Sam Soffes

Value of Beta

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I thought I had decided against doing betas of software to more than just close friends. A few friends assured me that most feedback would be useless. Their point as most just wanted to get it early to feel cool but didn’t actually use it or send feedback. I can definitely say for iOS betas in the past, this has been my experience as well.

The Whiskey beta has been great. I have a huge amount of things to build still. My list was a little overwhelming. Among things that still need to be built, there were lots of little bugs that needed some attention I’ve been putting off. No one likes to fix bugs.

Getting lots of email and tweets from people saying they love it and can see its potential is huge. People actually seeing it is good motivation. It also helps get me excited to fix little bugs. For example, several people reported this one thing that took me a minute to fix. I had just been forgetting about it because it wasn’t something I used a lot personally.

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Four Questions

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I recently got an email from a college sophomore that had some questions about getting started. Asked him if it would be okay to answer publicly and he was for it.

#1 How did you begin programming?

I started “programming” for the first time when I was 10 years old. My mom took me to an HTML class our local ISP was offering for free. I thought it was amazing you could type some stuff and make visual stuff happen. Started writing HTML in all of my free time in Notepad on our white Dell tower.

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Swift

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Yesterday, I did an interview on Venture Beat about Swift, Apple's new programming language. Here's an excerpt:

I think one of the best parts about Swift is a lot of the simplicity they were able to bring to the language due to not being built on top of C. Explaining Objective-C to someone who has never programmed is pretty difficult. You have to explain all of the exceptions to rules and get into pretty deep computer science topics right from the start. Swift let’s you bypass all of that and just get into the code.

In short, I'm a big fan of Swift. Checkout the full article.

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Quantum Data Teleportation

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A few days ago, scientists at Delft University reliably got teleportation to work with 100% reproducibility. (Read the full story at CNET.) This is huge.

First we need to understand qubits. Basically, a qubit is a quantum bit. Qubits have 3 states where classical bits (the ones in our computers, phones, etc) have two: 1 & 0. Qubits have a “spin” which can be up, down, or both. Quantum stuff is a little mind blowing since things can be doing two things at once.

Here’s a really great video explaining quantum computing if you want to know more:

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