Soft Arts

HR Awesomeness!

The company I work for, Black Pixel, has been looking for a few new iOS developers, and the responses I’ve been getting to our ads have pretty much been uniformly subpar. 

Finally, after reading yet another resume of someone claiming to have deep iOS development experience, I tweeted the following:

Protip: Comments like 

”* Very familiar with X-Code” 

in your resume automatically result in deletion.

The problem is, that the product in question is called “Xcode.”

I got a lot of comments from people, some of whom wanted to know if “XCode” was an acceptable mistake or not. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fit a reasonable, informative response in 140 characters this time.

No it is not. Hell, no, it is not.

Xcode is the main tool you use to make your apps. It is the fundamental place in which you do your work. If you’ve truly worked with it enough to claim solid familiarity with the tool, you will know how Apple spells its name.

Messing up the camel casing is definitely more forgivable, but not if you want to work for us. We push ourselves mercilessly to make the best software possible. If you are representing yourself as having solid iOS industry experience and being a good fit for our team, you wouldn’t mess this up.

Reality Check

None of this is a reliable indicator of good programming expertise. Knowing how to spell Xcode, iPhone, or knowing that iPod Touches are not referred to as ‘iTouches” doesn’t mean you are a great programmer.

But NOT knowing these things telegraphs a profound lack of attention to detail about things that are fundamental to how we work. Nothing screams “I will be a massive liability for your company” like an inability get these things right on something as important to their career as a resume.

Obviously the overall strength of the person’s resume and their previous successes will temper this response: if I saw “XCode” from an Apple employee that would clearly know better, I’d assume it was simply a shift key accident. On the other hand, if it was on their *resume*, well, I’d be shocked.

I need to transfer 250gb of data between two machines over the lan.

Ladies and gentlemen, the tar trick. I only need this every two to five years, but when I need it, I really need it.

This tars up the contents of a directory and streams it as compressed data to a remote host. This is super efficient as:

1. The data is compressed before it is transferred, so overall throughput is greatly reduced.

2. Compression and decompression are distributed and run in parallel. Instead of zipping everything up, transferring it, and then unzipping it, both processes run simultaneously, the the compress/decompress time is cut in half.

How to tar something to a remote host.

tar cvf - source_dir | gzip | ( ssh target_host “cd target_dir; gunzip -d | tar xvf - ” )

How to tar something from a remote host.

ssh target_host “tar cvf - source_dir | gzip” | gunzip -d | tar xvf -

UPDATE:

Several people have mentioned more updated refinements, I haven’t tried all of these but I agree that they sound like smart approaches:

Jerry Chen: you can use ssh’s -C compression flag which accomplishes the same thing as gzip, i believe

Nate True:  I like to use Netcat instead of SSH to transfer the data - cuts out the overhead of encryption but takes more effort to set up.

Zachery Bir: can’t you just use cvfz/xvfz and bypass piping to gzip/gunzip altogether?

 RIM has announced the BlackPad: their acknowledging nod to the iPad’s success. Welcome to Checkmate 2.0: the only thing I need to do here is replace ‘iPhone’ with ‘iPad.’

End game

Because of that effort, since the iPhone was released, everyone else has been struggling to play catch up, and no one has really come close. Apple raised the bar higher than anyone else had before, and by the time the competition realized how much of an effort would be required to seriously compete, the public had already turned to them to see how they would meet Apple’s threat.

Being in the public eye, and forced to react, no competitor is really going to be able to put in the years of time required to offer Apple any serious competition. Everyone is reacting and trying to get something out the door as quickly as possible. I think that this is very well illustrated by the BlackBerry Storm, probably one of the most notorious handsets ever released by RIM. Perhaps it was the need for a fast response, or perhaps it was arrogance on the part of RIM, but there was no way that the Storm could ever be considered serious competition for the iPhone.

Can’t wait to hear the reviews.