I have been a Pebble user on and off for the last year or so and overall it’s been great. Unfortunately when I switched back to using a Windows Phone for a few months the Pebble pretty much became useless. Due to some recent events though I am back to using an iPhone and the timing couldn’t have been better. Just last week Pebble released v2.5 of their firmware and while I am sure a lot of people are excited about it supporting Emoji the iOS 8 notification integration is where the real meat of this release is.
Usually I don’t write about things like this but after seeing some horror stories on other sites I figured I would chime in.
Along with most of the Internet I watched the Apple keynote address announcing the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Not a lot in surprises being that most of it was leaked but it was presented in a nice, neat little demo package. Right away I said to myself, not going to pre-order either of these. I needed to get them both in my hands in order to make an informed decision.
While I have been getting more and more into reading on my Kindle I never read fiction. Really, never. Most people think I’m crazy but oh well.
So that being said, how did I end up reading The Martian? I listen to a lot of podcasts and Audible.com seems to advertise on just about every one. About a month ago all I heard all the hosts talking about was how good The Martian was. I was looking for the next book to read so I figured I would give it a shot.
Long story short, the guy who doesn’t read fiction read the whole book in 5 days. Yeah it’s that good. It’s written from the point of view of a person who was stranded on Mars in the voice of his log entries. It’s incredibly funny but to me the more impressive part is the science behind a lot of the story. If you have any interest in Sci-Fi books on a regular basis I think you will tear though this like I did.
Verdict – Buy and read before the movie comes out
Today I woke up with a quite a weird feeling. For the first time in over 9 years (2005) I don’t have a job. While being laid-off wasn’t a surprise, read the news about Microsoft, it’s still a shock to the system when you take a step back and think about it.
I spent the last 7+ years with this group, that’s over a 1/4 of my life and my entire professional career. I went through 5 different job titles, 6 different bosses, and 9 different desk locations (in 2 different offices). I had the opportunity to work on many different products, using many different languages and frameworks, and through the lifetime of the product my software was used by over 100 million users every month. While it’s not all about the number of people that use my product I don’t know if I will ever get the opportunity to reach that many people again.
From my first day as an QA Intern to my last day as a Product Owner everyone at Novarra/Nokia/Microsoft has been nothing short of amazing.
- On my first day I walk into the intern room and meet everyone. Not long after that I notice that the guy right behind me has porn all over his screen. While I didn’t know what to make of it at first I found out a little while later that he was working on an adult content filter and he needed test content. Let’s just say that made for an interesting first day story at home.
- When our full time QA staff realized that Word documents and Excel sheet’s just weren’t cutting it anymore they trusted me and a couple of my buddies to come up with a solution. We got the chance to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails and create a new system that eventually the entire company used. It was the first time I led a team.
- I got the chance to travel quite a few times for all 3 companies. Domestically I traveled to North Carolina (RTP), Sunnyvale (Bay Area), Las Vegas (CES) and Redmond (The Microsoft Main Campus). I also got the opportunity to venture outside the country on my own to Finland (Main Nokia Campus) and London (Nokia World 2011).
- I had the opportunity to take an idea from hackathon, to prototype, to full time development and finally production. It started with 3 guys on nights and weekends and it ended with over 1 million monthly active users. And to think all of that started because a couple of us were bored with the current product line. Wow.
- I spent the final year and a half not ever writing production code but instead running a few teams and making product level decisions. I got nothing but respect from my colleagues even though I was way behind experience wise and I am so happy to have had that experience.
- Because of my body of work from the last 7 years along with some good feedback from my leadership team I was extended an offer to join the Internet Explorer team out in Redmond. In the end I turned the offer down for personal reasons. Throughout the whole decision process just knowing that I have what it takes to make it in “The Big Leagues” was just mind blowing and incredibly humbling. I wish the IE team and my few colleagues that are making the move out there the best of luck and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for them.
Am I sad to see this journey end? You bet. But I know that because of the last 7 years at NovKiaSoft I am a better person, employee and engineer. We had quite the amazing and fun family that we got to work with everyday. I can only hope that I find the same feeling later in my career.
I have been using my MacBook Air full time now for a little over a month. Most things have been working very well with one exception, Google Hangouts.
I only use Hangouts to chat with a few friends but it’s a great service with one giant catch, you have to run Chrome. Well newsflash, Chrome on a 2011 MacBook Air is a resource hog. I switched to using Safari and gained over an hour of battery life, no joke. So with that I was on the search for the best stand alone Hangout’s app on Mac. Long story short, there isn’t one. Google never released a real Hangouts API so there are no app’s besides the ones they wrote which limits you to a Chrome extension on desktop.