This week’s episode of SWS contains a video of Enes Yilmazer touring a mega mansion, a podcast of The Pragmatic Engineer about Notion’s journey to going native, an article of James Stanier on being in the details and an article on how Devin Davies received an Apple Award for his app Crouton.
Welcome back to this week’s episode of Ctrl+V: Stuff Worth Sharing. As always, I have read and listened to far too much media. The highlights of my weekly consumption I want to share with you.
📺 Touring a 177,000,000 Mega Mansion in Los Angeles — Enes Yilmazer
This video is not directly connected to my usual topics like programming or leadership, but nevertheless it is an interesting one to watch.
Enes Yilmazer, my favourite YouTube real estate guy, shows off this gigantic mansion. It offers everything one can think of while not feeling as cold as many other luxurious houses.
From an own spa, to several meter high rotating doors and a big park-like garden directly in Los Angeles, this house offers everything (for those who can afford this price tag).
🎧 Notion: going native on iOS and Android — The Pragmatic Engineer
Now back to the technical content. I enjoyed listening to this intriguing podcast where two members of the Notion mobile apps team, Austin Louden and Karn Saheb, share their experience of transforming the Notion app from embedded web views to native implementations.
They also got in depth on how their engineering teams organise themselves and which metrics they used during the transformation. The detailed journey on which steps and key decisions they made was very insightful, and I took away many tips to be used in my next architecture-focused project.
📄 Being in the details — James Stanier
James Stanier advocates for managers to be in the details. Managers who get into the details and thus get a full picture of what is going on in an organisation are prone to make better decisions.
He explains that “good management comes through delegation of responsibility, without delegating away accountability”.
By delegating everything, which results in not knowing what’s going on, “you’ve not actually delegated: you’ve abdicated”.
Finishing the article with some useful examples, he also points out that „being in the details is actually extremely fun. Your goal as a manager isn’t to set up your organisation so that everything gets done for you. It’s to set it up so that you can spend your limited time on the most important things“.
In my opinion, this is a must-read for every manager and has to be revisited regularly.
📄 Coding in the kitchen: How Devin Davies whipped up the tasty recipe app Crouton
In this Behind The Design episode of Apple, the developer of the Crouton recipe app, Devin Davies, shares his journey from starting as a novice Swift programmer up to receiving an Apple Design Award for Interaction in 2024.
He created Crouton to solve a problem of his own: managing recipes. Crouton acts as a recipe hub, where you can import recipes from online sources or even handwritten sheets of paper. Integrated ML models then categorise and organise the recipes.
Once he “started building something that solved a problem”, he “started thinking of programming as a means to an end, and that helped” him to program Crouton.
He uses models like the VisionKit for text recognition, while not needing to understand how it works under the hood. This once again shows the benefits of using Swift and the Apple platform for development.
During the first months, only he and his mother used the apps, but after a time the user count grew. This can act as a motivation for everybody reading this. Stuck to your work and the success will come. It sometimes just takes its time.
That’s it for this week’s episode. Thank you for reading this far. As I invest much time and effort in these writings, I’d be glad if you could subscribe, like or share this post 🙂