Mark Rabo

A little animation I made to make this list feel nicer. There's a subtle shrinking/growing of the checkmarks that I like looking at.

A trailer I made for Revere with a nice little musical piece from my friend @jampants. I've got this featured on the App Store right now.

@matt416 Thanks Matt!

@markrabo Congrats Mark, this is a great achievement!

Launch day nerves are different when... • The new version is a full, ground-up rewrite • You’re migrating existing users • You wrote all 14,000 lines of code yourself and scariest of all… • You're a first-time programmer 😬 Here we go!!!

It's been nearly 1yr and 1300hrs since I tried again to learn programming and build my app. The last two attempts never made it past 200 hours. youtu.be/-3r2foPHyVE

Went to buy a pair of @duerperformance jeans and was disappointed to find using my reward points cancelled out the free shipping. I still bought the jeans because they're a great product but lost a little affinity for the brand. This seems like an avoidable bad user experience.

@BrandonMChu You will definitely enjoy David Foster Wallace's collection of essays about tennis. It's some of the most beautiful and funny descriptions I've heard about the sport penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/539264/s…

I picked up tennis 🎾 during covid and I regret that I haven't been playing my whole life. Tennis is a high learning curve sport, but if you can get over the hump it's one of the best sports you can ever play: 1. Trains mental fortitude - you can only play well if you are able to be present and have a focused-relaxed state of mind. If you try too hard and brute force, or play too scared, you will make errors and lose. The only way to play well is to develop trust in yourself and swing fully relaxed and confidently. 2. Substitute for meditation - related, once you train yourself to get into the focused-relaxed state, you achieve levels of meditative pleasure that are very difficult to achieve in regular life. 3. Highest correlating sport with longevity - Tennis is intensely physical and challenges stability, flexibility, cardio, and strength. But unlike many sports, you can adjust the level of the game to the physical ability of the players. This means you can continue to play as you age well into your 60s and 70s. Studies show it can extend life 9.7 years (forbes.com/sites/stevensa…) 4. Equal parts chess, talent, and physical ability - There are infinite levels to the game of tennis. Because a tennis match is played over many many points, any slight difference between two players in ability/skill/tactics gets magnified over the course of a match, and it is pretty impossible to win by pure luck. However, there's also lots of ways to figure out how to win. If you are inferior to your opponent physically, you can adjust tactics to compensate for those weaknesses (eg. be aggressive and shorten point length if your cardio is worse). This feeling that there is always a way you can train yourself over the long run to win, even against someone who seems a lot better, makes the sport unique. Downsides are: expensive, hard to find players of similar ability, can be a little snooty depending on the club

Revere rebuild update: Just finished building Face ID for the first time. A small feature from a user's POV but a beast behind the scenes. It turned out just how I imagined though, with a bunch of little touches that make it feel really nice. youtu.be/4m542xC36Xo

Your “useless” projects could become your life’s work. psyche.co/ideas/a-life-o…

For every 3 lines of code, I write one line of comments. I have no idea what a typical ratio is.

Made an animation to make Revere's Face ID lockscreen a little nicer. One more piece and Face ID will be done.

Accessibility is often deprioritized in products because it ALWAYS scores low on 'Impact' (less users affected). This always bothered me but you have to respect the business' needs But with personal projects, you get to do whatever you want & I've moved accessibility up the list

Happy Vision Pro Launch Day! I'm excited but the early reviews left me wondering if it'll live up to the hype. I also think this could be a Tim Cook blunder. markrabo.com/blog/tim-cooks…

(From a conversation this morning with a friend) The more difficult path can sometimes be a lucky break

@messhof Legend!

Happy 10 years to NIDHOGG! youtube.com/watch?v=KYgP0I…

I'm reminded how we anthropomorphize products whenever I feel the guilt for pushing my old MacBook like this. Sorry buddy, hang in there and soon you'll retire to sipping videos as my Plex server.

There's that 10,000hr rule of thumb for becoming an expert; I think there's a similar one around 1000hrs for learning something new. Around this time you're no longer struggling with the basics, can do useful things, and aren't at risk of giving up youtu.be/ZofLJHdK0Uc

UPDATE:👹666hrs into programming. What I've built is better than the 1st version of @revereapp originally released. Still lots of work to get it to the current version, but back then this would've been a v1. Feeling very proud getting this far. youtu.be/hCceGmnHLL0

You don't hear adults say they're proud of themselves. The feeling is reserved for talking about other people or kids, but it's still profoundly important to feel it about yourself.

Playing with some animations — love this part