I’ve been following the Rands Writing Prompts with the intention of writing occasional posts when I get a prompt that grabs me. One of the prompts this week did: “Your favorite interview question and why.”
This one is actually kind of a two-fer; I have a question that I almost always ask when I’m interviewing. I also interviewed probably about two dozen candidates at my last job, and had a favorite question that I’d nearly always ask candidates at any level. Read More...
Besides messing with Flutter on a coworkers’ recommendation, I’m also making time to play with MAUI again now that dotnet 8 is out. Since Visual Studio for the Mac hits end-of-life on August 31, 2024, I figured it’s a good time to test out the MAUI extension for Visual Studio Code.
Running through the manual dotnet 8 install process for MAUI was painless; I upgraded to the latest version of the SDK (8. Read More...
Last week I made my return to CodeMash for the first time in twelve years. I had a great time - two days of great talks and chats with friends (and coworkers!) old and new. I do not plan to wait over a decade to attend again. 😉
Some general thoughts and a session recap…
Accessibility This was a mixed bag, but I’m not going to fault the organizers here, for a couple of reasons: Read More...
My friend and coworker, Jonathan Danylko, spent a lot of this year working hard on his first technical book. JD’s a prolific blogger and loves sharing his knowledge, so I know he’s been excited to get this book finished and into the world.
I think it’s a great book - it’s a densely packed treasure trove of suggestions and best practices that will be invaluable for people who are just starting their careers, and even experienced developers will probably learn something from it. Read More...
In this post, I’m going to cover a wide range of automatic captioning tools based on my personal experiences with them. This is not a comprehensive list - there are far more tools than a single person can test. For context, I’m deaf, and I’m not fluent in American Sign Language (ASL), so captioning is critical in both my personal life and professional career. Since 2018 when they started to become available, I’ve relied heavily on automatic captioning tools in both aspects of my life. Read More...
I’ve finally gotten around to something I should have done a long time ago; I’ve moved the blog repository over to GitHub, and since it’s a public repository I finally set up GitHub Actions… so beyond testing posts locally, getting a new post up now is as simple as merging a new PR into main. Heck, I could even type up a new post on my phone, assuming I hated myself that much. Read More...
As noted in my housekeeping post, I’m wanting to play with dotnet MAUI; a more desktop focused approach to coding would be an interesting paradigm shift, and I have ideas cooking for apps I’d like to build. However, MAUI is still new and in flux, and the process of getting an app to initially run and compile proved immensely frustrating, and I ran into the same issues on both my Windows desktop and my Mac over a few days of messing with it. Read More...
The blog lives! Some minor housekeeping notes:
There is now a link to my Mastodon profile in the header. I glance at Twitter now and again, but rarely post there anymore since I am not one of Space Karen’s greater admirers. I’ve also actually set this up to show that the account is indeed mine as linked on the site. Mastodon makes that pretty painless, which is nice. I may attempt to post more frequently! Read More...
Compared to the first-day adopters, I’m a bit late to the party here… but as of the end of February I’ve joined the ranks of ARM MacBook users. After two weeks or so of sustained usage, I’m impressed.
The short version of how I ended up with it: I took my 2016 15" MBP in to the Apple Store (this was, I will note, a very interesting pandemic experience1) to get the keyboard and “service battery” message evaluated. Read More...
It’s been quite a while since I blogged consistently. Since I would like to develop a habit of writing again this year and there’s been a lot going on, it seems like a great time to drop a year-in-review post.
Some background that I haven’t mentioned here: I was laid off from my old job in fall of 2019, then took a new contract-to-hire role much closer to home a few months later. Read More...
