My wife has been learning R and working on RStudio. Today she started a new blog using Hugo and Netlify. There is a plugin called blogdown for RStudio which makes this pretty easy to setup and handles running the R code and attaching any output to the post.

→ On Hiring at Highrise

Late last year at Highrise we were working on hiring a new server engineer for our team. We weren’t really clear what we were looking for and different parts of the team had different ideas about the ideal candidate. I worked with the team to overhaul our system to create a better process for choosing candidates. Last week Gusto published an article about our system which is a really great write-up about our system.

Debugging with Sound

Debugging is hard. You have to remember what you or someone else was trying to do while understanding what’s actually going on. I don’t remember where I heard it, but there is a saying that goes something like “Don’t write code at the peak of your understanding because debugging it requires 2 times the understanding…”. Sometimes it’s not that it’s hard it’s that there is just too much going on. For these cases, I’ve been using sound.

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I organize my development directory pretty well between work and side projects. Each of those directories usually has a _playground and _tools directory for testing things or common tools. Today I noticed my _playground directory is >8gb. That's a lot of sand.

That SpaceX launch today was pretty mind-blowing. I hope the future space-archeologists enjoy their discovery of some chunk of metal “Made on Earth by humans”. I think this might be my favorite gif right now though.

I wrote my first blog post on Android Development, Calling Kotlin from C++ about calling kotlin lambdas from C++. It's not as easy as it should be, but I'm super glad I figured it out!

Calling Kotlin from C++

At Highrise we’ve been building the future of our platform in a way that supports Android. We’ve put together a stack that is pretty challenging but really fun to build. It’s based on a C++ core and platform specific projects in Swift (for iOS) and Kotlin (for Android) that uses that core. On Swift you need to have an Objective-C++ wrapper for Swift to call functionality in the C++ core, but it’s pretty straightforward and things like wrapping a block in an std::function works pretty well. Android however runs on the JVM and requires using JNI to communicate with C++. This took away the niceness of Kotlin lambdas for asynchronous completion away from us. Or did it?

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→ On using Things 3

I really enjoyed this post about using Things 3. I’ve been using it off and on since last year but this post has already changed how I structure my projects. The funny thing is I now have more areas and projects but I don’t feel as overloaded as when I had a more dense hierarchy. I previously had projects children of companies or bigger contexts. Now projects have their own area.

📺 Now watching “The Cloverfield Paradox”. I can’t believe this was such a well-kept secret and it’s being released the same day it’s trailer was revealed. Is this the new future of Hollywood? Part of me hopes so, part of me likes building the hype.

…and our household record for the Christmas decorations going into the attic? February 4.