There is a perception in some tech circles that older programmers aren’t able to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, and that they are discriminated against in the software field. But a new study from North Carolina State University indicates that the knowledge and skills of programmers actually improve over time – and that older programmers know as much (or more) than their younger peers when it comes to recent software platforms. - Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, NC State University

This has been making the rounds but don’t get too excited, in our attention deficient summly culture, you might miss the most important part several paragraphs down.

They found that an individual’s reputation increases with age, at least into a user’s 40s. There wasn’t enough data to draw meaningful conclusions for older programmers.  - Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, NC State University

NPR has reported on aging numerous times. Mental dexterity doesn’t seem to utterly vanish, and I’d be curious to see a study following around 50+ year old programmers. While aging and mental abilities seems to be a mixed bag of research, problem solving seems to improve over time.

Part of my role at Twitter and Stripe involved interviewing front-end engineering candidates. We were given a fair amount of discretion on how we went about interviewing, and I developed a few different sets of questions that I thought would be interesting to share.

I’d like to prefix all of this with the caveat that hiring is extremely hard, and figuring out if someone is a good fit within 45 minutes is a demanding task. The problem with interviews is that everyone tries to hire themselves. Anybody that aces my interview probably thinks a lot like me, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. As it is, I’ve been pretty hit and miss in my decisions so far. However, I believe this approach to be a good start.

Ideally the candidate has a really full GitHub 'resume’, and we can just go back through their open source projects together. I usually browse their code and ask them questions about particular design decisions. If the candidate has an excellent track record, then the interview largely moves into whether they’d be a good social fit for the team. Otherwise, I move on to the coding questions. - Alex MacCaw, Interviewing a Front-End Web Developer, sourcing.io

Alex particularly focuses in on JS questions, which quickly dives into programming fundamentals. 

iOS 7 hasn’t been jailbroken yet, however there’s a movement to encourage a working Jailbreak.

It takes severe amounts of time to exploit an OS and develop a deployable hack. Those who do are currently good samaritans who receive little in return for their works.  isios7jailbrokenyet.com has an answer: a crowd funded bounty for a hack, complete with an impressive array of judges, including iFixit.com’s co-founder Kyle Wiens.

I dropped $5 to the cause. Its easily worth more than that for a working jailbreak. Go to: https://isios7jailbrokenyet.com

Are you ready for Google to take over the desktop? You’d better be if you use Chrome. With it, Google is making a play to rule the computing world as a back door to a new app economy.Are you ready for Google to take over the desktop? You’d better be if you use Chrome. With it, Google is making a play to rule the computing world as a back door to a new app economy. - Kevin C. Tofel, gigaom.com

Seeing as how the PS4 uses WebGL for its system UIX, its easy to see this a conclusion. ComputerWorld thinks Google’s end game is Google+, but really, its likely that Chrome is content delivery system and Google+ is the network which Chrome delivers.

Ubuntu Linux Gaming Performance Mostly On Par With Windows 8.1… 

Given the recent release of Microsoft Windows 8.1, at Phoronix we took 13 different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards and compared the performance between Ubuntu Linux and Windows 8.1 with the same hardware and set of OpenGL games/benchmarks. For AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards with their official drivers, the performance is largely similar between the competing desktop operating systems but there are some performance exceptions.

- phoronix.com

By exceptions they mean nearly 2x the performance gap on the highest end graphics cards stress tests. Linux wins if you consider OpenArena your game of choice.

I’m still sold on SteamBox as the future of game consoles but let’s not pretend that Steam’s choice doesn’t have anything to do with licensing Windows, the Windows (app) Store and tailoring a complete living room user-experience.

CDNperf.com has a list of stats for the fastest and most reliable public CDNs (content delivery networks). If don’t already, you should probably let Google host JQuery.  

The real surprise is BootstrapCDN leading the way for the latency which makes me wonder if Bootstrap’s CDN happens to be near the same network that CDNpref's 

iDownloadblog (a generally much more worthwhile read than bandwidth waste, Appleinsider.com) recently ran “This jaw-dropping concept totally reimagines Apple’s dull OS X Messages app” which contained screenshots from behance.net’s Message Concept App. 

Behance’s mockups iOS 7ify Messages

Lately, I’ve seen quite a few mockups of Apple products, a trend that started with hardware renderings. Now with the advent of dribbble and the clamour to beat Apple to its own punch, I’ve seen some interesting-yet-utterly-flawed-iOS 7 mockups that garnered a lot of praise for looking pretty (Slide to unlock at the top of the screen?).

 Now I’m neither a fan of Messages nor a user of messages but as much as the visuals look “good” they are a fundamentally wrong from a user-interface perspective, as scope and functionality should lead design, not the other way around. 

Rarely is IMing front and center, but rather an activity that compliments web surfing or work or gaming. Its certainly not a full screen activity, nor one that necessitates any more screen real-estate than it takes to deliver an IM.

Take Adium, the most popular alternative to messages.

In half the space of the hypothetical Messages redesign, Adium conveys oodles more. Information density isn’t always a good thing, but Adium isn’t presenting an overabundance, and its configured to my personal preferences.

Pretty it is not, but functional it is.

While negative space is something to appraised, think about the most beloved desktop interfaces today: Be it Chrome, Pages, Transmit, Aperture, 1password… All of these apps interfaces get out of the way to present the information as clearly and cleanly as possible with often little dressing.  Users aren’t locked into one-app-at-time, and thus shouldn’t be forced into the constraints of mobile user interface design.

For the would-be designers looking to break into the world of user-interface design, If you’re going to convince me that your user-interface is actually interaction design, show me the actual flows… and for the love of Steve Jobs, don’t hide full window mockups.

Give me any day a exceptionally well-thought out wireframe than a pretty PSD. The paint can be applied later. Otherwise you’re putting lipstick on a pig….

Next-gen USB connector a reversible challenge to Apple’s Thunderbolt & Lightning - Apple Insider

Nothing beats AppleInisder.com for its lack of journalistic integrity.

USB 3.0 isn’t a challenge to Lightning Cable. Lightning cable is USB 2.0 with a different connector… with annoying DRM chips.  Thunderbolt and USB are both technologies that Intel shepherds.

The article itself isn’t as bad, but misses the fundamental point that USB 3.1 isn’t due out until 2016. Thunderbolt 3.0 could easily be on horizon but that time, increasing its bandwidth 2x to 40 Gbps (5 GB per second) or even higher.

Don’t get your hopes up for PCIe 16x speed in two short years. Its 128 Gbps, bi-directional.

I’ve been “freelancing” part time for the better part of the past 4 years and full time for the past 8 months, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that telling people you freelance will garner responses that manage to combine a jealousy of your freedom and a subtle tone that silently says,

“A freelancer? That’s cute.”

So what did I do? I stopped freelancing and started my own company. I came up with a business name[1], filed for a business license, and as of recent finally even got myself a desk with a fancy “Suite” address in a coworking building. - Robert Nealan, robertnealan.com

I’ve never freelanced, nor am I looking to enter the fray but as someone on the other side of the table who occasionally deals with freelancers/contractors/consultants on projects, I like this strategy. It signifies that your contracting is serious endeavor as opposed to a passing phase in your career.

ColorSnapper Review

For many of us, grabbing a single color often mean launching an application, such as Photoshop, selecting the eye dropper tool and then selecting the color, clicking the color tool, and copy and pasting the color HEX value, simply to life a single color value from an image, button, graphic or so forth. Its a cumbersome process, and unnecessary.

Color Snapper is one of those no brainer utilities that should be part of OS X, as an extension of the OS X color selector. By now you’re probably familiar with the OS X color selection’s magnifying glass. In case you’re not, any application that uses the OS X default color selector includes a magnifying glass tool that lets you easily sample any color on screen (not limited to the current application). Its a useful functionality as you can select a color from a image in a web browser or Preview or even icon or menu, not just your current app.

Color Snapper extends this behavior to any circumstance. Simply press command-option-c (this can be changed) and you’re presented with magnifying glass cursor that easily lets you select any color on the screen. The color is then copied to your clip board as a HEX value (or RBG, RGBA, HSB etc if you prefer).

The dropdown menu displays most recent picks

p>A utility as simple as Color Snapper could have stopped without any preferencces and it’d been a very useful tool but it also includes a host options, such as key-command selection, format copied to clipboard, notification center, menu bar icon, launch-at-startup, last three colors and magnification level.

Depending on your brand of color values, its easily configged. As a Front-End Developer, (excuse me), User-Interface Engineer, I live in the world of HEX although I’ve configurred my alternate color value to rbga.

You can easily adjust the magnification level, a nice bonus.

Its hard not to recommend ColorSnapper, at $5, its everything it should be. The only improvement would be allowing area-average color sampling akin to Photoshop’s color sampler.

Color Snapper Website

App Store

From the Color Snapper website

Looking at the Amazon ratings of the PS4, there’s a whole lot of blue lights of death.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.

In the tech and design sectors there’s a lot of folks working long hours, like 70+ hours a week. There’s a certain badge-of-honor-martyr-complex-thing that comes along with it. But let’s set the record straight. Here’s what long hours really mean. - wearemammoth.com

Go read the article linked above, but the TL;DR version is that long hours symbolize a poorly managed company that does not respect its employees.

I had a phone interview with a company that prided itself on 60+ hour work weeks, and the CEO boasted over the phone, “We don’t believe in work-life separation, we believe in work life integration”. 

I appreciated the honesty. It was clear that we weren’t compatible.

Even after talking to an engineer interested in recruiting me for his team at Yahoo, I was surprised to hear that most employees work 45+ hour weeks. Its entirely more reasonable but that extra hour is an hour lost going to the gym, taking your dog for a walk, spending time with your significant other, playing with your child, watching a movie,reading book, playing playstation, playing an instrument…. quite simply, being who you are.  I’d gladly take a job where I make $60,000 work 8 hour days than $80,000 and work 45+ hour weeks. It doesn’t mean I’m not passionate about the work I do, and I do enjoy it but I do not derive my entire identity from my job.

Often young employees make the mistake that long hours will be seen as dedication. Its not the case. If you need further proof, read “Fire the workaholics”. In fact, read Rework, which is should be read by every employee and every manager as the business manifesto that we all should aspire to.

So Google is shipping Kitkat without a web browser…

Android 4.4+ KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome or build their own

“According to Android developer and author Maximiliano Firtman, he just got official confirmation that KitKat “… doesn’t ship with any browser, just the WebView. The emulator has it but not real devices. It’s up to each vendor to create a browser app using the WebView (such as Samsung) or to get license to preinstall Chrome.” - unwiredview.com

What the article doesn’t mention is google plans to auto-update the Chromium-powered WebView, by-passing manufactures. This means Google’s apps and app devs can continually run the latest and greatest even if a device is isolated to Android 4.4 hell years later.

The big news for us web devs is the Chromium WebView finally supports remote debugging. 

As a developer, you can count on most manufactures licensing the Google Web suite and your WebView apps will always have access to the latest and greatest.

Its Google’s round-about way to regain some of the control lost on Android and to attack the problem of fragmentation. I’ve been a bigger fan of iOS development strictly from a front end developer’s point-of-view as iOS users are much more likely to update and the Nitro Javascript engine still   triumphs Google’s V8 in speed.

That said, I’ll take an auto-updated webview over speed at this point.

Previously with this blog, its been a post a day format, but in reality 90% of my traffic is dedicated from roughly ten posts.  The takeaway message? Original / Quality posts count more than volume. Instead of trying to make a post day during the weekdays, I’m going to shift the focus to longer, more informative posts.

My readership is still small but growing, to roughly 2200 pageviews a month (amusing considering I created a website at one point garnered, 120,000+ monthly unique visitors for an astounding 1,500,000 pageviews during the same stretch).