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Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

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Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#161

Post by skybrian »

EpicEng wrote: post #137
skybrian wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you might not be quite getting the concept behind this sort of interview. Although some code is written, this is (usually) a test of how you talk about code. You want to show that, if a co-worker asks for your advice on how to solve a tricky problem, you will be able to help them figure it out. Part of this is understanding what they're asking for and adapting. If someone wants to know how to document…

>It sounds like you might not be quite getting the concept behind this sort of interview. Although some code is written, this is (usually) a test of how you talk about code. Assuming everything the GP said is true, what you're saying is completely contradicted by the fact that they were dinged for not using a null coalescing operator.

Well, yeah. But it may be that, when talking to a co-worker about something, they point out some programming syntax you weren't aware of, just as a way of trying to be helpful. What's a good way to handle it?

You could thank them for pointing it out, say you're not sure you want to use it (if you don't think it's better) and then get the conversation back on track. And, hopefully they'll think you handled it smoothly and won't take off points, but you'll never know how important it is to them that you're fluent in Swift. Maybe not at all, it's just an aside?

Which is to say, usually you can't tell in an interview what they're really grading you on. It's nerve-racking, but you just have to try to seem reasonable and hope that works.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#162

Post by FpUser »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #132
eugeniub wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most languages have had this since the 1960s. > It's called the "if" clause. If we got rid of everything we don't absolutely need in programming, we would have to get rid of 98% of Swift syntax, and probably every modern programming language including Swift.

Yes, but I LIKE Swift, because of all that sugar. I started off with machine language, in embedded systems. You can't get much more "raw" than that. I have been writing Swift exclusively for a long time. I speak it without an accent. It's my beauty. But I also know that you can have so much sugar you fall into a diabetic coma.

>But I also know that you can have so much sugar you fall into a diabetic coma.

Exactly my feelings. Same thing here started from machine code and now doing everything else including kitchen sink

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#163

Post by mypalmike »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #126
GGfpc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, while documentation is extremely important in the real world, interviews are time-constrained, and it makes no sense to write documentation when you have 45 minutes to implement something like that.

Ignoring dozens of repos (non-forked), and thousands of lines of testable, shipping code, is probably not helpful. I was a manager for a long time. I loved long résumés and relevant material. I was hiring expensive people to work on really important stuff, and there was no way that I wanted to rush the vetting. Also, I never gave a single test, and I think I got it right, every time.

Large companies tend to aim for standardization in the hiring process. They want apples to apples comparisons as much as possible, largely for legal reasons, but also for tracking metrics. Unfortunately, someone submitting high quality GitHub repo links doesn't fit a model where not many candidates are doing that.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#164

Post by RaiseProfits »

GGfpc wrote: post #104
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #70

Some time ago, I was contacted by Apple to apply for a job. My code is insanely well-documented. I like to think that a lot of the inspiration for my code docs comes from Apple's open codebases. Their code is exceptionally well-documented. In any case, as is usual with all employers, these days, they completely ignored the focused, relevant links that I sent them to elements of my extensive portfolio of repos, and, i…

To be honest, while documentation is extremely important in the real world, interviews are time-constrained, and it makes no sense to write documentation when you have 45 minutes to implement something like that.

...which just shows how noisy that signal was to begin with.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#165

Post by keithnoizu »

onion2k wrote: post #157
GGfpc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, while documentation is extremely important in the real world, interviews are time-constrained, and it makes no sense to write documentation when you have 45 minutes to implement something like that.

Hiring people who can pass a clever quiz without verifying if they do good work in the real world is precisely how a company ends up at the top of HN with the headline "Apple, Your Developer Documentation Is… Missing". I would argue that "how fast can someone implement this algorithm?" is a considerably less useful question to answer than "does this person document their code?" in an interview. If time is the constra…

what key macros do you setup to make jumping around in your IDE faster.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#166

Post by jamil7 »

AgloeDreams wrote: post #91
jtchang wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "cascaded nil-coalescing operator" ?

I'm not sure how it looks in ObjC but in Typescript you could write something like: let studentScoreFormatted: string = student.formattedScore ?? 'Student has not taken this test yet.'; Whereas if the score is null it will return the value after `??`. It is awfully helpful for ensuring you handle error states in displaying API values. Additionally if you want this behavior but when the value is falsey, then you can u…

Do you mean Swift? I didn't think Typescript had something like this yet.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#167

Post by Razengan »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #88
jtchang wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "cascaded nil-coalescing operator" ?

Think the ternary operator, but worse. In Swift, this is expressed by "??". It means "If the previous test returns nil, then execute what is after the ??". For example, if you have a concrete Int, but the source might be an optional, then you could do something like this: let a = b ?? 0 That means that if b is nil, then set a to 0. Otherwise, set it to whatever value b has. You can chain these, like so: let b: Int? =…

> Think the ternary operator, but worse.

How the hell is it worse? It lets me write things like

    toolbar.visibility = userSettings.showToolbar ?? defaultSettings.showToolbar

    someOption = localPreference ?? onlinePreference ?? defaultPreference
which is a lot better for the coder and a reader than any other alternative I can currently think of.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#168

Post by throwaway_symb »

craydandy wrote: post #42
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really funny to think about cyclical stuff and see how Blackberry used to treat their developers like shit (with stupid signing keys and stuff) and just look at Apple falling into the same trap.

And this reminds me of the documentation quality of Symbian around 2005-2007. I would highly recommend the author of the article the check it out, before lamenting Apple's documentation.

The Symbian documentation team was tiny, perhaps 20 people at most. At an offsite we would pretty much fit round two tables at most. As always you get what you pay for.

Even so the Symbian team did some pretty cool things such as creating open source documentation standards for C++ and the tools to support that.

Source: I was there.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#169

Post by e40 »

mypalmike wrote: post #163
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring dozens of repos (non-forked), and thousands of lines of testable, shipping code, is probably not helpful. I was a manager for a long time. I loved long résumés and relevant material. I was hiring expensive people to work on really important stuff, and there was no way that I wanted to rush the vetting. Also, I never gave a single test, and I think I got it right, every time.

Large companies tend to aim for standardization in the hiring process. They want apples to apples comparisons as much as possible, largely for legal reasons, but also for tracking metrics. Unfortunately, someone submitting high quality GitHub repo links doesn't fit a model where not many candidates are doing that.

And that process doesn't seem to be workout out too well, based on all the posts I see here.

Re: Apple Developer Documentation Is Missing

#170

Post by theIV »

edw wrote: post #154
chriskrycho wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: this first paragraph is wrong, see child comment. Leaving for posterity. The second paragraph I stand by. SwiftUI is not in beta. It may be beta-quality, but they shipped it and encouraged devs to use it . Yes, it has undergone significant breaking changes since WWDC (and that's to be expected), but it's not described as beta anywhere in their docs about it. (See https://developer.apple.com/xcode/swiftui/ and h…

You are wrong. Go into the documentation viewer in Xcode and click on any page of SwiftUI documentation. SDK support is listed thusly: iOS 13.0+ Beta macOS 10.15+ Beta tvOS 13.0+ Beta watchOS 6.0+ Beta Mac Catalyst 13.0+ Beta [Edit: indentation]

This page, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui, makes no mention of it being in beta.
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