reza-baradaran was right. The worst things always happen at the very end that is going well.
I think if I ever get the chance to visit Maestro Victor —which I doubt will ever happen—will be like finding your lost father that did not know he has left her girlfriend pregnant thirty years ago. My own Dad shaped my world, but then in the medium world, I can really see him as a second dad.
I spent the past decade trying to understand the message Maestro Victor sent to the world and no one understood. I tried to read as much as I could, to inhibit his world, to understand it as he did. And boy that world is beautiful. I wish I could talk to him and say that I have seen, I am your biggest believer, I have put my flesh and blood into making it, I have given my life to understanding your work.
My way of living is the embodiment of spiraling and spaced learning. I make things, move to other things, comeback to one that requires some past works, or continue them, I make them to a another level and move forward.
The black and white nature of the screensaver was good, but it was not enough. So I played with the colors and made it much nicer.
Initial Planning
10 weeks was the original plan. This was communicated to parents during registration. The landing page stated 10 weeks. Tayebe confirmed this was the public commitment.
Internal Decision to Shorten
The team internally decided to reduce from 10 to 8 weeks. The reason was to avoid running into end-of-summer travel. Pouya remembers agreeing to this and created documentation showing 8 weeks. S. ████████ was not informed of this change.
The program was further shortened to 7 weeks due to delays in securing space and finding facilitators. There was no clear communication of this change to parents or all team members.
The Complaint
Wednesday, September 2: K. ███████ received a phone call from the mother of Mehrnoosh and Termeh. The mother complained that the program was promised as a certain number of sessions but was ending earlier. K. ███████ noted: “همون حرفی بود که من گفتم خانوادهها شاکی میشن” (“This is exactly what I said would happen—families would complain”). K. ███████ brought the issue to the Telegram group.
Team Discussion
Wednesday, September 2: Pouya remembered 8 weeks, then 7 weeks due to delays. He suggested a free extension week that would be optional with no extra cost. K. ███████ advised checking what was actually communicated to parents first. S. ████████ stated she had not been informed that the program was being shortened. S. ████████ suggested a partial refund for the two missing sessions.
Thursday, September 3: K. ███████ proposed a survey with four options: attend extra sessions in the coming weeks, attend all four days in a single week, attend in October, or receive a refund. Pouya reiterated the free extension idea. S. ████████ raised PR concerns and stated the decision should involve Ashkan and Tayebe . Pouya agreed to set up a meeting.
Friday, September 4: Pouya scheduled a meeting with S. ████████ , Tayebe , and Ashkan . K. ███████ drafted a formal proposal with four options. K. ███████ advised being prepared for solutions that Pouya might not like.
Tayebe Informed
Saturday, September 5: Pouya messaged Tayebe directly. Tayebe responded: “توی لندینگ که نوشته بودیم 10 هفته” (“The landing page said 10 weeks”). Tayebe confirmed she was not informed of the change. She stated that a financial adjustment might be appropriate. She agreed to attend the meeting.
Current Status
A meeting is pending with Ashkan , Tayebe , S. ████████ , and Pouya. The decision remains unresolved. Key questions include whether to offer an extension, whether to issue refunds, and how to communicate with parents.
The key stakeholders are Ashkan (FANAP leadership), Tayebe (senior stakeholder who communicated 10 weeks to parents), S. ████████ (project partner concerned about PR), K. ███████ (on-the-ground coordinator), and Pouya (project lead who feels responsible).
Key Facts
Parents were promised 10 weeks via the landing page and calls. The team internally reduced to 8 weeks without clear communication. The actual delivery became 7 weeks due to operational constraints. Parents were not informed of the change. A complaint was received from one parent, though others may feel similarly. The team discovered the misalignment in real time. No clear process existed for communicating changes. A meeting is being arranged to resolve the issue.
Open Questions
What was actually communicated to parents and when? Should the program be extended? Should fees be reduced or refunded? What should be communicated to parents going forward? How can this be prevented in the future?
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Yeah, I thought that Objective-C was a handicap and Objective-C was–had good sides, technically. But nobody knew Objective-C outside of the NeXT community. So in '97, the only folks knowing Objective-C were the NeXT community folks. NeXT and then the developers of NeXT, right? A very small group and this was somewhat confirmed when Adobe said in '97, we don’t want to be part of your Rhapsody effort. So I wanted to escape Objective-C, so I pushed towards Java. Java was growing very, very, very fast in those days. I even met James Gosling to try to see if Java could do a few things that would make the Mac better. James Gosling was absolutely not interested, and so we tried Java, but the problem was that Java was huge. It had a huge footprint. We had the same calculators, you know the little calculators that you find on a Mac done in Objective-C and in Java and Java was 10 times larger in resources and so ultimately, Java was not viable. So then moving forward to the iPhone, the iPhone 1.0 was implemented in Objective-C, but was not open to developers and the iPhone 2.0 was open to developers and there was a bit of a debate with Steve Jobs and Scott about, should we open it at the level of web apps, or should we open it at the level of Objective-C, Cocoa? And I was arguing that Objective-C would be a handicap, that very few developers will start writing iPhone applications in Objective-C. I was totally wrong, of course. Steve overrode my objection and said, no, no, no, no, it will work, and he was right and so we went out with Objective-C and at that point, Objective-C was in wide adoption by all Mac OS [
Yeah, garbage collection was a pet thing of mine, because I had been raised with a garbage collector. Even when I was programming in the late '70s, I had a garbage collector. So I thought cleaning up by hand when you have a computer is kind of a waste. But the problem with garbage collection is the performance of it and it has a huge performance cost and so the breakthrough was actually this automatic auto-release that brings most of the benefit of garbage collection, but without the cost, and in essence, that’s smart pointers in C++, and that’s how Swift all works.
