How Much Is That Seat By The Window; How Flight Reservations Work #2
Published: 02/28/2014
In my first post about flights I covered a lot of the terms and participants in making a flight reservation. This post will answer as best I can the more interesting bits.
This is a really, really long post. You need a beverage and some peanuts. I think there will be yet another sequel.
If you don't want to read the first article, here is a synopsis of a few useful terms. A segment is plane goes up plane goes down. A leg is you go from home to some distant place on one or more segments. One way is one leg, roundtrip is a leg out and a leg back. A scheduled flight is a set of segments set at a particular times and airports, assigned a number and often appears on regular schedule. A seat is where your butt will go on each segment's actual plane. A reservation is a temporary hold on some seats on segments for one or more legs which becomes permanent when you pay too much for a ticket.
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Our iOS App Crash Rate
Published: 02/06/2014
Our flagship iOS app crashes occasionally. We use Crashlytics to track crashes and Google Analytics to track usage which is a fairly common combination. I look at the crash reports every day just to see if anything unusual happens and maybe find something I can fix.
Although I never identify my employer (directly) or the products I work on, I thought a little analysis might be interesting instead of the usual essay.
Our apps are free and tend to be used at most once or twice a week to buy stuff. Sometimes people only use them once or twice a year and the average session for the iPhone app is only a few minutes. Doesn't sound like much but we make decent money per session on average.
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Your Progress As A Programmer Is All Up To You
Published: 02/04/2014
I read a comment on a post on Hacker News where a young programmer said they didn't want to work at a place where older obsolete programmers were let go instead of being retrained, as they would be there some day.
This person meant well, but still managed to irritate me no end. Firstly just because a programmer is older doesn't mean they are obsolete (and just because someone is young doesn't mean they are up to date either). The biggest issue I had with that comment is: its your responsibility as a programmer to keep yourself educated and up to date, not some employer's.
I've been a programmer for 32 years now and I've always tried to keep ahead of the technology steamroller. A lot of people I knew my age who got a BS in Computer Science never learned anything new after school and did eventually become obsolete. I spent 6 years studying chemistry but once I got started as a programmer I found I needed to know what was going on outside of my job, and had a desire to continuously learn and try out all sorts of programming. Of course things were a lot slower back then and reading was a challenge (no internet, you had to read stuff on actual paper!).
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How I Wound Up As An Early Mac Pioneer And Built Something Crazy
Published: 01/25/2014
Thirty years ago I was working at a defense contractor as one of the few people they had working with microcomputers. I had a Lisa on my desk briefly (an evaluation unit) and got familiar with windows and mice. Once the Mac was revealed we didn't have one but I started to get itchy to do something with one.
By October I quit my job and starting writing spreadsheet templates for the oil and gas industry for both PCs and Macs. I had one of each. On the Mac the only spreadsheet was Multiplan - no Excel yet. Working on the templates it was pretty frustrating keeping the formulas straight, especially when adding additional cells and forgetting to extend the formulas that referred to them. It wasn't all the exciting to do and I often sat their and wished I could do some real programming again.
I still remember the day I came up with the idea that became the Trapeze spreadsheet program. Spreadsheets are basically relationships between individual cells; it doesn't know much about what the cells mean and when you miss something it's easy to not realize your spreadsheet is wrong. What if, I thought, you instead collected like data into "objects" and named them, then built formulas strictly by name? So a profit object would be equal to a sales object minus an expense object.
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Seven Years Ago Today Everything Changed. Again.
Published: 01/10/2014
Seven years ago Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I still watch that keynote every once in a while just to remind myself of what disruptive change looks like.
Four times in my life I have seen a massive change in technology, and each time it's drastically affected what I do for a living.
The first was the first time I saw a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1, I think it was 1978. A friend of mine worked on the operating system and I got to see an early model of it. Once I had a little money I bought an Apple II+ and got hooked on programming. Other than a little exposure in high school I didn't really have much access to a computer. Even though I was pursuing a degree in Chemistry I fought the urge to just be a programmer until 1981 when I got my first job. Being able to make a computer do cool stuff was far too interesting to not do it all the time.
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