Sam Soffes

In this year's RailsConf keynote, DHH talked about progress. In short, things are always changing—usually for the better. Progress is good. Embrace it.

I know a lot of people (especially in the Objective-C world) that fear progress. We have all of these great tools like Automatic Reference Counting, Core Data, and UIKit to make writing iOS applications easy. Apple has spent some considerable engineering time solving problems that we all have to solve. Quit wasting your time and embrace it.

People give lots of excuses for not using these fantastic technologies. Most of them boil down to resisting learning how to use them. Progress means learning. Learning is good. For these three in particular, the learning required to leverage all of the solutions to problems you're spending time solving is absolutely worth it. Spend your time building something useful instead of reinventing a solution to a solved problem.

I've heard of people rewriting simple things like UIImage because they didn't understand how it works, writing complex wrappers around SQLite to make an object graph, or starting new projects and not using ARC. This is ridiculous. On the other side, I know people who have used Core Data in their first app and happily upgraded their projects to ARC.

Spend an hour, watch a WWDC video, and start embracing progress.

By the way, I highly recommend watching his keynote even if you don't care about Rails. It's worth your time. If nothing else, it's good motivation.