The two hardest things about becoming a manager have been: 1) the emotional exhaustion, and 2) letting go of the part of my identity that was tied up in writing code. I accepted that writing code wasn’t the best thing I could do reasonably quickly, but it took longer to finally stop saying I was […]
The picture above shows what am I testing: the home screen of my app. There is a camera button, a gallery button and an inspire button. All of these launch intents, but the camera and gallery buttons launch intents that are expected to return something – an image – either from the camera or the […]
My 2014 side project was a technical book chapter on image processing for the Architecture of Open Source 500 Lines or Less Project. It was my bête noire, that consumed various evenings and weekends either by actual work, or by guilt. 2015 was mainly guilt, and some editing. Recently the final copy edits came back, […]
My first month as a manager I barely had time to think about how I didn’t really know what I was doing, because there was so much that clearly needed to be done. So I accepted that stuff was not writing code, and got on with it. Month two opened, and I kept getting on […]
I have done a lot of technical interviews. And mainly I think that interviewers have to change, but I do have some suggestions for interviewees. Ages ago I wrote up my prep list for interviewing at The Conglomerate, which is comprehensive, and frankly excessive. This is the short version with the benefit of spending more […]
We know technical interviewing is a problem but rather than asking interviewers to do better, a lot of suggested solutions push that problem off onto people we interview rather than those who are doing the interviewing. This comes up a lot because the hiring process is the second most popular place to improve “diversity” after […]
TL;DR – Don’t use categories. They just create different problems. Categories in Obj-C are a way to add (or expose) functionality to a class without subclassing it. You can see why this might be tempting, right? File getting a bit big, too many pragma marks, stick that bit in a category. I want to expose this […]
On iOS I do this using a button (with different pressed state), and I figured it would be the same on Android, but turns out, no. Step 1: Add a second image to the XML, and set the visibility to “gone”. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what […]
OCMock is mostly great! And I use it a lot! But there’s one problem with it – handling values. I was debugging some asynchronous tests and having this problem, which I assumed at first came from the asynchronicity but it turns out, no, it’s just CGFloat being CGFloat. Clue for this kind of bug is […]
I launched a thing. You can buy it for your iThing. Please upvote it on ProductHunt. What is the thing? It’s an image processing app. It allows you to make cool, partially colored images. It’s called Show & Hide. The longer and more personal story is: this has been a long term side project for me, and […]