolayout for Xcode 8 went obsolete three days after publication. One critical menu selection, the resolver, moved to a toolbar button, making the entire book’s tutorial obsolete and indeed confusing to use.

Secondly, there is a paradox of huge social pressure to appear super competent and successful. When your colleagues and friends post only their successes online, it becomes too easy to measure yourself only by their successes. In those you aspire to be, you don’t see all the pain and failure in getting where they are. All evidence is to the instant success, and everyone posts success when you are feeling the failure and pain of working towards success.

Thirdly, imposter syndrome is a pandemic among successful people. If you have great or small success, you’re probably going to feel at least one you didn’t deserve it, because you don’t know what you are doing. While Amanda Palmer might be famous in the world of music, her Husband, fantasy author Neil Gaiman is arguably a Literary rock star. Yet he tells a story about one time he really felt Impostor syndrome:

Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realize that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.

On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened,

Last week I was on vacation. During that time I’ve walked through a big bookstore: The Tattered Cover on Colfax Avenue, Denver Colorado. Ten or fifteen years ago, perusing the shelves of my nearest Borders Books, I would have had a very different reaction than the one I was having there. I would have both hands filled, weighed down by many books. This time, it is only one. My urges are so different here today, and it says a lot of who I am and how I have changed.

Goodbye for now, and thank you.

 

Some of the things I learned while recording at Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning last week. Also my plans for 2017 books and web lessons.

Hello all.

This week, I’m writing on the website about converting strings into doubles. For some cases this is easy, but if the string is a time or a fraction, it’s not so simple. We’ll look at how to parse these strings into Doubles.  You’ll find a Swift Playground file there to experiment or use the functions I came up with to convert strings.

It’s the time of year for the holidays. Apple closes down just about anything a developer or author wants. I for one missed my deadline for updating books. All the updates will happen in January 2017. I’m scheduled for early January 2017 to record the next courses for Lynda.com, after I’m done there, it will be book concentration time.

Most people tend to go for a holiday special or do reruns over the holidays. I’ve never done a holiday special before, but I’d like to do one today. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, some of it works here, some does not. Sitting in Starbuck’s with the Christmas music blasting too loud has me thinking about the season

There’s one story that’s ancient. It was compiled into a biblical commentary called Avodah Zarah, a name that sort of translates into “dealing with idolators.”  It was compiled 1800 years ago, but I would venture to guess it is far older than that. The story I’m thinking of concerns Adam and Eve, just after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The days begin to get shorter, the nights longer. Not knowing the Winter Solstice is the way of the world, Adam is afraid this is the death God told him about. As the day get shorter and shorter, Adam and Eve begin fasting in repentance. After the Solstice, the days begin to get longer. Adam gives sacrifices in thanksgiving. He  made those days around the solstice into holidays.  People since then have always marked those days with feasting, some in holiness, some in idolatry.

The important part of this is darkness. This year especially so. The Jewish Calendar is a Lunar calendar adjusted for the seasons.  It means this holiday season has very little sun and very little moon — it is the darkest of the dark.  That’s why it is all lights festivals. The star of Bethelem, Christmas trees, Menorahs, and Yule logs are about light cutting through the darkness. They are all metaphors for the same thing: In times of spiritual and mental darkness, we must be the light cutting though the darkness, enlightening ourselves and others.

I go into this in a religious context a lot more in the one fable I’ve ever published on Kindle, The Tzaddik of Klaas.

It’s a bit of a Christmas origin tale, jewish folk tale and interfaith philosophical discussion. It’s one of the best writing I’ve ever done. But I want to look at this in terms of the creative indie, more than religion. Darkness is around us in many ways. Creativity and the creative chases away the darkness. The greatest creative act ever wether you believe the Bible or the Big Bang was “let there be light.”

We can enlighten, we can delight. Contrary to its detractors, Apple has rarely invented anything. They just took what was there and made it a delight. We can make our creative work a game that makes a bad day better, a course or book that makes a frustrating  problem simpler, or an app that gets a tedious job done. All can bring light into the world. All can have a user interface that makes intuitive  sense to our user, helping them do what they need to do. Your code can make the world a brighter place.

As I’ve spoken to may of you, I’ve learned you have knowledge and wisdom beyond code. Many of your projects are about your expertise translated into code for a mobile device. It may not be your programming as much as your content that bring joy and delight to your customers.

Hello folks!

I’ll start again with the business stuff then work into my commentary for the week.

If you didn’t se it yet, I did post last week about the new Update Frames button in Xcode 8.1. I’m trying to finish four Lynda.com courses at the same time, so I’ll try to get to fix it in the books soon as I can, but I’m swamped. You’ll find the article also on the Book’s webpage

The new lesson is up on the website. This week I’m showing you how to use actions and categories with your notifications. This is a cool way to execute bits of code directly from the notification without opening the app.

For the tip of the week, I found out that the newer simulators work just like their device counterparts. That means any use of 3d touch in a simulator requires you to have a 3D touch trackpad. If you don’t have a 3D touch trackpad, you can’t do all functions  on iPhone 6s, 6s plus, 7 and 7 plus simulators. As I’ll describe in the post, this has some serious repercussions, since the newer phones require a 3d tap to get the actions displayed. The workaround is to use an iPhone 6 or 6 plus to test notifications or other application using 3D touch in the API’s. This would be the latest phone without the 3D touch feature.

I have a new idea for this newsletter that I’m beginning to work on. I have two readers who were nice enough to send me their apps to look at. Both apps I like a lot, and I’m thinking they might be cool to review and constructively critique on the newsletter. I haven’t gotten permission from either person yet, so If I do this, it will start next week. If you are interested in submitting an app in the app store for review, send me a valid redemption code  at [email protected] with some info about you and your app and I’ll take a look.

Some of you might remember last week I promised to tell you about the second best memopry from my trip to Russia. That memory actually happened not in Russia but in Helsinki, on a stopover, but  on my way home.  It turns out I heard some news last week that dovetails into that story.

Restaurateur Jim Delligatti died last week at the ripe old age of 98. You might not know that name, but I’m betting most of you know of his innovation, one that the corporate environment he belonged to resisted. Delligatti knew  it would be a hit, because he listened to his customers more than corporate. His innovation is known world wide. While he lived in Pennsylvania, it was in Helsinki that I found his invention was the best sandwich I ever tasted.

In August of 1986, a few months before I went to Russia, the Chernobyl disaster happened. It changed our trip, cancelling the original stop of Kiev since getting there would require going dangerously close to the affected area. It changed the name of our dinner and lunch too. No longer was it called Chicken Kiev. It was Chernobyl Chicken.  Lunch and dinner every day for two weeks was Chernobyl Chicken. Even the ultra hot mustard condiment was not enough to make this tasty by the end of the trip.  After two weeks, I never wanted to see a butter stuffed breaded chicken breast again.

On our way back from the Soviet Union, we had an overnight layover in Helsinki. Many of my class mates and I went across the road from our hotel, to a restaurant there. I think we all ordered the same sandwich. The two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun I ordered with fries and a Coke was the best sandwich I ever ate.

Yeah it was a Big Mac. That was Jim Delligati’s invention.

There’s a lot to unpack there.

Hello All,

Just a little bit of business this week and then on to some thoughts for the week. This week’s post is inspired by correspondence I’ve had with Denny, one of the subscribers to this list. It’s the basics of using gestures in your own applications, where I’ll cover taps, pinches and rotations. 

I also had a lot of problems with Xcode this week. First the beta iOS on my phone won’t work with the non beta Xcode I was using. Then the latest beta wouldn’t work. Kept getting a cryptic error message in the build. Turns out that a lot of fatal errors that have cryptic error messages when using devices occur due to corrupted or invalid provisioning profiles. Took me till Friday to clear the problem and get real work done this week.

I’ve gotten a lot of ideas from people writing me this week for posts. Someone from Twitter wants me to follow up my notification posts with one on Notification actions, which will be next week.

Updating Frames in Autolayout

For those of you about to tear your hair out about auto layout, Apple made a change that makes me want to scream. They changed where Update Frames is, deleting the original selections in the resolver. You’ll find it as an icon next to the left of the stack view icon.



Why they had to delete it from the resolver, I have no idea. What it means is  I have another round of revisions to Practical auto layout to do that I don’t have time for. I’ll have an errata in the website about it shortly.

Thoughts for the Week

I’ll end the post this week with some more thoughts. Due to some letters I received last week, and a movie I saw over the weekend, I want to relate some memories from a long time ago. When I was in college I spend a mini-semester touring the Soviet Union for a very cold, dark December, but one that was very enlightening. I had some interesting adventures like getting interrogated by the KGB if I had any contraband. Besides being patted down and having them try to see if I had a false compartment in my boots nothing else exciting happened.  Then there was tour bus leaving without me and my roommate at the Moscow Circus. We made it back to our hotel using the Moscow metro with no problem. But that’s not the two memories I remember most. I had an idea that started jelling a few days into the trip, and kept getting stronger as the  trip continued. As foreign nationals we were  almost always escorted everywhere by the Soviet tourist agency Intourist and of course given the party line about everything. I stopped counting the times our guide mentioned that Russia got invaded by some other nation — until I saw the bullet holes in Leningrad, now St Petersburg. Bullet holes were in buildings everywhere, from when the Nazis tried to capture the city. There were still bombed out buildings in the outskirts of the city from World War Two. On the plane home, after my second best memory of that trip (I’ll talk about that next week) I formulated my trip in a very simple idea.  There’s people who risk and people who want to be safe. As a large social unit, the People of the Soviet Union, and I suspect still much of Russia today, want to be safe more than anything else. On the other hand,  there are those who want to risk to become better, are willing to work hard, and willing to get very uncomfortable just to grow and succeed. In 1986, I believed that was what forged the United States and made it great. The U.S.  with two exceptions is an immigrant nation. People risked everything to come to America. These people worked hard and innovated hard to succeed, and the incredible growth of the U.S. Has that in its DNA.  That was my idea at the time. It gave me great framework to understand the true cultural clash of the USA and the USSR, why we both spent so much money pointing missiles at each other during the Cold War. One wanted to be safe,

Hello Folks,

I’m going to start with some follow-up from last week. Last Monday seems almost a century ago, though it was only seven days. I was upset and very depressed last week.  I was also honest, a little more honest than some on this list wanted.  In retrospect the damage isn’t bad. I got only one really nasty note about that post, who I unsubscribed and five people who unsubscribed either complaining that post was inappropriate or my politics didn’t belong in their feed. I assure you that is my last truly political post.  The post was more about my feelings than anything else.

With that said I will make clear that A Slice of App Pie is my site and I will say and do exactly what I want here. If you believe that you are in any way superior to any other human being because of your gender, who you choose to love, the color of your skin or your religion,  please unsubscribe. I will not be political, but much of what I have to say about being a creative indie assumes we are all equal but have cultural differences. I don’t call that political — that’s who I am. You won’t be comfortable with what I am going to say if you cannot accept that.

Okay enough of that. Onto the first topic of the week  which is still related to last week’s post.

Those six people give us a really cool opportunity for you to understand why I moved the e-mail list. That explanation was supposed to be last weeks post – why I made the move from Tinyletter to Mail Chimp. While I like Mail Chimp, this applies to other similar e-mail list system such as Constant Contact. Higher end mail systems have nicer content creation tools, and the look of the newsletter plus the speed I’m able to produce it are very important to that decision.

The second reason I moved is metrics. Tinyletter had almost no metrics. On tiny letter, I know only that a little less than third of the newsletters got opened. Beyond that I know nothing. Mail Chimp is a different creature. I know a lot about you, more than you can imagine. One example is the location you subscribed from. I can assume a lot about you from that information, and even group you regionally. Our six wayward friends, between their exit comments when they unsubscribed and their location lets me makes some simple inferences. While I have street addresses, for our purposes all you need to know is they were from Georgia, Western Washington State, Texas and Kansas. Given the political outlook in those geographic regions their unsubscribing makes total sense, and I wish them well.

That’s the example I wanted to share with you of using analytics to understand something that happens to a list. Unfortunately I don’t have any interesting data on iTunes connect for an example. The analytics is getting better there, but they aren’t as granular as this — at least for us.  Apple doesn’t give exact locations for a download, only countries. I’d love to see for my apps where people are downloading them. Geographic data can tell you a lot, as tribes do form in geographical regions. These are people with shared cultural values. If you have access to the cultural values or other demographic data that you can assume cultural values from, you can understand an audience better. That’s really what I’m doing with Mail Chimp. I’m looking at who you are, and then I can write what might be the best articles. Not everyone will agree or like what I write, but I know who I am writing to better.

Some of you, rightly so, should be getting chills. The first time I opened Mail Chimp’s analytics, I got them too. Even when you don’t volunteer information, you are giving a lot more than you imagine. Most e-mail systems do this to get the best idea of who their audience is. My ethics is such that while I will reference this data, I will not mention specific data about anyone. I will,

Hello all,

As promised, This will be a longer one. A lot going on here, Some of which you already know. We have a lot of book news, and I can finally tell you about the Lynda.com course.

First the tip of the week. With Practical Autolayout now released, I’m going to talk about Apple’s bizarre way of writing constraints. One thing I cover in the book is reading constraints directly in the document outline. For constraints that are relations between two views, there is a folder in the document outline that contains all of them. Suppose you have two buttons labeled Banana and Hot Fudge. They are spaced horizontally apart 10 points and pinned to the top and later margin.

Click open the constraints in the document you see they are written as algebra equations.

One equation in the set there would be: Hot Fudge.leading = Banana.trailing + 10. These equations default to plus, never minus. That equation tells you that there is spacing of 10 points between the Hot fudge leading edge and the trailing edge of Banana. If you see a minus, that means someone manually reversed the constraints. If it is flush with the margin, there would also be a constraint of Banana.leading = leadingMargin, meaning the leading edge of Banana is on the leading margin. It doesn’t not say +0 in those cases, it just leaves it off. An alignment can also be a equivalence. Both buttons when top aligned would have a equation of Banana.top = Hot Fudge.top.

If you know how to read these in the document outline, you can pick out constraints directly there, for modification or deletion. It’s a good skill to add, and speeds up selecting constraints. I go into this more in Practical Autolayout for Xcode 8, and where it is particularly useful.

Speaking of Practical Autolayout, its out and I’m starting to see sales. I’m going to assume that the first nine iBooks sales and eight Kindle sales for the Xcode 8 version I got are from my readers on the email list. Thank you for those sales. Hopefully I’ll be able to increase those sales over the next few weeks. For this list there an elephant still in the room I’m going to talk about right now: updates.

If you read my post late last week announcing the book, I told you the bad news: I made too many changes to the structure of the iBook to be an update of the previous book, and therefore had to issue a completely new edition. I did get a good question about this last week: If you have to buy a new book, which device should you pick? I have two answers for you: The first is the one you find most comfortable reading. The Kindle edition has the dynamic fonts so you can change the font and font size of the text. The iBooks version is static, but has been carefully formatted to fit the page Here’s examples of the same page in both formats. If you are listening to this on the podcast, you can check the show notes for the images.

Whatever device you like is great — in one perspective any book you buy is good for me. On the other hand, I do make more from the sale of an iBook at a 70% royalty than a Kindle version at 35%, so I’m kinda biased towards iBooks, where I can at least correct typos and update to everybody the corrections. You can also download free sample chapters on both platforms if you want to try them out.

You can find more on the iBooks version here and the Kindle version here. If you are listening to the podcast I left the links in the transcript.

There’s another elephant in the room too: updating Swift Swift View controllers. I have no idea what’s going to happen there. I was already planning for a update incrementally, and that might just get me past the filters that look for big structural changes.