Sometime back, I worked with a colleague who was completely blind. As I was introduced to this new would-be-teammate, I instinctively tried to thrust my hand forward for a handshake, only to stop myself short with a horrifying realization that might not be an appropriate form. Fortunately, to my great relief, he was used to such situations and offered his hand first. This moment particularly struck me.
The experience of working with him was exciting and as challenging as it was enlightening, as I think I learnt a bit more about myself and all the things around me I took for granted.
Anyway, here are some of my observations
1. Navigating a busy open-layout office is possible, but hard. My colleague was really great at doing so without using his stick.
2. Often it is the sighted who would hesitate at water-cooler chat for fear of offending or saying something untoward, but the colleague took the initiative to put them at ease, so it was always fun. No one could slip out unnoticed by him. The puns were mortifyingly entertaining, which I think only a blind person can make.
3. The written form of communication goes great lengths in bridging the communication gap (This is applicable in general as well)
4. ASCII diagrams and SVGs are great ways of making content such as flow charts and architecture diagrams accessible. Tools such as PlantUML, dotviz, mermaidjs are helpful.
5. Statically typed languages make it much easier to work within a screen-reader environment. We were working with Go, and he had much better success with it than a language that was used in other parts of the company.
6. Emacs seems to have a lot of tooling to facilitate the use of screen-readers.
7. Open-office chatter (in-person and chat) can become overwhelming very quickly, so setting expectations ahead on how you'd plan to work helps your teammates.
8. Monitoring is hard (in a server-side environment) as the notion of "taking a look" at the graphs doesn't translate for someone who is not sighted. I wish there were better ways that are more accessible.
Losing sight is perhaps one of the most terrifying prospects anyone can face. However, seeing (see what I did there) my colleague also gives me hope that all is not futile. It is possible to live a fulfilled life. It is possible to have a successful career as a software developer. Being blind does not have to mean disabled but merely differently-abled.
Thanks :) if you look at part 2 -- [http://abhirag.in/articles/train_of_thought_2.html] I already have a decent algorithm to find stations with wrong coordinates, regarding geocoding, if you zoom into the map, you will find that the stations are marked with a star so OpenStreetMaps presumably has that data already. Cleaning up the location data is definitely doable but wouldn't be easy. One main issue is the duplicate names of stations, although the station codes would be different, we still need to have a rough idea of where the station is. I did try and improve my results using the MapQuest geocoding api, but I would label that effort as "work under progress" for now :)
I left India 3 years back and from what I gather, salaries at reasonably good places have pretty much doubled and in few places tripled. Am not even talking about Google/Fb.
I agree, but you also have to consider the crazy inflation rate there. Not to mention cost of housing and no decent public infrastructure. You need a lot of money just to get a reasonable standard of living there.
There is no way they would reveal their most precious secret sauce for the sake of satisfying one country's law and I can only think of one way this can end - Google pulling off another Google News Spain, by shutting down Google.fr.
Forcing Google's hand did not go well neither in Germany nor Spain not too long ago. How are law makers failing to see this? How are even the lobbyists fuelling the whole thing not seeing this?
> The only way to know if you love drawing at a competent level is to reach that level. In a sense it begs the question: how can you tell if you will enjoy doing something until you have the ability to actually do it?
I have had such a realisation few years back, which I neither was able to put into concrete words, nor did I take it seriously, until I have read yours.
Growing up, I used to love drawing as a child, but later I started to become indifferent towards it and my skill started waning leading me to wonder if I simply disliked it or was just not so good at it. Unbeknownst to me I started practicing in hopes of becoming good enough at it to be able to do better programmer art work for my games. I became reasonably good at it and only then was I able to reason out that my indifference was because programming interested and intrigued me far more than drawing ever had.
The phone itself is not capable of receiving the aircraft broadcasts/transmissions as they are sent at very specific radio frequency. All of what you see is actually being aggregated by a remote server from a number of receivers across the world that are capable of reading such radio frequencies, and transmitted to your device simply using Internet/3G/Network over HTTP/HTTPS.
Majority of these questions seem to be Trivia, which can be looked up. I don't see any need to learn them. They are probably nice to know but are not helpful in objectively evaluating a developers iOS skills.
The important thing while talking to candidates is evaluating their understanding of technical concepts - like multithreading, GCD vs NSOperations, application lifecycle, properties, references, blocks, memory management, caches, sandboxing, responder chain.
Whats the point of someone knowing HealthKit or Voiceover or screen resolutions if they don't understand how atomic or nonatomic properties differ?
Understandable, I'm mostly a designer and so the first run I had a few questions like this sounded a little rough. Have a friend contributing and helping with these a bit, but still very early on this.
If you have any suggested questions, I would love to add them. If you don't wanna go through the PR, etc, my email is in my profile. Feel free to send over and I will add.
I think part of the idea of interview questions like these is that it will get a developer into those finer points, if they are in a technical discussion.
The experience of working with him was exciting and as challenging as it was enlightening, as I think I learnt a bit more about myself and all the things around me I took for granted.
Anyway, here are some of my observations
1. Navigating a busy open-layout office is possible, but hard. My colleague was really great at doing so without using his stick.
2. Often it is the sighted who would hesitate at water-cooler chat for fear of offending or saying something untoward, but the colleague took the initiative to put them at ease, so it was always fun. No one could slip out unnoticed by him. The puns were mortifyingly entertaining, which I think only a blind person can make.
3. The written form of communication goes great lengths in bridging the communication gap (This is applicable in general as well)
4. ASCII diagrams and SVGs are great ways of making content such as flow charts and architecture diagrams accessible. Tools such as PlantUML, dotviz, mermaidjs are helpful.
5. Statically typed languages make it much easier to work within a screen-reader environment. We were working with Go, and he had much better success with it than a language that was used in other parts of the company.
6. Emacs seems to have a lot of tooling to facilitate the use of screen-readers.
7. Open-office chatter (in-person and chat) can become overwhelming very quickly, so setting expectations ahead on how you'd plan to work helps your teammates.
8. Monitoring is hard (in a server-side environment) as the notion of "taking a look" at the graphs doesn't translate for someone who is not sighted. I wish there were better ways that are more accessible.
Losing sight is perhaps one of the most terrifying prospects anyone can face. However, seeing (see what I did there) my colleague also gives me hope that all is not futile. It is possible to live a fulfilled life. It is possible to have a successful career as a software developer. Being blind does not have to mean disabled but merely differently-abled.
I wish you the best of luck.