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I was asked Is the code quality at an early stage startup higher or lower than the code quality at a bigger company? This is a really good question to ask if you’re a developer looking to join an early stage company. To answer this question though, I’d like to take a step back. Code […]
Hey, we have a new thing for you today! Today’s new thing is called Stack Overflow for Teams. It lets you set up a private place on Stack Overflow where you can ask questions that will only be visible to members of your team, company, or organization. It is a paid service, but it’s not […]
When Uncommon was brought in to refactor a big legacy app last year, we found ourselves in a strange situation. Our client was maintaining a common library for handling networking — HTTP, FCM, MQTT — across all apps under their brand. This library (let’s call it SadLibrary) had an API that was badly designed and dated, but not using […]
April 27, 2018 ∞https://marco.org/2018/04/27/overcast42 Overcast 4.2 is out now. It enhances privacy in two major areas: Anonymous sync by default Overcast has offered anonymous sync accounts since 2014. They’re fully functional, but they lack email addresses or passwords, so they can’t log into the website. A login token is stored in iCloud so the account […]
There’s this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work, line by line, what you expected to see, what you saw instead, etc. Developers who try this report that the very […]
It has become quite common for companies interviewing engineers to give candidates take home tests. These consist of an interview problem (or problems) which they can work on in their free time. This gives the candidate the benefit of not being under pressure in a high leverage interview setting. This gives a company the benefit […]
[This is the second in a series of posts about Stack Overflow. The first one is The Stack Overflow Age.] Around 2010 the success of Stack Overflow had led us into some conversations with VCs, who wanted to invest. The firm that eventually invested in us, Union Square Ventures, told us that they were so […]
Instagram recently launched Type Mode, a new way to post creative, dynamic text styles and backgrounds to Stories. Type Mode was an interesting challenge for us because it is the first time we were going to create a way for people to post Stories without photo or video components — and we wanted to make […]
March 13, 2018 ∞https://marco.org/2018/03/13/overcast41 Overcast 4.1 is now in the App Store with some small but nice new features. Smart Resume is actually two features: It jumps back by up to a few seconds after having been paused to help remind you of the conversation. It slightly adjusts resumes and seeks to fall in the […]
One of my favorite parts of RxJava is that no matter how complex a state management usecase is, there’s always an operator for that™. During a recent code cleanup, I found a very cool usecase of RxJava’s scan() and compose() operators for simplifying the usually verbose DiffUtil implementation. I had been delaying writing this post […]