The personal website of the one and only Joe Fabisevich, and indie developer building Red Panda Club Inc. Formerly an iOS developer working on civic integrity, societal health, misinformation, and other wild things @Twitter.
tldr; Want to skip straight to the news and find out about my new job? On December 15, 2014 I went to dinner with Jukay Hsu . I was 25 years old and not too proud to say yes to a free meal, and my friend Josh said I really should meet him. I was none the wiser, so I agreed, not realizing that dinner would become one of the more consequential nights of my life. Our dinner turned out to be a job…
Around my birthday (which is today 🥳) I always feel a lot of love. I'm incredibly lucky to have so much love in my life. From the love of…
I won't bury the lede, I'm looking to go back to work full-time. I'm thankful to not be under financial strain, so I'm not rushing into anything. Instead I'm coming at this from a place of genuine interest in finding the right opportunity for me. Recently I've had some great conversations with interesting companies, and it helped me realize that there are some things I miss about not being an…
I'm riding on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto and wanted to jot down my thoughts from the 48 hours I spent in Tokyo. I'll be back in a few days, but if I had to describe my initial impression it would be titled: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once .
Yesterday I posted this on Mastodon and Bluesky to share how much I've been enjoying blogging as a creative outlet.
Consider this a PSA. I went to the doctor in September to get some blood tests done for my never-ending health crusade and was shocked to find out that I have shockingly low vitamin D levels. I was surprised by this because I walk at least 30 minutes every day, and many days that's upwards of 60-90 minutes. That's a lot of time in the sun, so I expected my vitamin D levels to be good — or regular…
I've always felt very conflicted about the idea of donating my organs when I die. On the one hand, it's entirely in accordance with my values. I strive to help anyone I can in any way I can, whenever possible — even in death. On the other hand, despite having lapsed in my Judaism — I think a lot about Pascal's Wager . 1 Pascal contends that a rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent…
I. I once knew a wonderful man . He was kind, gentle, and beloved by many. He was so wise that when he graduated from college, Mahatma Gandhi himself handed him his diploma. He was a scholar and a gentleman, blessed with the unique gift of deeply knowing Sanskrit and Hindi. He spent much of his life translating scrolls filled with the wisdom of the ancients into modern language — in pursuit of…
Colleen and I were binge-watching Gossip Girl last winter, and there are a few scenes where a stressed and irate Blair Waldorf wanders over to Central Park to feed the ducks. I told Colleen, "that sounds soothing — we should do that when the weather gets better". And then, as I’m wont to do, I promptly forgot. But Colleen takes note of moments like that, and a few months later she reminded me: we…
This blog post is documentation for a very specific problem I run into about once a year. That’s rare enough to forget how I solved it, but frequent enough to waste 15 minutes rediscovering the answer. And let’s be honest: it’s not the big problems that drive you mad — it’s the little ones that feel like their own Sisyphean hell. The Problem Some websites 1 require you to log in using a magic link…
The iPhone 15 Pro launched with a marquee feature, the Action Button. The Action Button set out to replace the mute switch, which had existed since the first iPhone was released back in 2007. The Action Button is a software-powered button, replacing what previously was a hardware switch that would toggle your phone’s silent mode on or off. The appeal of the Action Button was that now you could…
The post below was written by me, originally featured on the Plinky blog . To celebrate the launch of Plinky you can get 50% off of a yearly subscription by redeeming this offer: plinky.app/offer/REDPANDA There are few words I've ever said more excitedly than these: I want to tell you about my latest app, Plinky . Plinky makes it incredibly easy to do something we do every day, save links for…
The Turing test is dead, and we killed it. The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. From the 1940s 1 to the 2010s people programmed computers, and computers could only do what they were programmed to do in a rules-based deterministic manner. Sometimes a person would program the computer and it would…
When I wrote The Future Will Be Signed almost six years ago the latest in AI advancements was Google Duplex. If you're like me and have never used Google Duplex, it's a feature of Google Assistant that could make calls on behalf of a person and automatically perform a task, such as booking restaurant tables. While you may have never heard of Google Duplex there's a good chance you've used a…
Sometimes I think about all of the societal issues I cared about 10 years ago: privacy, government overreach, and platform accountability. More and more as I look at the technological landscape it feels like none of that care seems to have mattered. When I worked on the Societal Health team at Twitter I had a voice and direct impact on these matters. If the feedback I received and still hear from…
To set expectations for you my dear reader, this blog post was written for me, not for you. It's very long (quite long), but I'm still proud of it enough to post for the world to read. The frigid days of December are often unbearable in New York City, but those same freezing temperatures combined with the slow down of work, life, and everyone's collective desire to rest up after a long year afford…
Is coding a science or an art? — Matthew Garlington (@dejadu13) May 21, 2022 I've seen many versions of this question posed over the years, and to Matthew's credit it's a very good question. As you can see in the replies people translate their lived experience writing code and answer art or science based on however they conceptualize and practice programming. A few years ago MIT conducted a…
Hard to believe it's over. My time at Twitter wasn’t perfect but it was incredibly special and there's little I would change about it (though less crypto would be cool). I was able to provide constant feedback about products across the entire platform and the entire organization, work on some of the most pressing digital societal health issues of our time, including the 2020 US presidential…
Crafting a great interview process is difficult 1 , especially for software development where a company is often trying to assess years of specialized knowledge and potential in only a few hours. The best interviews are said to feel like a discussion amongst peers, where each side is providing the other with signal about what it will be like to work together. Candidates share signals about their…
Tell me who you are in 160 characters. I'll wait while you try and achieve the level of nuance necessary for the task. This constraint is why you end up with generic Twitter bios that don't tell you much about someone and all look like: Father, cyclist, biz-dev, and fighting every day for the Quebec sovereignty movement. Working on saving democracy @Meta, ex-Palantir, ex-Accenture, ex of my ex.…
The work of writing maintainable code is an ongoing endeavor and some of my favorite problems to solve are ones that build maintainable systems. Maintainable systems are ones you can learn once, easily manipulate, and ideally take from project to project. My favorite part of building maintainable systems is that it minimizes the amount of work I need to do when starting a new project, and like it…
For a long time I've told people that I love technology and all it enables, yet dislike the technology industry and working in tech. People often find my statement hard to rectify, probably because they see the two as inextricably linked. Technology is an ever-changing process, one that pushes humanity forward through the application of science, and the industry has become (and arguably always has…
GraphQL has been on my list of technologies to learn for a few months now, and last week I came across Majid Jabrayilov's post , feeling pretty excited to tackle the subject. The post was very good, but it didn't answer the one question I've had as I've gone through numerous exercises to understand GraphQL, how do I make GraphQL requests without a library?
Apple's been in the news quite a bit lately over concerns that many apps on the App Store are little more than scams . Some of these apps aren't even functional, they don't provide anything more than a screen with no functionality, only a button to purchase an indefinite weekly subscription. Many developers and consumers are confused or surprised that Apple isn't catching these scams, given Apple…
I recorded an episode of the Empower Apps podcast, where Leo Dion and I discussed a wide range of topics. We spoke about everything from how we scale app development to thousands of people and millions of users at Twitter, communication, documentation, people working together, and a lot about and the complexity of holding moral frameworks at a global level.
I've been thinking about privacy lately. No, not online privacy , but about how APIs can balance exposing the right amount of implementation details without revealing too much. I'll walk through a task I find myself doing often when building iOS apps, creating a view controller with header view, and four different ways to go about it.
As iOS developers, a lot of our work involves taking models from a server, and transforming them to be displayed on an iPhone or iPad. This sounds like a job for some declarative architecture. 🤔
If you haven't checked out Part I , I recommend reading it because if you don't, none of writing below will make sense!
Maybe the real friends were the friends we made along the way. I quit using Facebook years ago, and only follow ~70 people on Twitter , which leads some to assume that I don’t find keeping in touch with people to be a top priority, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. My todo list is where I hold my priorities, and my friends and family are the biggest priorities in my life, so that’s…
Throughout history technology has aided humanity. Not the other way around. From the invention of fire, to the creation of the wheel, the printing press, and the personal computer, technology has acted as a multiplier for what humans can do. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it won’t stand as an industry by itself. We — as software developers — should always keep this in mind when creating…
When 2018 started I set out to read 10 books this year. Much to my surprise I ended up reading 25 books in 2018. The most important reason I was able to get through 15 more books than I'd expected was that when the year started I set a goal for myself to read at least 15 minutes every day. I ended up accomplishing that 328 times over 2018, meaning 9 out of every 10 days I made significant progress…
As a mentor, I give a lot of advice. I give a lot of advice that comes from a breadth of experience. But my experience is rooted in the present, to remember how I felt earlier is an exercise in empathizing with a past version of myself. And memories are a fickle thing. In fact, there are many biases that affect how you remember an event, so it’s possible that my memories aren’t even an accurate…
The people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what’s happening. George Orwell, 1984
I recorded an episode of @learnswift_fm with Steven Sherry a couple weeks back. We had a great chat about contracting, computing history, philosophy, Smalltalk, and even a little bit about Swift. I think you’ll really like it, and recommend giving it a listen.
How many times have you been called into a meeting only to realize five minutes into it that you’re likely going to speak for sixty seconds… if you’re lucky? You potentially hold one piece of valuable information, and the rest of the discussion doesn’t concern you much. There are probably four other people like that in the room as well.
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.
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 of seeing how a candidate works in a normal work environment. I had…
Cryptography is becoming more important in our every day lives and there’s no way around it. Whether it’s the calls from governments to ban encryption , come up with “responsible encryption” , or to violate norms and laws , cryptography is playing a role in shaping our society. I’d like to approach the role of cryptography from the other perspective though, from the side of helping us prove facts…
Cryptocurrency is all the rage these days. From Bitcoin to Ethereum to Ripple , to some silly sounding thing someone will come up with tomorrow, it's something people want to know about. At the risk of sounding like a super noob, what's a good introduction to crypto? From the basics through understanding current landscape — Benny Wong (@bdotdub) January 5, 2018 So you're looking to learn a…
As I was on hour six of debugging how to read an object from the database, my brain suddenly noticed the slight difference in two lines of code. The compiler error had been off, too vague to help me realize that I was never hinting the correct type to the function. Generics had struck again. I cursed in the general direction of my cat (unintentionally), and moved on. There was nothing I could do…
Two meta-skills that help a programmer grow more than just practicing their coding. Thinking about thinking, and focusing on focusing. — Joe Fabisevich 🐶🐳™ (@mergesort) July 26, 2017
This is a blog post by Jasdev Singh , originally published on jasdev.me . I'm re-posting here since it's directly tied to me taking over his project, Public Extension.
Every day at a startup is an exercise in getting to tomorrow. Some days it’s easier, some days it’s harder, but if you don’t make it until tomorrow, there won’t be a next week, month, or year. This is why building a long-term foundation is incredibly important.
This is an interview that I did with Sam Jarman, originally posted on his blog .
I recently re-discovered UIKeyCommand while listening to Caleb Davenport ’s, podcast , Runtime. He’s also got a blog post which shows you exactly how simple it is to create UIKeyCommand shortcuts for your app. After reading that, I decided that it would be neat to implement them across my app, so I could also start navigating around my UI with lightning speed while I’m debugging in the simulator.…
WWDC is right around the corner! This post isn’t intended to be a prediction, as much as what I hope unfolds. As Betrand Serlet, a former Apple engineer discussed in this 90 second video clip , Apple often ships features iteratively. Projects start off private, only to be used internally, often times for a year or two. When they feel stable enough, Apple opens them up to 3rd party developers, and…
Ignores commenting on another static vs. dynamic dispatch article because people won’t accept Swift is a hybrid not plain static. — Joe Fabisevich 🐶🐳™ (@mergesort) May 24, 2016 Guess that didn’t last long.
At the original iPhone announcement, we saw Steve Jobs on stage with Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt, showing off Google’s amazing Maps. Built for the iPhone, it was something we’d never seen before. Apple’s incredible phone and revolutionary software combined with Google’s terrific web services and data coming together for one amazing product. With regards to collaboration, it’s all been downhill…
I pushed the magic button to get a Shyp person here to send out a couple packages I have been procrastinating sending for weeks. After that was settled, I dialed up Time Warner Cable, to get my modem swapped out, a process I’ve been actively trying to get done for weeks. After a combination of pushing buttons and yelling “tech support” into the phone for 10 minutes to get me to the right place, I…
Just leaving this here for later, feel free to call me out on it if I’m wrong. The Watch isn’t about Apple selling luxury products, it’s about making something nice looking enough that you’ll actually wear it.