Tech Reflect – Page 2 – Reflecting on 25 years in tech

Don’t forget soft skills when interviewing engineers

2018-06-22

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

2018-06-19

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

2018-06-12

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

2018-06-11

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

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

2018-06-05

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?

2018-06-01

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

2018-05-30

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

2018-05-30

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;

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Keyboard tricks in Dock stacks

2018-05-29

Note: For most of these keyboard commands, your stack must be in Grid View. Right-click on a Dock stack and choose View content as Grid. A small subset of the commands work in List View and Fan View.

Keyboard navigation commands

Action	Result
Tab or Right Arrow	Selects upper left item in the grid
Shift-Tab or Left Arrow	Selects “Show in Finder” which is the lower right item in the grid
Tab, Shift-Tab, and arrow keys	Navigate between items
Commmand-UpArrow	Navigate up to parent folder
Command-DownArrow	Navigate into selected folder
Space bar	Quick Look selected item
Command-Return	Reveal selected item in the Finder
Type characters	Select matching item

Some other interesting commands not related to keyboard navigation

Action	Result
Option-click file	Open file and leave stack open
Command-Shift-Plus/Minus	Increase/Decrease icon size
Command-click on stack or stack item	Reveal clicked on item in Finder
Option-Command-click on stack	Reveal

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Meet people in person!

2018-05-25

I don’t have data to support this, but at very large companies it’s likely that a majority of the people we know we’ve never met in person. This is especially true with large cross-functional projects where people may reside in multiple buildings. We know so many people only through email, messaging, or a bug tracking system.

You might ask why this a problem. Text is often fraught with peril when it comes to communication. It’s easy to miscommunicate both ideas and emotions. It’s easy to misjudge someone or think ill of them. This could impact how a project progresses.

Here are some radical ideas you can try to implement.

Phone

If you find yourself communicating with someone very often via text and visiting them personally is difficult or not an option (e.g. they are in another country), pick up the phone and call them. In cases where you’re about to … READ THE REST