Writing on software, and whatever else is on my mind.
Obadiah Stane had Stark Industries, a full engineering team, and the wreckage of the original suit on a table to reverse-engineer — and still couldn't rebuild what Tony improvised in a cave with a box of scraps. Tools have never supplanted the people who wield them. A case for the human variable, from a cave in Afghanistan to the bottom of a pull request.
Swift has no protected, and in 2014 that felt like a mistake someone ought to fix. It took me a decade — and one deadlock caused by calling a method that was never meant for me — to understand why the omission cost me nothing, and what visibility modifiers were really doing all along: naming an audience. This is the case for surfaces, a fourth kind of visibility that lets a class say who each member is for, and makes a caller declare, in one greppable line, which role it's playing.
I went to PHP Tek to win the Battle Snake tournament with a PHP bot I'd spent a year planning. I won it with a Swift bot I built at the conference, got accused (fondly) of cheating, and would do it again. This is the story of a reactive PHP snake that got smart by losing, a sparring partner that outgrew its purpose, a fifteen-year-old prejudice I caught myself holding, and why the least interesting thing about a good build is the language underneath it.