Tech Reflect

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 …

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 …

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 …

Many large companies with excess cash do share buybacks or offer a dividend. Both of these are intended to benefit shareholders. However, the waters are muddied in that some employees are also shareholders.

Let’s look at the numbers for Apple.

Cook said that Apple had returned $27.5 billion to shareholders last quarter

Apple […] also approved a 77 cent dividend per share.

Apple stock spikes after reporting strong guidance and earnings beat—CNBC—April 30, 2019

As of September 29, 2018 , the Company had approximately 132,000 full-time equivalent employees.

Apple Form 10K—SEC—September 29, 2018

I’ll extrapolate a little since I couldn’t find complete numbers.

1. $27.5 billion x 4 quarters = $110 billion in yearly share repurchase
2. 77 cents x 4.72 billion shares x 4 quarters = $14.5 billion annual dividend
3. $110 billion + $14.5 billion = $124.5 billion given to shareholders yearly

Divide that by the number of employees. Check my …

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

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