Tech Reflect

Confessions of a retired bug screener

2020-05-18

In the context of this article, “bug screening” means taking a bug report filed by an employee or developer or someone else. Then, doing any number of things:

Clean it up to make it more clear and understandable
Figure out if it’s already a known issue
Try to reproduce the problem
Send the bug report back if more information is needed
Route the bug to someone
Set a priority and perhaps a milestone where the bug should be fixed

Most of my jobs at Apple involved screening bugs and in one 30 month period I screened over 45,000 bugs. Not surprisingly, it was 100% of my job. The reason this is important to mention (other than it gives me a lot of credibility) was that 15 years earlier, the bug flow was small enough that it was only a small fraction of my …

2020-05-14

Tech workers believe that they have the best health insurance and all other types of insurance offered by their company. And they are probably right. I don’t have any data to prove otherwise.

What I do know from my own research and experience is that the disability insurance offered by Apple and other tech companies could leave you in dire straights much more easily than you know.

There are two types of disability: short-term (12 weeks), and long-term (indefinite with a big asterisk). A disability is something that partially or completely prevents you from doing your job. It could be anything from a serious physical injury to a debilitating mental illness.

Remember, this could be some terrible infection you get and end up in the hospital for months. Medical insurance covers the bills but your employer will only pay you via disability insurance. Same goes for an inherited mental condition …

2020-05-06

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Steve Jobs liked to take pictures. He was even taking a picture the last time I saw him. However, many people might not know that some of his photos shipped as Desktop Pictures in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

And here they are:

There were 3 other photos that I was unable to confirm (or remember) ever made it into a Mac OS X release, but here they are:

…

2020-04-29

While auto-correct frustrates every iPhone user at one time or another, I imagine it’s an insanely complex feature to get right. After using it for 13 years now, I find that I have a list of small things I’d love to see change rather than a few number of really big changes.

I wanted to make this more a list of suggestions that to just rip into auto-correct. Note that I can always keep a very close eye on the completion bar but to have to look at three possible spellings as I type a word is cumbersome.

1) Never auto-correct a word that is already a valid word

Auto-correct likes to outsmart us by choosing a more common word than we actually typed.

In some cases, it might be a welcome surprise, but I feel it’s outweighed by the frustration when it changes my valid word. If I really …

2020-04-27

I ask myself the question why I bother writing this. There are hundreds of articles on the web comparing these two products but I may offer a unique perspective.

I used Apple Maps from long before it shipped until today
I was a Quality Engineer at Apple for 20 years, which gives me a unique perspective
I use maps 100% of the time when I drive, walk, plan trips, even if I’ve been there hundreds of times

I’ll break this into categories that are in no particular order of importance, except the first. Well, the first one is the most important.

Search

Google was founded on search. They were so much better than anyone else when they burst on the scene. Today, the gap is narrowed but I think most people would admit they are the best, especially if you ignore privacy concerns. Google is so good at search in …

2020-04-21

In 20 years at Apple, I obviously saw a lot and was sometimes motivated to write long, laborious manifestos about things. Usually they were practices and processes I felt needed to change.

These were initially published on my internal blog at Apple. So if you love manifestos and have a lot of time on your hands, here they are.

Enjoy.

…

2020-04-20

All across macOS and iOS, when you search for something, the ordering of results in most cases is:

A top hit (unclear how this is generated)
Suggestions (unclear how this is generated)
Your own data that you spent valuable time entering

Maps

I’ll provide several examples. First up, Maps. Let’s say I want to search for my doctor in Maps. She is in my Contacts.

Let’s start with a search for “se” just for grins. Note how we have a Top Hit, Suggestions, and then my own data at the bottom.

Let’s type two more letters, but this time in Contacts. Note that we have one hit, my doctor.

Maps has something different to say. First, we have 4 results for places, one of which is 35 miles away and an offer to search nearby for “serralheiros”—and my doctor at the bottom.

Just for fun, how about my entire doctor’s …

2020-04-15

Number of years of my life I wanted to live in California: 0
Number of years I lived in California: 24

Ancient history

One of my brothers went to Stanford and worked at Genentech, so I had a chance to visit the San Francisco quite a few times. Loved it. Nice climate. Foggy. Clean city. Clean transportation although inadequate. It was a place that seemed a lot nicer than Chicago at the time

College

In 1996, I lived in North Carolina. Racist. Homophobic. A mix of educated and highly ignorant people.

I always loved technology but was too poor to buy any of it. I remember seeing a NeXT machine at the university bookstore and the education price was $10,000—at that time I made $18,000 a year!

I didn’t want to be rich, but being poor felt like I was unable to do things that were very important to me.…

2020-04-06

An abbreviated Steve Jobs timeline as background

July 1985 – Forced out of Apple? (resigned)
February 1997 – Apple bought NeXT
July 1997 – Gil Amelio ousted, Steve becomes de-facto CEO
September 1997 – Steve named iCEO (interim CEO)
April 1999 – I joined Apple
January 2000 – Steve becomes CEO

So, why did I call it a scare. Well, at the very end of the 2+ hour Macworld San Francisco 2000 keynote, Steve said the following (my transcript, with the always enticing “One More Thing…” slide up on the giant screen.

As a backdrop, this is what he said about ever becoming CEO after the NeXT purchase:

“And you will absolutely not be the CEO of Apple?” I asked.
“My name is not in the hat to be CEO,” he said.
Steve Jobs, the perfect CEO—Wired—2011 Sep 10

Note that as this speech at the end of the keynote …

2020-04-02

In my last years at Apple, if I had no workflow in place, it was not impossible to get over a thousand emails a day. When I would visit people’s offices, I would see two main workflows:

An inbox with 50,000+ emails in it, mostly unread
A hundred or more mailboxes, one for each mailing list, also with high unread counts

Sure, there is a ton of garbage emails, such as automated emails or irrelevant mailing lists you can’t subscribe from. But I developed a system that worked for me and I was able to never have an unread message and was able to always find the most important ones.

The very simplest version of it looked like this. For a smaller flow of email, it could work well, but I ended up beefing it up a bit.

The decision process I would go through was this:

Is the message

…

Reflecting on 25 years in tech

Confessions of a retired bug screener

2020-05-18

Becoming disabled while working a tech job

2020-05-14

Desktop Pictures taken by Steve Jobs

2020-05-06

12 things I’d change about auto-correct

2020-04-29

1) Never auto-correct a word that is already a valid word

Google vs Apple Maps

2020-04-27

Search

Manifestos

2020-04-21

Why is my own data least important in search?