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A comment on Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn.

Re:Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn by peterholcomb on Thursday August 08, 2019 @09:20AM (#20644223)
The first thing that came to mind when I read the opening paragraphs regarding churn is developing mobile applications. I find myself losing a day or two just to get my apps to compile if I ever go a month or two without spending any time on them. It's brutal how quickly things can break and dependencies need to be updated.

Is it possible to do modern mobile dev without churn (coming from a situation where my clients often go months without requesting features)?

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Re:Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn by ElFitz on Thursday August 08, 2019 @09:30AM (#20644337)
I only know of iOS, but here's what I try to do

- Reduce the use of dependencies to the minimum (I'm bad at this) - set version compatibility in my Cartfile / Podfile - when new breaking versions of Swift came out, suggest to my client a 2 / 3 mission solely focused on upgrading their app and it's dependencies (otherwise it will probably make their next last minute super-urgent-right-now feature needlessly long and complex to develop)

But I'd also willingly take any advice on this

Edit: also, semi-solved this for my JS work using automated dependency update services, like dependabot, coupled with unit / integration tests, but still haven't found a similar service for Swift

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Re:Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn by justinmeiners on Thursday August 08, 2019 @01:27PM (#20646518)
Cutting out dependencies helps. If you just have to worry about Google and Apple the changes are usually slower and documented.
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Re:Advice to my younger self: become allergic to the churn by kkarakk on Thursday August 08, 2019 @09:31AM (#20644350)
No. not really, However the solution here is to account for that time upfront saying "oh it's gonna take me some time to get back up to speed with your project". That's the reasonable thing to do anyways
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