Tech Reflect – Reflecting on 25 years in tech

Searching for porn at work

2019-11-05

This is one of my favorite stories from doing internal support for Mail. If you’ve been around long enough, you may remember when macOS had a system-wide Find dialog for text. I couldn’t find exactly the right image, but it looked something like this:

Unless an application implemented their own UI for searching text, Command-F would bring up a dialog like this.

The twist is that whatever was in the Find field would be remembered between applications. So, if you search for something in TextEdit and then bring up Mail, it would display that same search term, but it would be highlighted so you could easily type over it.

So, I was in this unnamed engineer’s office. You probably know where this is going. In the course of troubleshooting Mail, I believe I was wanting to search the raw source of an email message.

I hit Command-F and up came … READ THE REST

macOS tips: Old Dock tips that are still useful

2019-11-04

I ran across a list of tips I wrote when Leopard shipped a million years ago. Most of them still work and are useful. And best of all, I’ve found that most people are unaware that they exist.

Dock springing. If you drag a file and hover over Dock items, various useful things happen which are similar to Finder springing. Note you have to have springing ON in Finder Preferences (or use spacebar).
- If it’s a window, the window un-minimizes from the Dock.
- If it’s a folder/stack, the corresponding folder in the Finder opens.
- If it’s the Finder, it brings the Finder to the foreground and opens a window if one doesn’t exist already.
- The coolest springing trick is if you hover over an application while dragging a file The application comes to the foreground and then you can hover over the window you want and that springs to

… READ THE REST

How I almost worked for Pixar

2019-09-03

A good pairing with my article about How I almost worked directly for Steve Jobs.

Prior to coming to Apple, I was browsing the Pixar jobs website. I would do this a couple times a year but I was honestly so unqualified for absolutely everything they had offered.

But in 1999, they had a job posted for someone to assist with migrating some of their traditional UNIX workstations to the Mac. Initially, it was more of an investigative role as Mac OS X had not yet shipped and they had no desire to switch the classic Mac OS.

At the time, I had a very scattered resume of support and consulting positions. However, this job was so right up my alley it almost made me laugh. It required experience in this eclectic mix of software that I either knew really well or I used the software of one of … READ THE REST

How I almost worked directly for Steve Jobs

2019-09-03

This isn’t a very exciting story but definitely an interesting what-could-have-been thought experiment.

The job

When I worked in AppleCare in 1999, I worked with an engineer named Robert Esker. Years later, he became the technical support person for Steve Jobs. At the time, Steve was CEO of both Apple and Pixar and also kept a home office.

Robert’s job was to keep everything running smoothly and travel between all three locations as needed. He wasn’t on his own as there were people across the company that were familiar with getting the occasional contact from him to help resolve an issue with Steve’s systems.

As the support person for Mail, I was one of those people that Robert would contact. Unsurprisingly, Steve was a very heavy Mail user and also used Address Book (which I worked on as well) to keep notes for every phone call he made. It was … READ THE REST

Steve Jobs: “What an asshole”

2019-08-14

When I worked in AppleCare, I worked across the hall from a team of people called Executive Relations. Among their duties was to field complaints from “important people” about Apple products that ended up in in inbox of Steve Jobs.

Executive Relations was tasked with placating these people. I’m unsure whether this organization still exists, but in those days, Apple was in dire straights. There was a fear that any small thing could blow up into a big thing. Remember the G4 cube that started showing up cracked? Even though the lines were aesthetic, surface scratches and were corrected early on, this reputation sunk the product, damaged Apple, and led to a one-day 50% drop in the stock price.

So, complaints from influential people were taken seriously and the people in this group had some latitude to make people happy, including replacing hardware or even giving out freebies.

Whenever the … READ THE REST

Mail team: QA (2000-2004)

2019-08-05

Mail team: Technical support (2000-2004)

2019-07-09

Other articles about my Apple career:
My first job at Apple: AppleCare (1999-2000)
Interviewing for the Mail team (2000)
>>> Mail team: Technical support (2000-2004)
Mail team: QA (2000-2004)

My first 12 years at Apple, I held three different jobs that were just amazing. Mail edges out the other two, but it’s very a very close contest.

My position on the Mail team was really two jobs in one:

Be an on-call support person for all of software engineering as well as important people in other organizations. I was the public face of Mail and also monitored the “help” mailing list (this article)
Serve as the lone quality assurance engineer that was fully dedicated to Mail. This included managing incoming bug reports, analyzing, root causing, and prioritizing them (this article)

I’ll cover the support part of the job here. The reason for needing this was a mandate that everyone in … READ THE REST

Interviewing for the Mail team (2000)

2019-07-01

Other articles about my Apple career:
My first job at Apple: AppleCare (1999-2000)
Interviewing for the Mail team (2000)
Mail team: Technical support (2000-2004)
Mail team: QA (2000-2004)

Sometime in the summer of 2000, I interviewed with the Mail team.

I never intended to work in software engineering but I desperately wanted to work on Mac OS X, which was working on releasing the Public Beta within a few months. So a bunch of interviews with the Mail team.

The short summary is I sweated and laughed a lot. I alternated between being certain I was getting the job to being sure I wasn’t.

My most intimidating interview was with Scott Forstall, who was then was the head of applications and frameworks and the manager of the Mail team reported to him. This is what the entire interview was like:

Scott: It’s your first day in your new

… READ THE REST

How I unwittingly learned object-oriented programming

2019-06-28

1993

In May of 1993, I first connected to a online virtual community called LambdaMOO. It’s difficult to describe the place in one sentence, but here’s one attempt:

A MOO is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time
MOO—Wikipedia

LambdaMOO was created at Xerox PARC, where important inventions such as laser printers, the graphical user interface, Ethernet, and important aspects of computer graphics were created.

I didn’t really know any of the backstory at the time. I was an economics major and working in the tech industry wasn’t on my radar.

Like many people, I initially joined for social reasons. It’s was very much like a text-based adventure game only there were other people logged into the same virtual world.

You could walk around the world and read their descriptions. Anything you said would be heard by whoever was in … READ THE REST

My first job at Apple: AppleCare (1999-2000)

2019-06-27

Other articles about my Apple career:

My first job at Apple: AppleCare (1999-2000)
Interviewing for the Mail team (2000)
Mail team: Technical support (2000-2004)
Mail team: QA (2000-2004)

As I mentioned in a previous post about how I ended up at Apple, it was when I was handed a copy of Mac OS X Server 1.0 to bring home in my first day of interviews that I decided I had to be a part of Apple.

AppleCare (1999-2000)

My first job at Apple was doing data analysis on what people were calling Apple Support about it. It was primarily was is now called “Classic” macOS, but included all of Apple’s software products. It sounds boring, but I loved it and it had a real impact. I was the first person in this position.

Prior to me, the way that Apple Corporate would find out about the most important issues … READ THE REST