@orta => Eidolon retrospective

[ashfurrow]

No description provided.

[orta]

canonical

[ashfurrow]

[orta]

this post finishes really nicely.

[mzikherman]

This is an amazing post @ashfurrow . Being a n00b in iOS I definitely didn't understand things, but I enjoyed reading it.

Cheers! (a Saturday night in emoji):
🍸 🍻 🍻 🚬 🍻 🚬 🍸 😴

[ashfurrow]

Thanks! I'll wait for 10am NYC time, then merge+deploy.

[dblock]

Comments in order, feel free to ignore/comment/update/etc.:

• The title doesn't mean anything to the reader. It needs to say something about Swift, something about developing an app in it, maybe the word auctions. For example "Developing a Bidding Kiosk for iOS in Swift".
• The article starts with "before the kiosk app...", there's a lot of context here and if I am a casual reader I have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe start with something like "In ... we began development of a bidding kiosk for the Artsy auctions platform, code name Eidolon ...", and put a photo of the actual kiosk?
• Link Karatina/Orta/DB's twitter. DB is really spelled "dB." :)
• You jump quickly into "what", but it's not immediately clear "why" we even thought of it being open-source. For me, it was because we wanted to both share the learning around a new programming language and reduce risk by possibly getting help, being able to show code, ask questions, etc., to a growing Swift community. Under the Idea there's a lot more about it, I would swap a few things.
• There's confusion between the "I" and the "we" all over the place. I would pick "we" more.
• It's very verbose, I would cut things down by a lot. There're entire paragraphs about testing that basically say we ended up setting up a machine, that's a lot of text for very little value.
• There're references to who did what like "that DB wrote", that things were discussed (eg. "Orta I discussed"), that's really not necessary IMO because it distracts the reader. I think the summaries are the real meat, so I would focus on those more.
• You suddenly start mentioning Laura, who is she ;) ? I think for the reader the people are of very little relevance.
• I would put a lot of the lessons learned and conclusions in the intro of the article. That's ultimately what the message is.

[ashfurrow]

Yeah, I can address a lot of those, dB. The pronouns are tricky since I'm writing this as an individual on the team – I want to give credit to work that Orta and Laura have done without making me seem like just a project manager.

I would disagree with the text-to-value ratio; I think that developers want to read about our process, even if it lead us to conventional solutions. I'll make some improvements and send a new commit.

[dblock]

FWIW I think credit is a good thing, but when it's mixed with information it dilutes it greatly.

[orta]

It feels like Ash is writing a narrative but what @dblock is implying is that it should be more like a technical writeup. I think these would be two different posts entirely. Personally, I'd prefer to see both.

[ashfurrow]

Yeah, "narrative" definitely describes what I was going for. I'd be game for a separate technical post, too.

[dblock]

My comments are just my 0.02c :)

Btw, don't forget to add Eidolon to http://artsy.github.io/open-source/.

[ashfurrow]

Added Eidolon here: #70

[ashfurrow]

Deployed.