While the war rages on for software engineers I can’t help wondering when UX, interaction designers, and product managers are going to have their turn. For a lot of software projects adding a rockstar engineer can boost productivity by more than their substantial individual contribution, but adding a rockstar designer can double a team’s output.
When a software company is searching for a new CTO or VP of Engineering, they tend to look for either a Chief of Surgery or a Head Coach. Hiring the right (or wrong) one can mean the difference between success and failure as a company. Knowing which you are can help you choose the right opportunity.
When I started work on DishFu.com (one of my code playgrounds…its something like Yelp) a couple years ago I wanted to support natural language search so that, instead of clicking lots of checkboxes to search for the best burrito in my zip code, I could just ask “what is the best burrito near me” and get the answer. At the time (and even now) I didn’t find a ruby library that made this easy to do, so I thought I’d take a stab at it.
For months I struggled with frequent audio dropouts while connecting to stereo through my Airport Express from my Mac laptop. My connection was strong (5/5 bars on wifi) but I still had dropouts. I tried every manner of fix and none was satisfactory. Until now. I seem to have stumbled on a solution and its one I had not read about before. No doubt it won’t work for everyone because of the many different possible causes for bad connectivity to your AirTunes device of choice. But here’s what worked for me.
While developing a Rails apps using PostgreSQL (unlike MySQL) I often run out of db connections and see errors like
FATAL: remaining connection slots are reserved for non-replication superuser connections
and when I do, my Rails app stops working. Restarting Postgres fixing the problem, but it was harder to restart postgres that I expected. Here’s how I do it.
