Category: Tech

Here are some of the tradeoffs I evaluate when buying a smartphone. Emotion and momentum are valid items to factor into a decision. I’ve used both Android and iOS, and have been a mostly happy iPhone customer for several years

• Camera quality — one of the most important considerations
• Friends
  • If the people closest to you use Android, then go with Android, especially if you need them to help you maintain it or know how to use apps.
  • If you want to talk to friends with iMessage, then get an iPhone
  • Airdrop to share photos (and more): This is a killer feature, and it works even in the wilderness when away from WiFi access points. It’s speedy and convenient.
• App ecosystem
  • Is there a must-have app? Consider whether there are alternatives for a different smartphone OS. It can be fun to learn new things.
• Integration ecosystem
  • Accessories — everyone makes accessories for iPhone, but android accessories may be cheaper. (As of 2023 with Apple switching to USB-C instead of Lightning, accessories are cheaper)
  • Apple watch only works well with iPhone, yet the integration is stellar (from what I’ve heard)
  • iMessage works seamlessly on Mac (for those who own a Mac)
• Total cost of ownership
  • Time to maintain. Consider buying more storage if you don’t want to spend time erasing old photos to find enough space.
  • Security updates: Number of years the vendor will supply security updates. Apple is stellar in this area, and as of 2023/2024, Google has announced long-term support for its newer Pixel phones.
  • Durability: Will it last 3+ years? If so, it may save you money. Get a phone case and protect your investment.
  • Resale value
    • Some people say it’s dangerous to recycle phones because the sensitive data persists.
• Appeal
  • I tend to focus more on functionality than on looks
  • A beautiful OLED screen is nice looking
  • An always-on screen is nice
  • Get a fun phone case
• Vendor lock-in
  • iCloud sharing sucks compared to Google Photos, in my opinion
  • Do you want to be locked-in to one vendor’s ecosystem?
  • Android makes it far easier to get your photos off of your phone to a Linux computer. It’s much harder with an iPhone, and that’s the beauty of Google Photos… to get photos away from Apple’s clutches.

That said, there are always lemons. Once, I was on the phone with Apple for five hours to get a phone activated for one of my kids, with no resolution. We ended up trading in the already-used-in-our-family phone for a brand new one. Apple gave us $100 credit or so for it.

It’s 2022, and before I returned from holiday vacation, the company HR department emailed and asked us to work from home if we can.

When we went into lockdown in 2020, the networking folks beefed up the VPN and the speeds to our internal on-premise server infrastructure. I bought an external monitor for home use, a pair of Ethernet-over-Power bridges, and set up a fantastic makeshift workspace (a slab of wood on top of sawhorses)… one that I’ve moved to a few different locations in the house before settling in the master bedroom. Even after lockdown ended, I continued to work from home two days a week.

So working from home has been part of my reality, and the adjustments of doing it full-time again include:

• I miss the in-person interactions that I had with coworkers. Video conferencing is good, but it’s not the same.
• I get a minor amount of cabin fever, so I go on walks.

I look forward to a time when coronavirus is no longer a problem.

I’m grateful for the amazing cameras on modern smartphones, including low light mode. I’m glad that family members share pictures they take — enabled by AirDrop and online services such as Google Photos, and even Facebook (lower resolution).

I’m thankful for the beauty of the natural world, and that I get to enjoy it with my family.

During my career, I’ve written code in C, C++, GNU Make, Perl, Java, Groovy, Ruby, Python and bash. I’ve often wondered what new programming language (or framework) I should learn so that my skills remain relevant. The number of languages and frameworks has blossomed over time, and the size of the industry has increased to support and keep them vibrant.

In the old days, I read books to learn new languages, but in modern Internet times with online tutorials and stackoverflow.com, I haven’t used them as much. Recently however, a coworker loaned me “The Go Programming Language,” published by Addison Wesley and written by intelligent, seasoned software engineers. Studying it reminds me that I enjoy books. They often contain a distillation of knowledge and wisdom that is harder to come by in online mediums.

For example, the Go tutorials explain how to use slices, but they don’t explain the mechanism of how they work, so they were a bit confusing. This book rectifies that gap in my knowledge, and briefly covers other interesting side-topics such as how UTF-8 was designed to be self synchronizing and directly searchable without having to convert it first.

Go isn’t as familiar to me as what I’m used to, so initially I didn’t like Go. I remember feeling the same way about learning Ruby, which is even more foreign than Go. In the end, there are many considerations with using a programming language that matter more than whether it feels familiar or foreign, elegant or boring. John Arundel summed it up well:

…every programming language represents a set of trade-offs. Each language is optimised for different things, so your choice of language should be determined by what suits you and the problems you want to solve with it.

Tradeoffs include, but are not limited to…

• Integration — the ability to integrate with existing systems at various levels — the operating system, foreign libraries and programming languages, network systems and APIs
• Maintainability (simplicity and type checking are great benefits on large projects)
• Speed of compilation (important on large projects where frequent change occurs)
• Performance in production — speed, scalability, memory usage
• Tooling — build system, editors (IDEs), refactoring support, linters, formatters, packaging, deployment, profiling, testing, etc.
• Ecosystem: libraries (availability and quality of those libraries), community
• Backward compatibility
• Industry momentum — pool of engineers, the time to come up to speed, trust, longevity.

Engineers don’t often get to pick the programming language for a project — it’s already been chosen by the time they arrive on the scene. Instead, they get to pick the project or the company they work on or for.

Like tens or hundreds of thousands of others, I am working from home while the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the United States and the rest of the world.

Here are a few observations about my experience working from home. I’m a software engineer, and I realize that my experience is different from that of hardware engineers, QA folks, customer solutions agents, teachers, and even from other software engineers.

Sleep. The first several days, I worked from my bedroom, which has a great view of the outside world, but I found it difficult to sleep restfully at night. Once my wife shut down her in-home preschool, I moved to working from one of the two preschool rooms, and now I sleep quite well at night. It’s good to have a separate work place.

Exercise. Working from home, I feel more fidgety… maybe I move around less, because there are fewer meetings, and fewer impromptu discussions. So I feel a strong need to get out of the house and work in the yard (pruning, since it’s spring), take a walk or ride a bike.

Convenience. The kitchen and bathroom are closer. If I want to take a nap, no problem — I’ve got a comfortable bed nearby. Taking a walk around the block is a piece of cake — the front door isn’t that far away compared to when I’m working in the office.

Interruptions. Most of my children are teenagers, and believe it or not, I have fewer interruptions at home than I do at work. When my children are doing their remote school, two of them are in the same room as me, with headphones in their ears, and it’s so quiet that I can hear a pin drop.

Social. I enjoy the more frequent face to face interactions with my wife and children. I miss the face to face interactions with my coworkers. Video conferencing is a great invention, and yet it’s not the same as being there.

Communication. There are a lot fewer impromptu hallway discussions with coworkers, and more with family members. I’m not sure if we’re better at communicating with slack now that we’re all remote or not.

Internet. We have excellent wireless internet service. Since our entire family is working/schooling from home, we notice much more quickly when there’s network latency or poor quality.

Up to now, we’ve used a Disney Circle for parental control, and we knew it caused problems on a nearly weekly basis (it does ARP poisoning of a local network), especially for managed devices. With remote school, Circle started breaking things on a daily basis, so I turned Circle off.

I found that 5 Ghz WiFi on the main floor of our house doesn’t penetrate the floor and walls to the basement, and so I pulled my old ASUS WiFi router out of storage, put it in access point mode in our basement, installed a firmware update, and wired it to the router upstairs. Now I get better speeds and connectivity.

Commute. I had a great commute before, but it’s even better now. With so many people staying home, the air is cleaner.

Productivity. My productivity ebbs and flows at work, and the same is true while working from home. Overall, I feel a bit less productive working from home. I’m more inclined to put my Slack app in “do not disturb” mode when I finish working.

Update: It took three weeks before I settled into a good flow of working from home.