It’s that there’s no life native to those environments. The authors is making the point that lay people, us, lack a frame of reference for how inhospitable Mars is.
Of the 90’s era deck building games it had the most advanced mechanics. The unique, beautiful, brilliance of the game was an element of randomness built into the game be the cards themselves.
Your deck was a stack that you would often draw the top from to determine random elements. Then place the card on the bottom (there’s more to this rule, but good enough for now).
Experienced players could learn to count cards in the end game, creating either fast, dynamic play or hard fought chess battles, jockeying for positions slowly undermining your opponent.
Tournament games had a time limit, but I’ve played regulation decks for 3 hours.
Lucasfilm eventually pulled the license for lesser games, but for a while it was amazing.
I've been an iOS dev for... 12 years now. And I love it. I'm in a position now where I'm learning Android for the first time. It's Kotlin and I don't hate it. And I'm still trying to learn back end. I can't code my way out of a box using HTML. I guess you'd say I can't code my way out of a <div>
The ecosystem is amazing. I love the tools. Xcode is a joy of an IDE to work with. There's some room to improve, but compared to everything else... it's not even a question. The community is full of people who are full of wonder and excitement.
As a web dev, you probably already know some Ruby and have some familiarity with some build tools that I didn't when I came to iOS dev. That'll help. You won't be exclusive to Apple. You'll be using CocoaPods and Gradle and Bazel and Jenkins and Travis and god only knows what else. On any given day I code in Swift, Objective-C, Ruby, Kotlin, and Groovy.
At the end of the day, remember you'll be doing this 40 to 80 hours a week. Make sure you enjoy it.
Curious how you have handled some of these challenges:
1. What do you do to avoid massive view controllers? I have found that a lot of iOS apps I have worked on end up having the view controller be responsible for doing everything from fetching data from an API to setting the corner radius on some component. This leads to view controllers being really big and not unit tested.
2. Do you do anything to explicitly keep your application state in one place? I find that state in iOS apps ends up being scattered between a data store, singletons and view controllers. This is a lot more cumberesome than something like Redux where state is just in a single store.
3. I am pretty excited about SwiftUI as it addresses a lot of these pain points and brings iOS development into a more modern era similar to React. What is your opinion of SwiftUI? Are you using it on your apps? If so, what have been the challenges of introducing it into existing apps? If not, why not?
1. Don't have massive VCs by not having massive VCs. That sounds unhelpful, but hear me out... You're asking the VC to do too much. Break that sucker down. Have many, many small classes that do small things. Use libraries for stuff. A VC should be a hub to transit data from the user to a model us MVVC, MVP, MVC... I don't care, every architecture has their acolyte.
2. No. Again not helpful. This is a domain specific problem. I will say I'm waging a now multi-decade war against singletons. Dependency injection is the way to go. For Swift checkout Swinject, it really superpowers your testing.
3. Haven't touched it... yet. My primary projects need to ship and my secondary projects haven't hit the point of UI. Won't until later this year. Then I'll deal with SwiftUI. Combine, however, is my new hawtness and I recommend diving into.
I cook or eat left overs 6 nights a week at this point. Beyond saving a massive amount of money it's shocking how much better the steak I make myself is than one I can get out. Most cities have kitchen equipment stores (not just Bed Bath) that actually have cooking courses you can take.
Saving massive amount of money? Judging just from demographic that uses hackernews (mostly tech workers), I think it's actually cheaper to eat out if you measure price of your time by how much money would you earn in that time while working compared to shopping for the ingredients, cooking and doing dishes.
That's an optimization that looks good in theory but is poor in practice. Evidence has proven that we consume more calories at restaurants than we do when we cook at home. There's a lot more to get out of cooking at home than nutrition, though. As others have alluded to, the experience of cooking and working with your hands is excellent (and cheap) therapy.
As for economy, you will find it once you've built up a good stock of spices and non-perishables and begin to optimize things by--for example--making chicken stock from the bones of that bird you roasted for dinner, or freezing the extra tomato paste from the can that you used 1/3 of.
This is coming from a guy who spent the first 15 years of his tech career eating out every single meal before meeting a girl, getting married, and then eating 6 of 7 weekly dinners at home.
My doctor tells me the secret to long life includes not eating out too often. Which is short for restaurants tend to cook in ways you wouldn't at home: deep fried food is much more common. They tend to use more salt than I would. Sugar is added to things that don't need it. Cheap oils instead of the better quality ones...
I'm a salaried employee, I don't get paid extra if I stay an hour later and get a takeaway on my way home, and I still have to pay for the takeaway. I get the idea, but you can't work 24/7
I've been there, done that. It's not worth the extra $20-30k/year to do nothing but code. Even if I had clients to fill 80 hours a week I would still only work 40. Life is too short to do nothing but earn money.
If I go to H-E-B and buy a rib eye steak for $15.99 a pound and cook it. I'm out less than $15.99, because I don't want a pound of steak. If I go to a mid range steak restaurant I'm going to get a rib-eye for $29.99 for 12 oz of steak. And it's going to be of lower grade and less seasoned. Why would I do that?
Also, I'm not working all the time. Cooking is a way of relaxing.
Even if I charge $250/hour I'll still save both money and time when doing grocery shopping and meal prepping every sunday night. It's not like I'd been working on a sunday night anyway so I can't count those 5-6 hours/month spent on grocery shopping and cooking as a "loss of income".
Don’t underestimate the value of build tools. Just because you know Xcode and Swift or Android Studio and Kotlin (or their antecedent languages) are you done. Finally having a senior dev who knows what he’s talking about has done more for me in the past two years than the previous 8 of reading blog posts and hacking. He’s shown me the real value of build scripts. Today even my personal iOS projects are dependent on a combination of Swift, Ruby, YAML, and Kotlin to build. It’s complicated to set up but I can prove that my code works.
Having attempted this in the past let me say: I’m in violent agreement.
Attempting to “share code” between Swift/Kotlin is folly at this point. I’m not going to close the door on Kotlin Native some day. But for now just say, “No”.
Theorizing that one could time travel within their own lifetime, I led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top secret project, known as "Quantum Leap". Pressured to prove my theories or lose funding, I prematurely stepped into the Project Accelerator and vanished. I awoke to find myself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not my own. Fortunately, contact with my own time was made through brainwave transmissions with Al, the Project Observer, who appeared in the form of a hologram that only I could see and hear. Trapped in the past, I find myself leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong and hoping each time that my next leap will be the leap home.
City of Mist. Very cinematic with a lot of Comic Book overtones. Simple rules. All you need are 2d6. Starter kit comes with some great characters.
https://www.cityofmist.co
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