Archived posts on Mark Aron Szulyovszky

2016 - Functional Reactive Intuition - Swift edition

Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Functional Reactive Intuition - Swift edition So, you’ve heard about reactive programming. Then you got discouraged, almost immediately. Like: is this guy really talking about switching on the observable of observables? I have no idea what’s going on. That’s all fine, we agree on one thing: people usually try to explain functional programming in a way that only makes sense to people who already know functional programming. Let me show you something, maybe it can help with your appetite.

2016 - Big S(tate) notation

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Big S(tate) notation This is an early and somewhat funny/incomprehendible post I wrote a long time ago about stateless / stateful components (not in a React, sense, but more in an OOP, object-sense). There’s something that bothers me a little bit: We have this useful thinking tool, Big 0 notation, to measure the computation complexity of an algorithm / function. And it’s great! We can anticipate the amount of time that a certain operation could take, and the necessary memory we need prepare for it, and it helps us architect our software, and forsee future problems without actually writing a line of code.

2016 - Making mistakes

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Making mistakes For a long time, my profile said “I make complex simple”. Well, first of all, it would have been more accurate to say: “I try to make complex simple but I fail most of the time”. Also, I don’t like the super-confident picture “I make complex simple.” is carrying. So now I can rephrase my motto to: “I make lots of mistakes while trying to make complex simple”. But then, reducing complexity, keeping things as simple as possible is kind of what engineers do anyway, at least in my mind, so I can leave that out.

2015 - Post-text messaging?

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Post-text messaging? Have you ever been thinking about this little symbol? I sometimes do. It gives me that anticipation, that sense of presence, which always makes conversations a lot more enjoyable. I have a question though. Why do we have this representation of a conversation as the standard? This feels like something we inherited from here: It does seem really useful to see the chronological order of the sentences, I have to admit.

2014 - Anatomy of a touch interaction: Swipe-to-peep

Sun, 07 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Anatomy of a touch interaction: Swipe-to-peep You open up your messaging app. Question: Why can’t you just “peep” into the thread by swiping on a conversation cell like this? Today’s state of interaction design seems a bit swipe-obsessive, right? But really, why do people love to cuddle their phone? Does swiping really make touch interactions seem more effortless? Mailbox, the iOS app I’m using stopped working for a few days for me, so I went back to the Gmail app, and I was like, how can people use this?

2014 - Today’s mobile context-insensitivity

Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s mobile context-insensitivity The supercomputers we’re carrying around don’t know what we are doing and what we are up to — and that’s a problem. I have an iPhone. The technology inside is so advanced that I can’t even imagine — and there’s no chance I can actually understand it. Its operating system has a built in physics engine, a database management system, OpenGL, and many awesome features and it would take me half an hour to list them all.

2013 - Life in a startup incubator

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Life in a startup incubator (I wish I had read this blogpost before I’ve got into one;) Now there are so many chances to travel, form a company and spend a 3-month period somewhere in the world - more than 300 tech-only startup incubators exist at the moment. We ended up in Estonia and got a seed investment from GameFounders, Europe’s first gaming accelerator. First of all, it was an experience of a lifetime.

2014 - Designing your personal identity

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Designing your personal identity

So you are a graphic designer and you think you need a personal identity - not necessarily to show off your skills, but because you need to have one. And designing it can cause a lot of problems. I, myself can’t even count the hours I wasted on experimenting with my own personal identity - and still, it’s in “beta” at best.

I mean, how can you have something as a graphic designer that both represents your skills, your mindset and your style when all of these variables are changing extremely fast? And I really do hope that none of them will eventually stop improving….