tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71002600101858129482026-06-28T02:56:14.980-04:00A blog of what I'm working on with tech today.Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.comBlogger97125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-45181832750491591042015-05-19T21:36:00.004-04:002015-05-19T21:36:44.964-04:00

There are a bunch of ways to describe the quality of a product you want to sell; here's three of them. Are most of the engineers who worked on it proud of their work? Are people likely to pay for it? Are people who paid for it likely to recommend it to others? If you can get the last one, you're golden; you have a product that virally markets itself.  If you've got a product that everyone

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-3851749622117352002015-05-19T15:27:00.002-04:002015-05-19T15:27:40.587-04:00

Randy Pausch came up at work, and he wound up giving me good advice years ago, so I added that to the discussion; while it's on my mind, here goes. His advice boiled down to: look at how you spend your time, and list it out. prioritize that list, based on how much you and your society gets out of it. start at the bottom, and start cutting. actively choose replacements that make future-you a

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-31673673469612692612014-10-07T20:31:00.001-04:002014-10-07T20:31:43.826-04:00

It's important to take vacation; human psychology is setup to benefit across the board from detaching from work, and vacation is one of the biggest/easiest ways to do so.   Some folks have trouble taking vacation, or aren't sure how to work it in.  Here are eight strategies that I've seen work, enable easier leaves, and hopefully get more benefit from the same days off.

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-84283825548412258812014-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:002014-09-30T00:01:48.127-04:00

That's been a very long break, so here goes.  I'm curious how many reality and game shows have available data online. Was watching The Voice and trying to figure out if judges who turn their chairs late in the audition have a lower chance of winning contestants they're interested in; if Adam Levine turns around a minute in, and Blake Shelton turns around two minutes in, how much better

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-32682380344683688442013-06-01T09:48:00.002-04:002014-09-30T00:00:34.592-04:00

At any large enough company, people on projects far from yours make decisions that occasionally look like idiocy. Assuming they passed the same interview process that you did, there's a pretty good chance that the person who made that decision is reasonably smart.  But human nature being what it is, we forget that, and sometimes assume the worst.  Cries of "why would they do that?", "

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-83930964354703749142013-05-30T19:01:00.002-04:002013-05-30T19:01:30.156-04:00

So, related advice I give to both interviewers and interviewees. Interviewers: If you give a candidate a question that has several answers, they might say "well, we can do A, B, or C. Let's try B." At that point, politely stop them and make them pick a different path. If they chose B, it means they probably know B the best of any of the choices; if they can knock A or C out of the park,

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-77345030825728233072011-10-26T10:43:00.000-04:002011-10-26T10:43:07.785-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-70378015278793433932011-09-27T09:54:00.000-04:002011-09-27T09:54:25.948-04:00

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?

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-56139011687179502392011-09-21T15:52:00.000-04:002011-09-21T15:52:01.166-04:00

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.

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-38520729010960820522011-03-28T10:16:00.000-04:002011-03-28T10:16:00.617-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-48401675587546758752010-10-15T14:24:00.001-04:002010-10-15T14:26:26.630-04:00

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!),

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-81670337183417269392010-10-13T21:01:00.002-04:002010-10-13T21:01:25.331-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-52649897523337021982010-09-28T16:10:00.002-04:002010-09-28T16:10:26.367-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-78920164316348097902010-09-19T20:02:00.000-04:002010-09-19T20:02:19.653-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-13939790624786519142010-09-07T23:29:00.000-04:002010-09-07T23:29:33.155-04:00

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.

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-31948630524570401572010-07-31T19:10:00.001-04:002010-07-31T19:16:47.173-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-87230882822084064142010-07-26T20:33:00.000-04:002010-07-26T20:33:39.687-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-31308723274297775752010-07-08T16:11:00.000-04:002010-07-08T16:11:08.657-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-14305058067132711062010-06-21T20:40:00.000-04:002010-06-21T20:40:15.815-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-21604621018660324882010-06-16T16:48:00.000-04:002010-06-16T16:48:14.335-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-20688251829134197592010-06-15T15:24:00.000-04:002010-06-15T15:24:58.003-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-49163437912779812412010-06-15T15:14:00.000-04:002010-06-15T15:14:29.937-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-76138307530128171562010-03-26T20:39:00.000-04:002010-03-26T20:39:14.142-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-50612408980629682472010-03-23T21:46:00.000-04:002010-03-23T21:46:15.318-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7100260010185812948.post-74111790102866012202010-03-14T13:51:00.000-04:002010-03-14T13:51:10.639-04:00

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

Dean Jacksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05862185746791036769noreply@blogger.com0