Here are some of the things I learned this week, in the order I’ve noted them down.
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Polybius is an urban legend from the early 2000s around an arcade game experiment that was allegedly run in the 80s by the US government in Portland, Oregon. According to the legend, the game was extremly addictive and caused several psychoactive effect on the players. Shortly after its supposed release, it is said that all Polybius arcade machines have disappeared without a trace.1
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The Zeigarnik Effect refers to people’s tendency to remember incomplete tasks better than successful ones (via Laws of UX). No wonder I have a constant sense of guilt over my abandoned side projects.
# Programming
- Writing both the client-side app and the server-side API in Swift has some pretty significant benefits. In addition to sharing a lot of business logic, this approach reduces the impact of context switching when developing a new end-to-end feature. Writing the entire stack in the same language, using the same IDE, in the same workspace is a godsend.
- Most of this sounds ludicrous, but it never hurts to indulge in an urban legend or two, especially if it involves video games.↩