They Only Do These Things During Meetings
A message to my team explaining my brief absence from the meeting: one kid got hit in the face with a rake, and my wife spilled oil all over the car. They only do these things during meetings.
Topic
work
A collection of 60 posts
Hosting an AASA File on Your Ghost Blog
I wanted to self-host a blog that wasn't WordPress, so I landed on Ghost. The catch: serving a .well-known/apple-app-site-association file when Ghost insists on trailing slashes. With no nginx in front, I solved it using a Cloudflare rewrite rule. Here's how.
App Development Drudgery (App Icons)
The problem with app icons isn't the tools, it's that the tools are necessary at all. I just want one 1024x1024 image, not three million resolutions. Icon Set Studio is indispensable, and yes, I think I actually like JavaScript a bit more than Python.
App Development Drudgery (App Store Screenshots)
App store screenshots are one of the most obnoxious requirements of app development, and once you finish, you get to do it all over again for iPad, Mac and the rest. Screenshot Studio made it far less painful, and the lifetime purchase was worth every penny.
Steam Machine, Drones
The Steam Machine is the first console to tempt me since the Wii U (which I only bought for Mario Kart). Meanwhile a drone company wants a video codec person, but it's all Rust, and the last time I chased a new language to learn, they handed me a Windows laptop.
Senior Recruiter
In software, everyone's resume says "senior", so in silent protest I dropped titles from mine entirely. Yet every recruiter who calls is a "senior recruiter", never a junior one. I look forward to the day a recruiter intern finally contacts me.
Shoulder to Shoulder
My former employer may finally have to pay the price. The first thing I noticed in the article's photo of the CEO in their new offices: there's no space. The developers are sitting shoulder to shoulder. Maybe that's just me.
Scrum Sucks: Standups
Scrum is a development process, and right there it has already screwed up without having done anything. Starting with standups, which rest on three failed assumptions about how much I care what you're working on. Stop stopping work to talk about work and just WORK.
Drunken Monkeys
When this project's done, I'm writing an essay called Drunken Monkeys: a diatribe against formalized project management and feature estimation. First I have to find that paper I read forever ago about the fallacy of the perfect process design.
Mind Numbing
Recruiter: Would you be interested in a job in Maryland? Me: No. A small monument to the mind-numbing arithmetic of making a thousand such phone calls every day.