This really reminded me of a colleague who had a part-time night job flying cancelled checks from Centennial Airport (KAPA, south of Denver) to SLC. A bunch of us went out to lunch on a Friday in December 2005. That night, on his return to KAPA, he crashed his Mitsubishi MU-2 about a mile short of the runway. He and his co-pilot were gone, just like that. On Monday you could see the wreckage and cleanup from our office which was near the airport. It was so surreal.
But I was shocked to learn that the wife of a friend of mine had grown up in Oregon City (15 miles south of Portland) and she had only ever traveled to Washington state and had never pumped her own gas.
That is indeed a super-skill! If you remove as much of the perceived power imbalance between interviewer and interviewee (often difficult, to be sure), and you can engage in a two-way conversation with them about the experiences on their resume, then you'll get a far better picture of how they'll be as a team member.
A candidate's ability to do performative whiteboarding while 1-5 interviewers stare at them tells me very little. For a software engineering job, of course technical ability is important. But equally (and often more) important is the amount of friction they could potentially introduce to a well-functioning team. What I want to know more than anything is: "Can I stand working with this person?" "Is this person a dickhead code-reviewer?" "Will this person be able to adapt and overcome when presented with a novel or urgent task?"
The way to divine these answers is by trying to put the candidate at ease as much as possible. So many interviews, unfortunately, become a sort of gauntlet or inquisition.
This is really excellent. I used to use Altap Salamander when I was more of a Windows user, and it became one of my most indispensable tools. I've tried most of the Mac commander-style clones (Forklift, Pathfinder, fman, Nimble Commander) and found them slightly off for various reasons. This one really hits the mark for me in terms of functionality, usability/feel, performance, and predictability. And the Sublime-style command palette makes it even better. Excellent job!
+1 to your quitting acknowledging sneezes. That has always seemed to me like a pointless injection of politeness that continues only because of cultural inertia. Not sure how much it has improved my life, but it sure feels nice to be one less person doing it.
I'll say it loud and proud: "Bless yourself. I am no longer a sneeze acknowledger." I think I'll get that printed on a t-shirt
Wow, I had almost totally forgotten about TextPad. I absolutely loved that editor back in about 2002-3. Unfortunately, the site looks exactly the same as it did back then (although, surprisingly, there have been fairly recent new releases)
I followed the entire genesis of StackOverflow pretty closely via Jeff & Joel's blog posts and the first go 'round of the StackOverflow podcast.
During that time, and to this day, I never ceased to be impressed by Jeff's committment to making the web a better place for programmers and the general public too. He never got mired in startup-speak; you never got the idea he was just in it to sell it, and even once they got some VC backing, you never got the idea he was planning to just sit back and collect the money. Just a no-BS guy in every regard.
It's obvious to me that when Jeff does something, he does the shit out of it, and I can't imagine that parenting will be any different. We could use more people like him in every part of life.
I dinked around with Play a while ago and was impressed all around. However, am I the only one who thinks it would benefit immensely from a better name?
"Play" just makes it sound so... unrobust. It needs a name that conveys that it's industrial-strength. How about Chupacabra or Lugwrench or Nailgun or ...
One really simple thing that was driving me crazy was when an app pops up a dialog with buttons. Coming from Linux and Windows, where you can tab between the buttons and just hit enter to click the selected button, I was shocked that Mac doesn't do this.
Turns out, Enter always fires the default button that's colored blue (e.g. Save), but you have to hit Space to fire the button that's highlighted (i.e. just outlined in blue).
That simple revelation has prevented me from defenstrating my MBP in a fit of pique.
It's not really that your living in suburbia is evil, it's the fact that suburban development is a hugely wasteful, inefficient, costly, and completely unsustainable mode of development.
Oh I guess it was 2004, not 2005.
Yes, Perfect Landing is a great restaurant!