Multiple Hats

Management Authority

2011-10-26T10:43:00.000-04:00

One thing I've noticed over the years is the correlation of the effectiveness of a team and the source of authority of their management. Software development teams managed by MBAs who have no hands-on experience writing software are hit and miss. If the managers are engaged and proactive, this often works really well, especially if the team is large; formal training in managing large projects

Interviewing Advice

2011-09-27T09:54:00.000-04:00

I had to give a 5-10 minute talk on "interviewing tips" for a room full of college students. Since it's generally interesting, I wanted to post it, so here's my notes. I speak (as always) from my own point of view, and not my employer's. -------------- An interview starts with a friendly chat about you. What's the last thing you've worked on that you're proud of? Why do you want to work here?

Creativity at Work

2011-09-21T15:52:00.000-04:00

A friend asked me to answer questions for a survey, with respect to whatever experience I have that's relevant. Here goes. Please briefly describe your current position at your company, your professional background, and any involvement you've had with new product development. I've spent ten years doing web development, largely in Java, HTML, and CSS2, but also touching C#, PHP, and JQuery.

It's been awhile - resumes

2011-03-28T10:16:00.000-04:00

Day 1 of the new job involved refreshing a 15-year-stale knowledge of C++, and it's been busy since then. Finally had a thought worth posting about that I'm free to talk about, so here goes. Prior to this job, I'd often spend an hour a week screening resumes for new hires. The vast, vast, vast majority of resumes are terrible; at one job in DC, I'd typically take 100 resumes, find five worth

Twitter vs Buzz vs Facebook updates

2010-10-15T14:24:00.001-04:00

Once you get over a trivial number of friends - once you have more than one social circle - Twitter doesn't scale at all. If I send a public reply, my followers get it... but don't have the context originally. So, it works well, until you get beyond one social circle, and then the whole thing goes to hell. It's great for shouting something to a larger group (at the Sharp Edge Beer Palace!),

Just for the record...

2010-10-13T21:01:00.002-04:00

**This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.**

Productivity Boost: Multiple Monitors

2010-09-28T16:10:00.002-04:00

So, on my desk, there's a laptop, a 17" screen, and a 23" behemoth of a LCD screen. The 23", I purchased myself at Costco; it was $200, and the biggest boost to my productivity since the invention of coffee. For web developers - or any complex computer-based task - multiple monitors often lets you lay out your computer desktop like your actual desktop. Instead of having exactly one stack

Recruiting Chat

2010-09-19T20:02:00.000-04:00

Someone was having trouble recruiting for new talent, and I wound up talking them through my previous strategy over chat. I took some notes, so here's the recruiting speech, as a stream of consciousness. I recently was hired by a company whose hiring process is *nothing* like this, so your mileage will always vary. I did interviews for a small company for awhile, and now get to interview

UI/UX

2010-09-07T23:29:00.000-04:00

Fifteen years ago, a person I'd met wound up landing a job with Microsoft; he was incredibly well versed in DirectX, and was part of the team at Bungee that wrote Halo, one of the best selling and most popular videogames to date.I saw him give a talk on "why was Halo so popular?", and the question was "any secrets for UI design?" His answer was very simple: "Dip it in floor wax. Make it shiny.

Women in Software Development

2010-07-31T19:10:00.001-04:00

So, a friend shared an article that's certainly worth a read: Women in Technology. The article has a great point; some people think that "maybe women aren't cut out for technology". If we thought about most things this way, and our web pages took two minutes to load, we'd simply handwave the issue away with "maybe this hardware is crap", instead of looking at the processes and procedures that

Encryption Strength

2010-07-26T20:33:00.000-04:00

Got into a discussion today where I was asked to compare various forms of encryption against each other. This is pretty much the long-form verbatim reply, which was interesting enough to post: First off, there are two main categories of encryption algorithms; symmetric and asymmetric. A symmetric algorithm is like a decoder ring; both people have the same key. Taking the postal service as

Statistics for UI Testing

2010-07-08T16:11:00.000-04:00

So, you've setup two copies of your web application, and don't know which is better. You know you have 10,000 users, and you randomly give 50 people the new copy, and see how that goes. 23 of them don't like it. Is that statistically significant? Here's a quick article summing up all of statistics for user experience testing. It's long, but I'm bookmarking that one for the next time the

Beginning Software Development

2010-06-21T20:40:00.000-04:00

Do many (any?) academic computer science bachelor's programs offer a course - or seminar - on software development? I know that that might be considered a lean towards software engineering, but I really think there's overlap that could be introduced in a day that's simply not taught nearly early enough. By "software development", I mean pretty simple things; expose potential developers to an

Sort Algorithms

2010-06-16T16:48:00.000-04:00

Okay, this one makes me happy. New algorithms - new applications of theory - that I can actually use seem few and far between, but I just ran into one. David Musser's Introsort is an algorithm from the late 90's that starts with quicksort, and switches to heapsort if quicksort isn't expected to perform well on the actual dataset. It has the speed of quicksort, but in a worst-case-scenario, it

Remote Working and Volunteerism

2010-06-15T15:24:00.000-04:00

The last post didn't quite cleanly segue into this, so a separate post. When I lived in DC, a good friend and I were looking to volunteer with a nonprofit organization, doing web work for them. They happily accepted remote volunteers (they're in San Francisco, we're not), and had a shiny-new teleconferencing system setup just for folks like us to be able to help out. That was great, everyone

Working from Home

2010-06-15T15:14:00.000-04:00

At least once a week, I work from home. The group I'm in doesn't have any technical staff at the site I'm at; the rest of my team is a two hour drive away. So home is quieter, and I've found that I'm notably more productive here with one caveat. My desk is about a floor away from my project manager, and keeping in regular contact with her ensures that I have a productive day. While we don't

User Expectations

2010-03-26T20:39:00.000-04:00

At least as important as the user experience itself would be the users' expectations of that user experience. Google is easily the world champ at this. Gmail was in Beta forever. It was introduced to the public as "a product in test". If it went down, had a glitch, or didn't perform 100%, well, you expected that to some extent, for quite some time. And since it didn't fail often, much, or

IE6

2010-03-23T21:46:00.000-04:00

So, I had to give this explanation today at work, why developers don't really care for IE6. It ballooned into something postable, so here goes. IE6 was built around 2000, and ignored several significant web standards at the time. IE6 was somewhat of a "lesson learned"; IE7 is better about following those standards, and IE8 is better still. Firefox was built around Netscape/Mozilla, and

DisplayTag

2010-03-14T13:51:00.000-04:00

C# has something that's a strong advantage over the base Java libraries; it has UI widgets. If you want to show a table of search results to the user in the UI, you can write the code for the table manually, or you can just drop in a GridView and have it do most of the tedious work for you. Java's added a *lot* of classes to Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition, but I haven't seen anything

One Address Book?

2010-02-25T11:16:00.000-05:00

I have an address book on my phone, that I update with people's numbers when I get them. It syncs to my laptop's address book, but that stops there. I tried using Plaxo to sync that with other machines, but I wasn't thrilled with their service; I wound up moving my primary email to Gmail instead. Now, I also have useful contact information at work, in LinkedIn, and in Facebook. Is there any

Java Enum

2010-02-22T23:06:00.000-05:00

So, in Java 5, they added language support for enumeration types. There's a Java Trails tutorial that does a good job, but it left out one important bit, so here goes. The less good way to do an enumeration is manaully, without language support. public class Colors { private static final int RED = 1; private static final int BLUE = 2; private static final int YELLOW

JQuery

2010-02-17T23:39:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty much in love with JQuery at the moment. The last time I had to do anything complex with JavaScript, I inherited a dropdown menu system with some animation that was using 7500 lines of script pushed to the client's browser. I was able to replace it with 20-30 lines, including hacks for IE6, and it only took two days to tinker to be just so. I was really proud of that. Fast forward a

Three Java Pitfalls

2010-02-11T20:23:00.000-05:00

A coworker asked for a few gotchas in Java; things you just step your foot into and never saw coming. Three seemed a good number of things to list off at once, and they're three that have come up recently. The time and date libraries in Java are a bit broken; getting the values you want usually takes a couple lines of code, and things like time zones aren't well represented. There are

Design Patterns - The Command Pattern

2010-02-08T11:03:00.002-05:00

There's a lot of knowledge in the book Design Patterns (Gang of Four). Developers should know the material in there to write efficient and maintainable code, but the book is pretty dry. I'd say it's quicker and easier to just point curious folks at the Wikipedia article, which sums up more information more quickly, and allows you to dive in if you find one particular bit interesting. The other

Scrum

2010-02-02T23:54:00.000-05:00

So, I've used Agile/Scrum in the past, but always in a development shop that had been on that methodology for awhile. My current team is adopting it mid-project, and the results are both promising and a learning experience. Basically, there are a few key principles: Change is inevitable; accept that things will change, and that other things will have to. Communication is as important as