Replacing SSD in MacBook Air (13" mid-2012)

Posted on July 18, 2016

I was running low on my 13" mid-2012 MacBook Air's SSD, which had me pretty concerned. Thankfully I recently discovered that the SSD inside this thing is replaceable. After some Googling, my SSD options came to OWC Aura 6G and Transcend JetDrive. I spotted more negative reviews with the OWC drive Vs. the Transcend drive so in the end, I decided to go with Transcend and get the 960 GB version. It cost me $448.59 on Amazon.

Copying a single file from one Git repo to another Git repo while maintaining commit history

Posted on July 14, 2016

Yesterday at work I had a need to copy a single from an existing Git repository to a newly created Git repository while maintaining all of the commit history associated with this file. I did some Googling around and the most straight forward solution I came across was described on the following page: http://blog.neutrino.es/2012/git-copy-a-file-or-directory-from-another-repository-preserving-history/ (thank you!)

Simple interview and phone screen tips

Posted on June 16, 2016

I've been busy doing a lot of phone screens and interviews as of late. Actually, I've been doing a lot of interviewing during my time at Cappex. Since joining the company in July of 2012, I've done over 400 phone screens & interviews. I'm certain I've looked at over 1,000 resumes during my time at Cappex so far. Anyhow, I thought I'd jot down a list of interview & phone screen tips. Every single one of these items are things I've seen candidates do in the past. These items are in no particular order.

What to do when you are on the receiving end of a 2 week notice

Posted on June 7, 2016

One of the things I hate the most about my job is having to deal with losing good people on the team. I run a small organization (currently 10 people including myself) and there's very limited redundancy in terms of responsibilities, roles, and skill set. Losing one individual often means that I lose a significant portion of the team's collective knowledge. It's painful when all I have is 4 software engineers on the team and one of them turns in his resignation letter. Or when all I have is 2 QA engineers and I realize that I'll be at 50% QA capacity for the foreseeable future. Just a few weeks ago, my one and only system administrator on the team told me he would be leaving the company in 2 weeks and when I found out, it just about ruined the rest of the week for me. Of course, I'm well aware of the fact that everyone on my team will eventually leave the company at some point but... it still comes as a surprise (the bad kind) to me when I'm the receiving end of a 2-week notice. Nowadays it appears that having tech employees stick around for more than 2 years is considered a long time.

Resolving Issue With Code Example in Lightweight Django - Chapter 2

Posted on May 21, 2016

I've been reading through the book 'Lightweight Django' by Julia Elman and Mark Lavin and I was having a lot of trouble getting the final example in Chapter 2 to work. The local server would start up but when going to http://localhost:8000 I would encounter the following error:

Looking to start or join a support group of CTOs & engineering VPs in Chicago

Posted on May 6, 2016

Here's something I just posted on Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643390

Tips for Technical Managers on Writing Better Employee Reviews

Posted on May 4, 2016

At Cappex.com, we do formal employee reviews twice a year and being that it's already May, I'm starting to think about writing reviews for folks on my team. I don't particularly enjoy writing them (does anyone?) and while there's a lot of noise out there about increasing number of companies getting rid of their formal review process, I think formal employee reviews do play an important role. Even though I hold 1-on-1 meetings with my direct reports at least once every 2 weeks and provide them with regular feedback, I think formal written reviews are helpful in that they summarize someone's performance over the course of 6 months and highlight items that are noteworthy--both good and bad.

Resolving Tethering Issues with iPhone

Posted on May 3, 2016

I spend roughly an hour and a half Monday through Friday commuting to and from work and my laptop is tethered to my phone probably 90% of the time I'm on the train. I've never had issues tethering from my MacBook Air or iPad Mini but I've had consistent issues tethering 2 different MacBook Pros to the iPhone. I would turn on personal hotspot on my iPhone but when trying to connect to it via Wi-Fi from my MacBook Pro, it would almost never find the hotspot. And without finding the hotspot, my laptop would refuse to connect to the iPhone. This had caused me to tether via Bluetooth, which works, but it is terribly slow.

Deleting Non-empty AWS Glacier Vaults

Posted on March 18, 2016

I had a couple of AWS Glacier vaults that I had been meaning to permanently delete for awhile. When I tried deleting them via the AWS dashboard, I got the following error message:

Selenium WebDriver and JavaScript Confirmation Dialog

Posted on January 12, 2016

One of many things I had been wanting to accomplish in the 2nd half of 2015 was to start making some hands-on contributions to my team's functional test automation code, which utilizes Selenium WebDriver. I'm a firm believer that in order to be an effective technical manager, you need to have a certain level of technical expertise. During my 3 and a half years that I've been at Cappex.com, I've had little-to-no experience working on the test automation code (well, it didn't even exist until about a year after I joined the company) and as such, I had felt that there's very little that I can do to technically support my QA manager and QA engineer. So anyhow, sometime late last year I decided I would make my first significant contribution to our test automation code.