How did I end up at Apple?

How did I end up at Apple?

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people while I’ve been at Apple. Unlike most new recruits, Apple was not a company I ever dreamed about working for.

I never wanted to work for a big company. Period. For me, a big company was one withmore than 200 people. I found even companies that size were riddled with bureaucracy. You’d never talk to any of the senior leaders except during a Q&A at a company-wide event. I couldn’t fathom working at a company with more than 5,000 people.

Even if Apple were small, I had given up on them back in the mid 1990s. The last straw was my nearly $7,000 purchase of a PowerBook 5300— the worst computer I’ve ever owned. I later sold it for $500 just for the display. Apple’s system software quality was also at an all time low. For six months, I tried to switch to Windows but … READ THE REST

Apple: Best and worst hardware product

Apple: Best and worst hardware product

When I used to interview people at Apple, I sometimes liked to ask them what they thought were the best and worst Apple hardware products of all time. It was a good way to test product knowledge, the ability to be critical without getting carried away, prioritization skills, and ability to keep things in perspective.

Sometimes the interviewee turns the tables on me and asks me for my best and worst. It’s something I think about a lot because the company has gone through so many highs and lows. I think it’s important to evaluate what went well and what went wrong in the past so the same mistakes aren’t made.

The worst hardware product

I started with the worst because it’s really easy. In my mind, it’s been the worst Apple hardware ever since it came out and was never topped. This product was so bad that:

  • I had
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Don’t forget soft skills when interviewing engineers

Don’t forget soft skills when interviewing engineers

This is based entirely on personal experience, but I thought it might be useful to others. Tech companies tends to do highly technical interviews in engineering and overlook the soft skills. Over the years, when I’ve been given the freedom to do so, I tend to focus more on soft skills. Here are some things I often ask. There really aren’t right and wrong answers, but it’s more about how they handle what is thrown at them.

How do you think code should be tested?

Here I’m generally looking for a few things:

  • Recognition that having only engineers testing their own code is not adequate. If they think it is, I will usually point out that if you know how your code works, it might be hard to stumble upon bugs. Then I see how they respond.
  • Familiarity with the different types of testing and their strengths and weaknesses. For
… READ THE REST
How to easily create documentation

How to easily create documentation

Some undeniable truths about documentation:

  • People hate to write it
  • People really need it

When someone needs some help, it can consume a lot of resources, especially when a company is continually hiring new people or losing people to other teams or companies.

There are a couple types of documention:

  • Simple questions and answers
  • More detailed documents

The usual way things are done

Simple questions and answers are done in person or in chat, usually lost forever except to the recipient of a chat who could search their chats.

Write emails containing more detailed information to someone, a group of people, or a mailing list.

Proposed way

  • For short questions and answers, create a page on your wiki (e.g. Confluence) for frequently asked questions and quickly add it after providing it to someone in email and chat.
  • After sending an email, create a wiki page and paste in the contents
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Delete previous word or path item in Terminal

Delete previous word or path item in Terminal

In pretty much any Cocoa app, option-delete is an incredibly useful shortcut to delete the previous word or path component. If you mess up typing a word, for example, you can start fresh instead of having to use the mouse/trackpad or hit backspace multiple times. For paths, it’s great for when you want to remove a few components from the end of a path.

In Terminal, however, this is not possible by default. You can enable a command in the Edit menu called “Use Option as Meta Key” and it will restore this Cocoa editing behavior.

You can also enable it on a per-theme basis in the Keyboard tab.I find this incredibly useful in quite a few scenarios.

  • You make a typo and it’s just quicker to do option-delete and retype the word
  • You’re typing a command and you’ve messed up the flags or perhaps the ordering of
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App Switcher tricks

App Switcher tricks

In case you’re not familiar with App Switcher, press Command-Tab to bring it up

App Switcher

From there, you can continue to Tab until you reach the app you want to switch to and then release. But there are some pretty advanced things you can do.


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Using social networking at work

Using social networking at work

Networking is not only a way to increase productivity of a company as a whole, but also a way to advance your career. One way to do this is to engage in the work version of social networking.

When a company is small, it’s easy to know everyone and recognize them by face. When a company gets large enough, you can get to the point where most people you interact with you rarely or never see in person.

It’s important to know what everyone works on, but it’s also important to get to know people. If people know who you are, they will remember you when starting a new project. Higher ups in charge of the purse strings may remember you better around review time.

So, how might this work? In the absence of any framework for this, it could be simple as creating a page for yourself or perhaps … READ THE REST

How do I learn AppleScript?

How do I learn AppleScript?

Before we get to how to learn Applescript, it’s important to first think about WHY you would want to learn it. Based on my experience, here’s my take on that.

  • Applescript’s main reason-to-be is to send or receive data directly between applications and also control them. This is something unique that it does, so if this is what you want to do, Applescript may be what you need.
  • I do like Applescript, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a general purpose scripting language. It can be slow and cumbersome and the syntax is unusual. Scripts are harder to share because most people use languages like python. Also, it can be a better use of your time to learn something that is more broadly useful.
  • Some people say that Applescript is a good way to dabble in scripting and programming before moving to other languages. I encourage people (on Apple platforms)
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Ideas for better quality software

Ideas for better quality software

I’ve been around long enough to see many different efforts to improve software quality fail. Often the ideas are fairly one-dimensional rather than wholistic. I’ll give you one example.

Let’s say there’s a decision that everyone must use continuous integration in the next release. Even if it’s not sold as a panacea, there seems to be an implication that it’ll definitely lead to significantly improved quality. And it’s not to say that it couldn’t. But the problem is that for continuous integration to be very successful, it requires other things like good development practices and perhaps a suite of unit tests.

Having said all this, many could be done in isolation.

Better source code management practices

Most of this revolves around source code management. A common way to use tools like git is to do the following:

  • Branch for a bug fix
  • Branch for feature work
  • Branch for releases as
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“defaults” command tricks

“defaults” command tricks

If you use the defaults command to set preferences, it’s easy to forget that you ever did. Some implications of this:

  • You could be filling up your drive with logs or slowing your system down
  • You could run into other bugs later that are caused by the default itself
  • An update to an app might not benefit you because the default you set is overriding behavior

Finding defaults

The defaults command has a find subcommand, but I’ve found that people generally aren’t aware of it. Let’s say you set some defaults relating to your trackpad, but don’t know what domain they are in:

defaults find trackpad

Found 3 keys in domain 'Apple Global Domain': {
     "com.apple.trackpad.forceClick" = 0;
     "com.apple.trackpad.scaling" = 3;
     "com.apple.trackpad.scrolling" = "0.75";
 }
 Found 3 keys in domain 'com.apple.AppleMultitouchTrackpad': {
     Clicking = 0;
     DragLock = 0;
    
… READ THE REST