Interviewing is not a one-sided conversation. If you land a job by only worrying about successfully impressing interviewers, you will almost certainly be surprised, and you may be unhappy once you start the job. It is critical that you understand that an interview is not about making the company happy and fitting their mold, it …
October 2012 archive
Oct 29 2012
Hyphenated Names and Job Security
The hyphenated name fad is a conspiracy to keep software engineering jobs secure. What will we do 20 years from now (and every 20 after) when two hyphenated named people marry? We’ll have a y2k-scale crisis of last name field lengths in forms and databases, that’s what. When Mike Smith-Jones-Anderson-Smith-Snow marries Jane Doe-Jones-Anderson-Jackson-Williams, and little …
Oct 29 2012
IOS 6 app store crash on your iPod touch 4? Restore.
For weeks the app store has crashed constantly on my iPod Touch 4th gen after the over-the-air IOS 6 update. Restoring the iTouch to a fresh install of 6.0 on iTunes fixed the problem and now the app store works better, not perfect, but better. Symptoms: I would search for something, and swiping left or …
Oct 20 2012
So-called “Terrible” stock performance
A few days ago, Google slipped up in releasing quarterly earnings reports before they were PR-ified, popular media referred to their results as ‘terrible’: What Page couldn’t apologize for, however, is that Google’s results were pretty terrible. The company’s profits plunged 20 percent from a year ago, according to the Wall Street Journal (source) Today, …
Oct 18 2012
Life is like a movie..
Life is like a movie, except there’s a lot of boring filler between the scenes worth remembering. In other words, life is like a Peter Jackson movie.
Oct 17 2012
Users aren’t stupid, your UI is.
tl;dr; version: Get your head out of your ass, stop adding complex features that 90% of the world won’t care for. Instead, learn to stop, breathe, and make your software products simple by focusing on usability consistently. Users aren’t stupid, your UI is. In a big bad world of federated software product development, Usability is …
Oct 16 2012
Regularly losing hard drives? Try clean power.
A few years back, I was losing 1 to 2 hard drives a year, every year. I was purchasing quality drives (for consumer grade..), and it did not seem to matter if a drive was internal or external, the life span was just junk. Your computer’s parts are highly sensitive pieces of equipment in terms …
Oct 11 2012
The story of Freddie Kreuger, the brave three-legged cat.
This is the story of Freddie Kreuger, the cat who taught me what patience and love are, and what it means to be brave. Freddie Kreuger and her 3 siblings were born in a neighbor’s backyard in May of 2010. The four kittens were born to a feral mother, who we mistakenly named “Mr. Bond” …
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About
Jason Baker is a software engineer. He works on enterprise infrastructure for big companies. He also enjoys creating smaller scale software products and scripts in his spare time.