Year: 2015


Nov
2015

If I’m going to hire you, I don’t want to read your resume

categories: Skills

Well, I take it back. I want to remember your name, and I’m terrible at names. So it helps if I have your name in front of me.

Dead-Tree Resume

“But,” you ask, “How will you know if the candidate has the skills and experience you need?”

Good question. Let’s look at the purpose of an interview.

The Two Questions

An interview must answer two questions:

  1. Can the candidate do the job now and in the future?
  2. Will the candidate be a good fit for the team?

Neither of these questions are answered by the candidate’s resume.

Wait a minute

Unless the candidate worked for a company doing the exact work, for the exact clients you have, their experience will not tell you if they can do the current job at your company.

Put it this way: would it make sense to compare your company to another in a different industry, with different customers and a different product, and then make a judgement about performance based upon that comparison?

Company Industry # Customers # Employees Product
MyCorp Pharmaceutical 3 7 Blue Pills
Acme, Inc Energy 150 70 Batteries
Initech Accounting Software 3,200 1,500 TPS Reports

We will investigate the 2 questions in a future post.

Related articles

Sep
2015

Adding defensive sanity checks

categories: Skills

I recently needed to make a set of several favicons, so I went to the web to see if anyone had a script I could borrow steal.

Sure enough, I found one written by Joshua McGee: “Create a favicon with ImageMagick” (not reproduced here for copyright reasons).

It was a simple enough script, just a series of escaped commands. I noticed, however, that it assumed a few things:

  • An image file was specified on the command line,
  • The image existed, and
  • Imagemagik was installed.

In other words, the script was not developed defensively. This makes sense: it was just a bang-out.

The script had no inline documentation†, and if a favicon file that already existed in the current directory would be silently overwritten—not good.

I’m clumsy: I delete and overwrite files all the time, so I could use a little help. Maybe I can tidy up the script? (more…)


Aug
2015

Standalone CRUD

categories: Developer Hell

CRUD: Create, Read, Update, Delete; actions for managing data usually stored in a database.

Data model diagram picture of an EMPLOYEE data...
Data model (credit: Wikipedia)

A system I maintain has a very unusual quirk: when adding a new element (“blub”) to a list of elements (“blubs”), the system crashes with a generic error.

What this tells me is there is an unmet dependency, probably a join to another database table. I suspect the original developer (OD) created all the blubs manually, then later added in CRUD screens to manage them. For some reason OD never tested creating a new blub.

For any list of things, unless they are constants that will never be CRUDded (okay, reading is okay), the app should be able to Create/Update/Delete them without any manual steps.

Why? Because someday, some schlub who maintains your code is going to have to CRUD. And they will be screwed.


Aug
2015

The importance of turning on debugging

categories: Skills
Debugging a php script with emacs in geben mode.
Debugging a php script with emacs in geben mode. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was recently testing some wordpress plugin code for an upgrade. As part of my testing, I turn on debugging to see if any errors or warnings show up.

Imagine my surprise when several errors appeared, many of them deprecation warnings. After troubleshooting to determine the source of the errors, I discovered it was coming from the theme I was using.

Without turning on debugging, the site appears to behave normally, which is problematic. One of my objections to many languages and frameworks is that they hide problems from the developer. In many cases, for example, deprecation warnings don’t mean much—except they’re a ticking time bomb. At some point in the future, the code is going to break. Better to fix it now while it is easier to do, than scramble to diagnose and fix lots of code just after an upgrade.

In the case of WordPress (or PHP in general), it would be helpful if the admin area showed everything – bugs and warnings. For novice admins, of course, this would be a support nightmare, as they would have little clue what was going on. The upside is (hopefully) sloppy coders would fix their stuff promptly. Nothing will get a plugin/theme pulled faster than getting an error right after installing it.

Related articles

Aug
2015

Development Languages are not Just Syntax

categories: Skills

I recall a conversation I had with a coworker years ago. This fellow mentioned he thought differences between languages (e.g., Perl and PHP) were simple syntax.

example of Python language
example of Python language (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is true, sort of. The nuts and bolts for each language (displaying a variable’s value and the like) are same in concept and similar in construct.

<?php =someVar ?>

or

<% puts someVar %>

You get the idea.

The difference (and where the coworker was wrong), is the concept of how the data flows through the system and which pattern(s) are encouraged/discouraged.

Some languages encourage MVC, whereas others encourage spaghetti and still others encourage a hybrid (or something else entirely, like modules).

What is a language best at?

Going beyond this, what is the language best at doing? Is it installed in places you want to host your code? Do you have data structures/stores that fit better with one language than another?

Picking the best tool for the job is important in delivering a quality product. Choosing which language to use isn’t trivial and can make it easier—or harder—to deliver the solution.


Jul
2015

Goals

categories: Skills

Goals differ from intentions or ideas in several key aspects.

Every goal:

  • Has a deadline
    • A goal is achieved at some point in the future. By having a deadline, the goal is focused, even if the deadline is not specific: “next week”, “next year”, etc.
    • A goal without a deadline is an intention.
  • Is measurable
    • One or more conditions that indicate when the goal has been reached, such as “built my house” (the house is ready for occupancy); “completing a course” (I passed the final / learned the material); “saved up to buy a car” (I have enough money to buy the car)
  • Has an owner
    • The person responsible for moving work forward to achieve the goal; may not be the same person as the one who does the work.
  • Must be reviewed on a regular basis
    • Conditions and people change, so it is important to review every goal to determine if it needs to be adjusted to fit reality.
    • Sometimes goals may no longer be necessary so continuing to pursue them is time better spent in other ways.
    • Some questions to ask about every goal:
    • is it necessary/desired?
    • is work on track to finish by the deadline?
    • is the deadline still applicable? and
    • is it still achievable?
Related articles

May
2015

Bulk process RAW image files

categories: command-line magic, tools

Recently I had to convert about 250 RAW image files to PNGs. For neatness, I wanted to convert the upper-case filenames the camera assigned with a lower-case name.

A little bash script-fu is all it took:

clean_pics.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Extract from SD Card
for i in /Volumes/SDCARD/DCIM/100ND40X/DSC_0*; do
 filename=$(basename "$i")
 lower_file="$(echo $filename | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]')"
 # verify it doesn't already exist
 newfile="${lower_file%.*}.png"
 echo -e "Processingnt$i tont$newfile"
 if [[ -e $newfile ]]; then
  echo "****SKIPPING"
 else
  convert "$i" "$newfile"
 fi
done

echo -e "Detoxing..."
find . -iname "*.png" -exec detox "{}" ;

echo "Procedure complete."

(“SDCARD”, etc is the path to the source files)

Once the script was up and running, it took about 1/2 hour to process all the files. Meanwhile, I was off doing something else!