One of the best decisions I made during a very turbulent 2020 was to leave conventional coding behind and embrace the #nocode movement. @bubble made this a reality. Although my own journey thus far is premature, I’ve learned a lot so here’s a power thread on....

~8yrs ago (Dec’12) I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇

By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.

We were 1st to “containers” (lxc) & container management (Borg) - since '03/04. But Docker took LXC, added cluster management, & launched 1st. Mesosphere launched DCOS. A lot of chairs were thrown around re: google losing this early battle, though K8 won the war, eventually 👏

We were 1st to “serverless” (AppEngine). GAE was our beachhead -- it was the biggest revenue source early on but the world wasn’t ready for serverless primitives. We also didn’t build auxiliary products fast enough. Clients that outgrew GAE wanted “building block” IaaS offerings.

1st to hadoop (map-reduce ‘04) but our hosted Hadoop launched in ‘15. AWS EMR was ~200M ARR by then. 1st to cloud storage (GFS ’03), but didn’t offer a filestore till ‘18! Customers were asking for it since 2014. Didn’t launch archival storage or direct interconnect till v. late.

New iPad Pro has Face ID, thinner bezels, squared off edges. A new touch sensitive Pencil that magnetically attaches to the edges. Thin enough to have a camera bump. Uses the XR's LCD cornering techniques.

The new 12.9" iPad Pro is physically smaller than the old one with the same screen size. It's roughly the same size as an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. 5.9mm thick.

10 billion transistors in the A12X. 8-core CPU. 7-Core GPU. 35% faster single-core performance. 1000x faster GPU. iPad Pro is Xbox One S class GPU performance in "94% smaller" package, Ternus jokes.

Apple's silicon team is just dropping bombs every event.

live shot of Apple's silicon team

iPad Pro gets USB-C for up to 5K external displays and enables charging out to iPhones. Wild.

A thread about Eastshade's bike mechanic!

When I originally thought of putting a bicycling in Eastshade, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work, for the simple fact that if it was easy, we'd see a lot more rideable bikes in games. Well, I was wrong. It took a mere week.

Its essentially a first person controller with extra momentum, resulting in the the movement direction lagging behind your look direction. Then I used the angle between the look and the movement to dictate camera "bank" and handle bar rotation, and voila! Game changing feature!

The look of the bike was harder than the movement. Bicycles are fairly modern, so it was tricky to fit it to the setting. I took some artistic liberties and settled on a penny farthing (but wooden), ignoring how impossible that would be to ride on the rugged terrain in Eastshade.

Surprisingly, the hardest part was sound. It didn't feel like riding a bike until I found the right sounds and how to trigger them. For a while I was stuck thinking too realistically. A penny farthing is fixed gear, pedaling sounds nothing like a regular modern bike.

Finally I abandoned realism and went with sounds normal people would associate with biking. We're all so used to modern bikes that we strongly associate the distinct ticking of a freewheel mechanism (think of the sound when you stop pedaling and coast on a modern bike).