gmurphy

We call this the 'dark matter' problem - when you're trying to hire great people, for every well-known rockstar, there are tens of people who are better, toiling away in obscurity.

The early JavaScript scene was like this - there were people who published amazing JS work and everyone on DHTMLCentral knew who they were, and it was easy to find them and try to hire them. Yet we felt this huge frustration because occasionally we'd interview someone who was as good or better, but we had only found them by accident.

I'm excited about sites like Dribbble and GitHub, which make it easy to showcase your work without having to go through the pantomime of a large folio piece. Though it can be a pain for introverts to do, I've never met anyone who regretted overpublishing their stuff.

In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understanding what comes naturally to the rest of the world.

One example is font and font size choices - because the system fonts and font rendering styles differ between platforms, it becomes very hard to tell what looks broken or 'not quite right' on the platform you're not used to. It's not uncommon to see sites launch with font choices that look rubbish on ClearType, but if you're not used to ClearType, it's hard to tell whether the rubbish is your fault or not.

Apple's excellent execution and Windows' (no-longer-deserved) poor reputation also mean you frequently hear excuses for this behavior like "Windows users won't care because they don't care about design" or "The Apple way is better, so we should do it that way on Windows too". Both of these are infuriating and lead to terribly designed products.

FWIW, H1Bs have run out until October 2013.

Lachy is Australian though, and could almost qualify for the E3, which is a far better visa (I'm still on it seven years on) though it still needs employer sponsorship and some level of university education, which makes it less than suitable for his case.

The dynamics of the H1B run-out will be interesting for Australian tech workers if it means US companies can only hire Canadians (TN) and Australians (E3) for the next 16 months.

> Loyal customers were the last to hear about it

I'm a Linode customer, your message is the first time I've heard anything about it.

Apple released a firmware fix that makes the Capslock key behave normally if it's remapped in OS X. However, I don't use OS X, and the keyboard doesn't send the event until after the delay (if I just tap the key quickly, Linux/Windows don't see anything), so I assume it's some combination of keyboard firmware + OS X.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1578 http://www.tow.com/2007/12/18/apple-wireless-keyboard-review...

Except there's a 200ms delay on the Capslock key to prevent accidental activations. Because this is built into the hardware, it means that even if you remap, if you press the second key really quickly after the first, the character ends up getting inserted into your document. It's ridiculously annoying.

While Mount and Blade is one of my favorite games of all time, its sword fighting is pretty different to the simulation in Die by the Sword. DbtS didn't really have pre-programmed motions like M&B, it instead attempted to map 2D mouse position to 3D hand position using a physical model of the player's skeleton (which generally resulted in flailing madly with your arm contorted into bonkers positions for the first week of play).

I believe this is what Blade of Honor (Tsurugi) did, though I can't find any deeper reference to the controller.

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10210

I was skeptical too, but when I tried this app a few months ago, I compared it to my Garmin heart rate monitor at rest and after exercise - they were usually within 1bpm of each other. I was very impressed.

I looked into the Neurosky and Emotiv headsets the other day for a side project. They've been on the market for a while, but most reviews are pretty cautious.

The Neurosky headset appears to suffer from inconsistent readings, and is mostly really good at picking up muscle movement (head turning, blinking) - great if that's what you're after, but terrible if not.

http://www.colorfulwolf.com/blog/2009/12/13/mind-control-for...

The Emotiv headset has some mechanical issues - the pads are a pain to wet and place and keep falling out. The data also appears to be super encrypted and quite hacker-unfriendly, so I stopped reading there.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/27/review-emotiv-epoc-tough-t...

http://thingist.com/t/item/23089/ (some angry words)

It's hard to meet people like this because of attitudes like this. I have three designers on my team who are also world-class engineers, yet they often don't advertise themselves as such because they run into the "well if they do both they can't be good at either" attitude.

No-one bats an eye when an engineer also turns out to be a fantastic musician, or when an engineer drives great product decisions, yet somehow being able to code and understand design is an impossibility?

We're here to build great things - code and design are mutually-beneficial skills in your toolbox; your brain is not zero-sum.

When I moved to the bay area, I noticed that fellow Australians who had been here for more than three years sounded weirdly sort-of-American, and thought "good thing I'm going back in two years!"

I'm still here six and a half years later. I'm the guy in the video.

These are supposedly the links, though both sites are down. The third was just an "express an interest" page, as the supplier didn't yet have the appropriate page up.

http://export.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-ras...

http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/bespoke/bespoke7.jsp?ICID=I-RASP-H...

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html

> You can't do that on Chrome

Actually, you can do that on Chrome, and we've supported both it and automatic keyword generation since the beginning. I can type w<tab>webkit and get a Wikipedia search without looking.

http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-make-Chrome-search-Wikipedia-...

Quake is also responsible for changing my life: after years of muddling around in BASIC and LOGO I started writing mods in QuakeC, which required me to write code, design a website, design and build models, and test and test and continually tweak and iterate on the experience. For the first time I was writing large code and doing serious graphics work, and I loved it deeply.

It lead me towards building websites and writing about games, and out of the Quake community I met people who ran Unreal websites - they gave me a copy of their CMS, and I ended up learning PHP/MySQL from it and building and designing bigger and better websites.

I dropped out of my Mechatronics/CS degree to pursue programming for a living - which lead to my first exposure to the then-revolting idea that programming and design were different disciplines. I spent years bouncing back and forth between the two, never quite fitting in, but learning a ridiculous amount along the way.

Now I'm at Google, technically employed as a software engineer but leading the design of a large product. I probably would have ended up somewhere in the software industry anyway, but I believe that I'm in this exact position, the best job I could possibly imagine, because of a chain of coincidences that were kicked off by Quake and its modding tools.

If you don't have an opinion on PyCharm, this is why I care about it:

Most of the code I write is in JS, with a small amount of Python. For the longest time, I swore by Visual Studio + Visual Assist X for JS development - it's a weird combination, but the inline autocomplete was the best at the time.

Once VS started getting slow, I spent a lot of time looking around for JS IDEs - my main criteria was learning speed of the autocomplete system. If I typed something as simple as:

  function A() {
    this.brains = function(x, y) {}
  }
  A.prototype.branola = function(x, y) {}
  var a = new A();
  a.br

I expected the 'brains'/'branola' autocomplete to automatically appear inline. PyCharm/WebStorm was the only one that did this quickly. Others either couldn't do it, took forever, had keypress-based autocomplete, or just offended me in random other ways. Even IntelliJ, PyCharm's bigger and crazier sibling, was too slow (and seemed to lack the ability to just open a folder and have that be your project).

In more recent versions, they integrated VCS into the editor, so you could see your delta lines, and use keypresses for viewing and jumping between your uncommitted edits (which is the most ridiculously useful thing that no-one but me seems to want).

Many other people have had success, but so far there doesn't seem to be a common thread between the people who've had failures.

A small word of warning: I mostly use Windows 7 on my MacBook Air, but I decided to upgrade anyway. Unfortunately for me, the upgrade rendered my Bootcamp partition inaccessible (it doesn't show up in startup disks, and does show up in Disk Utility, but cannot be repaired).

The European Browser Choice screen was a good example of where this style of sorting can come and bite you - the browser choice screen was designed to display a selection of browsers in random order, but the above sorting code unintentionally biased it towards particular browsers.

Here's a good writeup with a bunch of test runs and graphs: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/02/microsoft-random-browser...

The lead frontend engineer on Chrome was previously the lead frontend engineer on Firefox, and many other people on the team worked on browsers forever - we all knew what 'chrome' meant in a technical context long before we called it that.

But we still liked 'Chrome' more than the other names, and our motto is "content, not Chrome", which neatly works with either capitalization.

As it took a small amount of searching, here's more info about the company (Magnet) mentioned at the end of the article: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/04/27/alfred-chuang...

And their site: http://magnet.com/

I'm an Australian living in America; I sometimes seriously cite the lack of an Australian Amazon (or real equivalent) as one reason not to move back. Other, more normal Australians don't disagree.

I made this quick demo of using it for wikipedia search using a bunch of different public APIs: http://bodytag.org/perch/

Here's one I made that lets you transition between URLs: http://bodytag.org/rollstate/

We didn't have the button/title flicker when it was first implemented though :\

Growl is great for all the reasons you state, but Chrome doesn't use it because Growl doesn't allow HTML, and it would require us to ship Chrome with Growl for all the users who don't have it.

HTML notifications can be powerful because they allow you to include live content (video of the person attempting to video chat with you) and actions (e.g. archive, reply buttons) if you choose.

It's not inconceivable that someone could write something that suppressed and stripped the text out of a Chrome notification and presented it in a Growl notification.

For me, it was the news (in 2005) that they were hiring JavaScript-specific engineers - JS was my true love, and though I didn't think I was anywhere near the CS-Genius stereotype I'd read about in the press, I felt I was pretty good at JS, so I applied on a whim, thinking that it was an outside chance, but the best I'd ever have.

By the end of the interviews, I felt I did well (considering that I'd read up on complexity theory for the first time the night before and had told an interviewer that I didn't know what a hashtable was), and felt that even if I didn't get the job, I'd had an awesome day, but still didn't really believe that it was really going to happen. Then it did. I think I worked out OK for Google (I'm still here 5 years later, at least).

My perspective was that of a foreigner in a land where CS was a path to becoming a suit-wearing enterprise software automaton - at the time, Google seemed like this romantic faraway wonderland, so the whole process was very removed from reality for me; the perspective of someone who went to a school like Stanford or Berkeley is probably very different and more realistic.

I work at Google and I am an engineering-degree dropout who was referred by a music-degree dropout; we both now report to a VP who was a mathematics-degree dropout.

That's not to say it won't be harder to get past resume screens and such, and a referral does help in these cases. Thetrumanshow is right that Google suffers when people like you don't apply.

Unfortunately for happiness, they reset my password after I'd already done so myself.

I did it for fun for many years - had my work exhibited and in books, got to travel around the world, and met interesting people. Then it turned out I was doing it because my day job was so unsatisfying - as soon as I got a job at Google, my 'artistic' output dropped to zero.

However, the stuff I learned while doing it was invaluable - I maintain that the best designers can code, and the best type of code they can write is visual interface code - being able to clearly describe animated sequences in code (motion curves, costs of different effects) makes communicating your design that much easier, and helps you polish the working product to your exacting specifications.

Stop thinking of it as a career path, and more as a highly-useful method of expressing yourself, then let it take you where it takes you - the market for visual effects programming might be unpredictable, but the market for coders who have the drive to learn how to do anything in order to achieve a specific and detailed aim is huge.

It was designed and implemented by Ben Goodger, the front end lead.