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Category Archives: Technology
development gotcha: incorrect data types
The other day I ran into a code bug that took a while to figure out. It was so unique (to me) that I thought I’d write about it.
The broken engineering interview process
Imagine yourself in an interview, sitting in front of 5-10 others of your field. Midway through, the group’s questions drift from the personal and work experiential to the assessing and cross-examining. They ask you to step up to The Whiteboard, marker in hand, and prove what you know. Never mind that you’re not fresh out …
Ukrainian Outsourcing
I had the most bizarre confrontation last year in my gym locker room — a place that is supposed to be a bastion of privacy, comfort, sometimes camaraderie — from which I haven’t really recovered. Charles is a jovial sort of guy. He’s in his mid to late 50s. He’s gregarious and extroverted, often seeking …
Mishandling errors
For the past 3 years, I’ve been working full-time as a software engineer. This has been a substantial, if not calculated, change for me. I’d been an hardware engineer for longer than I care to think about. Perhaps the biggest, while subtlest difference between the two career paths that I didn’t see coming is this: determinism. I …
Simulated Power Fail Test
I ran across this little humorous easter egg the other day, buried deeply in a software development kit manual: Simulated Power Fail Test To begin the test, pull the power plug from the UPS. The first time that you do this, psychologically it won’t be easy, but after you have pulled the plug a few …
From iOS to Android, part 2: ecosystem shock
Last time, I talked about two key aspects of technology that tend to make loyal customers: platform ecosystem and user experience. It was a natural transition from owning Macs for the better part of a decade to iPods and then finally iPhones. Apple has done well to keep the user experience very fairly consistent between …
Continue reading “From iOS to Android, part 2: ecosystem shock”
online IDEs
I love IDEOne. It’s a fully debuggable online compiler for a bunch of software languages. And there’s no need installing a plugin to format source code correctly on my blog, when this service offers embeddable links. Like this: By the way, this isn’t compiling. Anyone have any pointers? See what I did there? Pointers?
The collision of Boxes
I’m a big fan of Dropbox. I (and the rest of the internet) have been using it in free mode for quite some time. I probably don’t need to tell you what it is . What I particularly love about the cloud is that it kills two birds with one stone: Syncing your files painlessly …
Bearable wearable
I’ve always loved following tech. The emergence of the wearables market has been a fascinating one: a convergence of small form factor, low power, and high performance electronics. In particular, this market really couldn’t have happened without the smartphone industry blazing the trail, since wearables leverage multiple technologies like touch screens, accelerometers, compasses, and wireless interfaces. And …