235 posts from 1996 to present
I connected with a friend yesterday about his job search. He's a scientist with 20+ years of experience leading drug development teams, recently laid off because his company is winding down. Tough market right now. Biotech capital has gotten scared and shifted toward late-stage assets, which means a lot of very qualified people are looking....
Continue readingPSA: consider pulling in charitable contributions to the next few weeks that you were considering making next year....
Continue readingA great leader inspires a team with possibility, vision, agency, and genuine caring for their people at every level. They are willing to fearlessly dive into the details and roll up their sleeves alongside their team when needed to get the job done. They actively solicit feedback and critique to improve and create a culture where it's safe to speak up. When a hard call needs to get made, they own...
Continue readingThe new iPhone is here! And yes, to cut to the chase, I am going to get it because it is bright orange, thank you very much....
Continue readingI re-coded a Rust library in Swift 6 this week and was surprised to see it was a third the size. It ended up with no third party dependencies beyond the system Frameworks, whereas the Rust crate pulled in several third party crates that in turn pulled in innumerable other libraries - creating a situation with multiple versions of the same library ultimately needing to be included....
Continue readingFolks; thanks for all the kind comments on my transition last week. It's time to start sharing what I'm working on now - fixing employees' remote & hybrid connectivity....
Continue readingToday is my last day at Capital One....
Continue readingAfter seven+ months of work, studying my ass off for my written, and a retest after I went long on my first power-off 180, I've finally achieved a life long goal of becoming a Commercially-rated airplane pilot....
Continue readingTrust is an interesting thing. Who do you trust when you scan a QR code on the side of a McDonald's Happy Meal? McDonald's of course, but the list is a lot longer and stranger than that......
Continue readingAbout a year ago, I started thinking seriously about running for the school board. As I eased in, it became clear that I had an enormous amount to learn. While I had served on for-profit and non-profit boards for 20 years, being an elected official on a school board was a whole new thing. New regulations, new standards, incredibly complex budgeting processes.. I started my learning even as a candi...
Continue readingFolks; Hacker Dojo is looking for an Executive Director....
Continue readingHuman adaptability is one of the most remarkable and fascinating attributes of our species. Paradoxically, while we are fantastic at accommodating change, we often resist it. Yet, when we are forced into an adaptation, we end up enjoying aspects of it and keeping those adaptations with us even beyond the circumstances that required them....
Continue readingThe main goals of a technical interview are to assess what the candidate knows, how they explain what they know, and how they reason: how they handle being pushed beyond their limit of firm knowledge and have to rationally speculate. Common failure modes are: clamming up being unwilling to reason or share their thought process, bullshitting confidently and erroneously prognosticating, and not sani...
Continue readingI suspect that one of the most powerful points of leverage for any tech company - in a downturn or no - is excellent developer experience....
Continue readingAmazing: Didn’t see the Watch Ultra coming - amazing battery life and durability, astonished that they’ve obsoleted dive computers. Neat improvements to mic and speaker, tho I’m not sure how much the “emergency siren” is gonna help at ~85dB versus, say, yelling?Personal locator beacons now possibly obsolete - but satellite SOS doesn’t compete with the T-Mobile/Starlink deal since it’s extremely lo...
Continue readingI sued a spammer!...
Continue readingThe Metaverse is not a bad idea not because it can’t be built. It’s totally doable, though challenging with dozens of very complex and exciting risks that require solving for: human perception, haptics, foveated rendering, extremely lightweight optics and compute, low-latency network interconnects, and edge processing of a massively sharded but contiguous world. The depth of rich and exciting comp...
Continue readingI’m one of the tiny team that built Howdy, a new voice-first chat application that sends speech & an auto-punctuated transcript to close friends and family. We launched our iOS app in Q1 of 2022 and we’re working on the Android app!...
Continue readingI had the pleasure of working at Facebook many years ago. It was a very exciting time, where smart engineers from around the world got a chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder on problems that impacted a large and growing fraction of the human population. A lot of the excitement was due to an earnest belief that in helping people share with each other we would help people feel better connected to eac...
Continue reading> BLRB is shutting down. All accounts, content, and pages will be deleted in the coming days....
Continue readingToday Sonic.net installed a 10 gigabit synchronous, unmetered XGS-PON fiber optic link to my home in Redwood City California. The connection will cost me $40/month. My only gripe is that I can’t get static IPs, too! I spent the earlier part of the week wiring my home with 10G capable switches and getting a 10G copper Thunderbolt 3 interface for my notebook — which means that for the first time in...
Continue readingThe Meta announcement is interesting and unexpected....
Continue readingThe 20th century model of life can be roughly encapsulated as being in three acts: in the first act, one is educated up to the limit of one’s mental capacity. Then, once full of knowledge, you are sent out into the world to work for as many years as you can. Finally at the end of your career you retire, have some fun, travel a bit, then die. We can call these stages: Learn, Work, Play and they are...
Continue readingI know the schtick is to “start with the small stuff and then build” but the purple iPhone and reskinning of the Podcast app were pretty underwhelming. There’s so much more Apple could be doing in the podcast production and consumption space. Boo....
Continue readingBlessing...
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