[Grustaf]

We obviously can't know, but hearing someone talk about something gives you an idea.

My impression is that Casey is quite weak (as in average), but meticulous.

Siracusa is almost certainly the one with the best understanding of theory, but hard to say how he is practically. He could be very good at what he's doing.

Marco also doesn't seem very strong in raw programming (he resisted Swift for half a decade, complains that it's hard to deal with, says that architecture is only for beginners etc) but obviously he can solve whatever problem he is faced with, even quite complex ones. And this is obviously what matters if you are an indie developer. That and product sense, which he is also very good at. He probably has the perfect skillset for an indie developer, better programming wouldn't make him any more successful.

[greedo]

I think Marco's resistance to Swift doesn't indicate anything about programming skill. Based on his low level audio programming (he hates to rely on code outside of his own), he's quite an accomplished programmer, unafraid of complex problems or reinventing the wheel when an existing library doesn't satisfy his desires. I doubt he would survive well in the world of unit tests, CI/CD, Jira and managers though. And I envy him for being able to avoid that.

[perardi]

Yeah, gotta defend Marco here, though I have my quibbles with him on this show. (He has the most first-worldiest of problems.)

He has gone in deep on performant low-level audio code, and how it integrates with the system APIs. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff with programmatic drawing of icons in his apps. He did a lot of good caching work back in the Instapaper days, when cell connections were almost like dialup.

He seemed to be reluctant to learn Swift, because Swift would have gotten him…what? I think he thought that Objective-C was mature, tested, comprehensible, and battle-tested in production. And it wasn’t going to change out from underneath him…which you sure couldn’t say about Swift for the first few years. You eventually had to adopt it, as Apple is moving to Swift-only, but I think Objective-C let him accomplish his goals, and a lot of the good security stuff in Swift is maybe not super relevant to his app development.

(Ugh, PHP, though…)

[greedo]

I love how Marco just feels like throwing money at one of life's problems is the best solution. I think he would be the first to tell you the role of luck in his success. Yes, he worked long hard hours at Tumblr, and eventually that paid off financially when Tumblr was sold. He was smart to scratch an itch when the iPhone first came out by releasing Instapaper, and smart to realize when it was time to sell it. He was smart to realize his itch for a good podcast player might be universal. So I think he's an incredible businessman who is really only limited by his unwillingness to yoke himself to a corporation.

His use of Obj-C and PHP are just as pragmatic to me. He's an expert at Obj-C and possibly at PHP, and why change? Let Swift mature, see if Obj-C becomes deprecated, and then move on. He can obviously learn new languages since he's dabbled in Rust etc.

I do wish ATP focused more on tech stuff and less on how to live your best life on Fire Island. But I enjoy it every week.