Note to modern web designers: since the displays are becoming wide and short, please do not squander vertical screen space. Here’s a good example of what not to do:
Viewed full size, you see a window that is 705 pixels tall. The OS claims 24 pixels, the web browser claims 90 pixels, and the web application claims 250 pixels. So, by the time you hit the actual content, 50% of the window has been wasted!
Squinting into a tiny pane to read news makes me angry. Google, you can do way way better than this!
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.
Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can’t. I’ve also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.
Huh? I remember when a CTO explained that a SysAdmin should have at least mediocre programming skills. So, I have always aspired to have at least mediocre programming skills. (More important, SysAdmins are extremely well-served when they can write programs to make their work easier!)
I haven’t written C code in a long while, but I fired up vim and had this compiled and running in a few minutes:
#include <stdio .h>void main(){int i, fb;for( i =1; i <=100; i++){
fb =0;if( i %3==0){printf("Fizz"); fb++;}if( i %5==0){printf("Buzz"); fb++;}if( fb ==0){printf("%d", i);}printf("\n");}}
#include <stdio .h>
void main() {
int i, fb;
for( i = 1; i < = 100; i++ ) {
fb = 0;
if( i % 3 == 0 ) { printf("Fizz"); fb++; }
if( i % 5 == 0 ) { printf("Buzz"); fb++; }
if( fb == 0 ) { printf("%d", i); }
printf("\n");
}
}
I recall at least one interview with Google and probably other companies where I have done something like this on a white board, with the interviewer challenging me with compiler-like errors to help me repair syntax errors.
Patrick’s point is that when you work with excellent people, you see your skills in that context, and will tend to be unduly modest. But when you step back a bit and look at your skills in the context of the industry as a whole, you may well be among the best on the market.
Here in the Silicon Valley, there are plenty of tech jobs, but there is also plenty of competition, which means that the folks you come to associate with will tend to be toward the top of their field.
Patrick’s further point would be that you need to take your skills, and develop the capacity to convey the value that those skills can bring to an organization.
Leonard Kleinrock tells the story of the Internet’s birth. First word was LO:
And then, he shows us the world’s first router, which they were going to throw out:
My first experience of the Internet was a 1200 baud dialup connection to a USENET host that connected upstream twice a day at 2400 baud. That would have been around 1992 or 1993. (I was a broke highschool kid who couldn’t afford the $30/mo+ for a proper Internet connection.) My first email address was dannyman@netwrk21.chi.il.us, and I lost that address when my network uplink failed to pay his phone bill. Oh well!
When I started college in January, 1995, and had access to labs and labs and labs of computers directly connected via Ethernet, with Mosaic and Netscape installed, it was like I had found my Nerd Nirvana! It only got better when I took a C programming course on the Sun workstations in the basement of the DCL . . .
A friend posted a link about some iPad App that will show you recipes. My reaction was one of being condescendingly underwhelmed, and here’s the gist of what I’d really like to see in a “cookbook app”:
“Will it plan a week’s menus based on seasonal ingredients and give you a shopping list? Because that’s the fucking time-consuming part the computers need to fix.
Any clown can convert a menu book to an App . . . and any clown can find a recipe, drive to the store, spend 45 minutes trying to find some ingredient they don’t know about which is out of season, pay a bunch of money, get home, if they still have the energy maybe cook something sorta edible . . .
. . . but this being the 21st century, an electronic cookbook ought to be able to suggest recipes for you based on the ingredients you have ready access to. (In your pantry, in your growing region, partner with a supermarket…) I have found a website that does a mediocre job of this. This thing is begging to be invented.
Anyway, what I’m saying is–cookbooks in an app–that’s like lets transcribe 15th century technology into silicon. I say hell no, with all this information technology let’s leverage the information to really make it easy for the people to cook healthy, inexpensive meals at home. THAT is the revolution that will make us all better off.”
JIRA is an issue tracking system that is really flexible, but sometimes presents irritatingly arbitrary limitations.
I have been working on a screen which uses multiple tabs. The tabs are there to make it easier for the user to find the fields they want to edit, without scrolling through a single long, complex issue. But every tab has a Comment field rendered on it, which makes things confusing, and makes each tab look like it needs scrolling.
So, just remove the Comment field from the Screen, right? No, it isn’t in there. So, can I remove Comment via the Field Configuration Scheme? No, it is mandatory. Damn your arbitrary limitation, JIRA!
Anyway, I don’t normally speak JavaScript, but I managed to gin up the following snippet to paste into a Field description which appears in the screen I wanted to tweak. It finds the element containing the Comment, and sets its style display attribute to none. As the page loads, the Comment box is rendered, but once the page load completes, the Comment box disappears.
Flying down to LAX to visit the wife. I booked at the last minute which means I paid a bit more for Main Cabin Select on an otherwise full flight. That means I get to go through security in the short line and board the plane first. A good start to the weekend and time enough to post a photo.
Enjoying Dmitri Samarov‘s new novel about driving a taxi in Chicago, I looked up at my cafe table in Mountain View, CA and noted that mine was the only analog screen. Technologist that I am, I’m just not ready for an e-reader yet. I’m too attached to hardbacks and paperbacks.
My mother, however, has a Nook. She used to drive a cab in Chicago.
Many eulogies celebrate Steve in terms of his “products” — those mass-produced little gadgets that we love for letting us check email in front of our friends — and lose sight of his grass-strained spirit. What always moved me about Steve was the calligraphy and the LSD, the passage to India and his firing from Apple, his struggles at NeXT and his return from the wilderness.
The insistence on Steve’s perfection, on the vast difference between him as a producer and us as consumers, seems inhuman and even lonely to me. I wish we could take a moment in eulogizing Steve to grieve for him as one frail human to another, and feel in his passing the miracle of every human life; so many other people, geniuses on a smaller scale, are struggling his struggle. It hurts me that we have so much love to give to Steve and not to them.
At the beginning of our current economic crisis, I embarked on an infrastructure project to make needed improvements to my existing jaw line, and to stimulate the economy through orthodontic stimulus spending. This spending was completely paid for by my personal revenues, and did not contribute to any deficit spending on my part. At least three orthodontic professionals, one oral surgeon, one x-ray technician, and countless support staff received their paychecks as a result of this infrastructure program.
This morning, we took the scaffolding off to unveil my new and improved smile.
The economy could use a little more stimulating, though. With any luck I can make a contribution to consumer confidence by smiling at people.
A note board in an abandoned cubicle records a last message. Some time back I added a note regarding Darmak’s location. Today I noticed that someone caught on to my note and put in an annotation for Jilad.
Watching "High Plains Drifter" via Amazon.com on the Roku, and on the laptop. On the one hand, the laptop can do high definition. On the other hand, it has to sit on my belly.
