Perforation

Is it just me, or does perforated cardboard never seem to do what it’s supposed to? I always end up either mostly shredding the parts that aren’t perforated as the tear shoots off in some random direction, or tearing the perforation so slowly and carefully that it may as well not even be there in the first place.

At work, we have a Keurig single cup coffee maker. We get our coffee singles from Green Mountain Coffee (Keurig seems to be heavily marketed through Green Mountain, are they subsidiaries?). I’ll admit that although I like drip-brewed coffee better, the coffee singles are actually pretty good.

Anyway, the coffee singles come in boxes that are perforated on one corner, kind of like the 12 packs of soda that are meant for your fridge. They also have this nice cutout for your thumb or finger on one edge of the perforation. Apparently its purpose is to lure you into thinking that you can just insert your thumb or finger, pull, grab a single and brew. It never fails that I partially destroy these boxes while trying to use the obvious approach.

The perforations on those damn 12 packs never seem to work out either.

I don’t get it. Perforations really seem like they should work. If I had more free time, I’d invent a better way, but since I don’t, I guess I’ll just complain-blog about it.

Feedhub.com goes live!

It’s been a lot of hard work by the very dedicated and talented folks with whom I work, and we’re all very excited to get it out there for everyone to try. So, if you use or know about RSS, go check out feedhub.com. We hope you like it!

My life on timers

Another big adjustment in my transition from working at home to commuting to an office has been that my schedule is now largely dictated by outside forces. My morning and evening commute schedule is tied completely to the bus schedule, for example. Over the past week, though, I’ve discovered a couple more slightly amusing ways in which outside schedules affect my day.

The office lights in USX are on timers. There are no light switches. Want to go into the kitchen and find a fork with which to eat your breakfast at 7am? You’ll be fumbling in the dark … luckily you’ll have the Joust machine to provide a bit of light (but not much, since it’s screen is 90% black most of the time anyway!).

Luckily, the bathroom lights seem to be on by 7am, so I don’t have to aim in the dark. The automatic flush systems, however, are not. No flushing before 7:30am, and presumably no flushing after a certain time in the evening. I’m not sure whether I find this funny, or just plain freaky. A bit of each, I suppose.

The next morning bus commute

In the back of my mind, I just knew I’d shouldn’t have blogged about how smoothly that first morning bus ride was.

I needed to get into work a bit earlier today, so I took a different bus, the D Flyer, from a nearby park and ride. On the bus, I popped open my laptop to do some reading, and shortly after, I heard:

“D Flyer, mechanical emergency”

It took a sec to register, but then I realized that there was no sound coming from the bus—no engine noise, no whiny electrical noises. Uh oh. So much for getting into work early. The bus driver called in to the mother ship, and then quickly herded us out to a nearby bus stop. After only a few minutes, another bus stopped to pick us up, and we were on our way again. The first driver got us back on another bus within minutes on one of the coldest days of the year. I’m sure the he’ll never read this, but …

Thank you, Mr. D Flyer driver from Feb. 16.

This new bus, the 1D, only got within about 6-8 blocks of where I needed to go, so I figured I’d just have a brisk morning walk through the city … if I could figure out which way to walk. It’s probably good that I looked a little confused, because a woman that had boarded the D Flyer with me earlier asked if I knew where I was going. “Uh, well, I know I need to get to the USX building.” She told me to walk to the nearby T stop and take the T to USX. So I did. It’s free to ride in town, and it was about a thirty second ride right into the base of USX. I consider myself a fairly savvy city traveler, although not so much in Pittsburgh, as I’ve never really had to, but I’d have never thought to take the T five blocks. I’m sure she’ll never read this, but …

Thank you, Ms. D Flyer rider who recommended the T.

In the end, I only lost about 10-15 minutes, met some nice people, and learned a few things along the way, so I’ll consider it a good morning, especially when it had the potential to be a very bad one.

The first morning bus commute

Ironically, after my first day at mSpoke, the weather got bad enough that I (and most everyone else) worked from home on Tuesday and Wednesday. Since I drove to work on Monday, today was my first day taking the bus to work in the morning.

Before I get to that, though, I just have to say yet again how amazing dogs are. Lubov somehow knew that I was leaving for work today, well before I had done anything that I thought might give it away. He moped around all morning and kept giving me that “I know something different is about to happen and I know I won’t like it” look. Argue all you want, but you’ll never convince me they don’t know.

Anyway, thanks to Google Transit (and no thanks to the dreadful Port Authority website) I found a bus that stops at a reasonable time just a 5 minute walk from the house. So, armed with a book, laptop, and several podcasts (NPR’s daily 5 minute news segment, Fresh Air, and Ancient Faith Radio’s The Path by Fr. Tom Soroka), I comforted the pups and headed out.

It was so cold out again, that when I decided to use my phone (which had been in my pocket and reasonably warm, so I thought) to check Gmail at the bus stop, it wouldn’t even acknowledge that my sim card existed, and rebooted itself repeatedly. It probably needed more coffee, like me. It also took 15 minutes on the bus for my iPod to warm up enough to work at all, and my toes never quite warmed up until lunch time.

I’m all thawed out now, so I can say that I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the bus got me downtown. I had a few minutes to spare, so I even made a detour over to the Port Authority store (or whatever you call it, it’s not a terminal) and bought weekly bus passes for the remainder of February. I still managed to make it into the office by 9.

So far so good with the bus. Hopefully the journey home will be equally painless. Thank you PAT bus 1B, and thanks Google Transit.

Thoughts from the first day

A few random thoughts from my first day in four years working in a real office:

• Is that a real Joust arcade machine? Cool.

• Interaction design actually being scheduled into the development cycle?? That makes me happy.

• I miss my coffee maker at home.

• I miss my dogs more.

• The commute wasn’t that bad. Wait, where’d my evening go?

• I have a lot to learn.

Hello mSpoke

Yesterday, I accepted a position as Senior Software Architect at mSpoke. “Another startup??” you ask. Yep. Nearly all of my professional career has been with startups, or small companies/groups that have those aspects of the kind of work environment that I enjoy. The folks at mSpoke definitely have that kind of environment. However, although I can’t give much detail right now, I can say that mSpoke is in a rather unique situation for a startup company, and that is certainly something that helped in my decision making process.

They are an all around great group of folks located in downtown Pittsburgh, and you can check out their site to get more of an idea of what they do. One of the reasons I am so excited about this job is that the problems mSpoke solves are problems that I see and experience on an almost daily basis as an internet user. I understand the huge potential benefits they can provide to me as a user, and to other users who aren’t computer geeks. Another reason is that I can tell the job will make me stretch technically, just as working at Tomo and Adhoc Mobile did.

Of course, because I have been working from home for the past four years, Lor and I have to figure out all the logistics of how to deal with my not being home during most of the work week. It also means it’s time for a wardrobe check. I’m guessing that even though mSpoke is a very laid back place, pajamas aren’t appropriate.

Job interview observations, part 2

I realized after my last post on job interviews that I gave some examples of technical questions that I think are useless, but didn’t really say why I think they are useless, and didn’t give any examples of questions I think are useful.

One of the questions I mentioned was “What is the difference between public, private, protected, and default access permissions in Java?”. If the purpose of this question is to immediately disqualify someone who doesn’t know anything about Java, then maybe this question has value. However, if a candidate answers it correctly, what have you learned? Not much at all, in my opinion. Maybe the candidate read it in a book the night before. Maybe you’re doing a phone interview and he/she did a quick google search. Maybe he/she knows the difference, but always makes all member variables public because it’s just less typing than writing getter and setter methods. Maybe he/she is the greatest software engineering wizard the world has ever known. How would a correct answer help you discern? I contend that it won’t help you.

Ok, so maybe that question is just one among a whole series of similar questions that test reference book type knowledge. Again, what will you learn if the candidate answers them all correctly? If your minimum requirement for a developer is someone who can write code that compiles, then you’re probably (but not certainly) safe. Programming languages are simply tools, like hammers and saws. I know how to swing a hammer, I know how to operate a circular saw, and I know what nails and screws are, but you do not want me to build a deck on your house (trust me, you don’t).

A better approach, for example, might be to ask the candidate to design a few classes to model a problem domain (like a poker game, or address book, or whatever you want) and see how he/she uses those access permissions, possibly asking questions about the class relationships and permissions. Another approach might be to ask him/her about certain design patterns that can make use of those permissions, such as the Template pattern. I think youll learn a lot more about the person on many levels from this type of question, especially at the technical level, since it’s highly likely that this is closer to the kinds of things you are actually hiring him/her to do on a daily basis.

Obviously, language syntax is important, just as knowing how to swing a hammer is important. However, truly effective interviews go beyond that. What is really important on the technical side, in my experience, is how logically and/or creatively the person thinks, and how quickly he/she can understand the important aspects of a problem, begin to formulate solutions, and how they weigh those potential solutions to pick the best one for the situation.

Job interview observations

I’ve had quite a few phone and face-to-face interviews this past month in my job search. A few of them have been refreshingly interesting, and also effective. A few have been truly dreadful. Most fall somewhere in between, of course. However good or bad, though, I think I’ve learned at least something from each one—either something about myself or something about the job interview process.

A few things stand out in my mind from what I consider to be the most effective interviews:

1. They were balanced. I felt that I learned as much about them as individuals and as a company as they learned about me on a personal, professional and technical level. How do you know you will be happy working somewhere if they don’t let you learn about them, too?

2. They were comfortable. I didn’t feel pressure to dress or act a certain way, or like I was a suspect being interrogated. The interviewers and I had real, two-way conversations, not just question and answer exchanges. I always came away from these feeling like I had just met some very nice, and very talented professionals.

3. Their evaluation of my technical skills went beyond the common (and in my opinion, useless) reference book questions. An example of the worst is the classic “What is the difference between public, private, protected, and default access permissions in Java?”. “Why are manhole covers round?” is just as useless, imho. The best ones required that I devise a solution to a small, but interesting computer science-y or real-world problem. Some involved writing code, others involved drawing architecture diagrams or object models. All of them involved explaining my thought process and my solution.

Filing for unemployment

I just officially filed for my first two weeks of unemployment benefits. It’s one of those things I had never really thought about before, even though I was on the brink of being unemployed once already last year. It was always one of those things that other people do. Now it’s something I do.