Month: June 2018

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
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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 …

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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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