Stratoscope

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Remote: Yes, or hybrid if nearby

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data

Résumé/CV: https://www.geary.com/resume.html or https://www.geary.com/resume.pdf and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/

Email: [email protected]

Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:

• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.

• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.

• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.

• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.

• Technical and general interest writing.

Open to full time or contract.

I look forward to talking with you!

What is this "Stack Overflow" you speak of?

Oh yes. Now I remember. I used to visit the site every day.

I love helping my fellow developers and answering their questions whenever I can.

My reputation there is 29,020, and I've contributed 645 quality answers.

I used to brag about this.

Now I had to think a bit to remember SO still exists.

My last answer was on May 28, 2021, over five years ago.

Obviously it wasn't LLMs that drove me away. And I'm not sure what it was.

Was it the culture, as others here pointed out? Or did I just get busy with other things?

---

Update: Now I think I remember what muted my enthusiasm.

Some of you older programmers may have used jQuery.

There is a common convention to use $ as the first character of a variable name that is a jQuery object:

  var $foo = $('#foo');

One of my few claims to fame is that I invented that convention and promoted it on the early jQuery mailing list.

Someone asked about this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/205853/why-would-a-javas...

The top-rated answer, with 1542 votes, is a good summary.

The second answer, with 278 votes, is as irrelevant as an answer can be.

I'm in third place with 71 votes. I gave the story behind the naming convention, because I like people to know the "how and why".

It gets better! This question was marked as a duplicate of another one. That other question has a wild variety of answers, but none that does what I tried to do: explain the reason and background for the convention.

Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.

That is a wonderful article!

> Over the years, Pitelka has rescued some of these rocks and deposited them at his mom’s five-acre property, including a large hunk of limestone that, when he dumped it out of his truck, split in half to reveal a perfect trilobite fossil, convex on one side and a matching imprint on the other.

> “I was so excited to hear that the right people got involved,” he said. “I’m absolutely ecstatic it’s going to be on display. For me, as an (excavator) who loves boulders, it’s the coolest thing that people understand its historical significance and appreciate it.”

That works for me! Can you help me drag this 50-ton rock?

There are big rocks everywhere. But surely we can be allowed to have a little fun?

Here are the name finalists:

  • Sweet Stone Chicago
  • No ORDinary Rock
  • Chicago Rocks
  • O'Rock
  • Orchard Rock
  • Da Rock

"No ORDinary Rock" and "Orchard Rock" are the winners for me. They both pay tribute to how O'Hare got its IATA airport code in the 1940s, when it was called Orchard Field.

So deciding between the two, Orchard Rock is my pick! It's subtle, but the plaque can explain it.

Interesting! I haven't noticed any problem with that myself. The display doesn't cause me any eyestrain. But everyone has different eyes and vision.

I have a nice Kindle Paperwhite, but I hardly ever use it.

Instead, I read my Kindle books on my S24 Ultra. Why?

One reason is the classic photographer's question: "What is the best camera?" The one you have with you.

The other is that I really like scrolling instead of page-turning. I can hold the phone in one hand and use my thumb to scroll up and down just like any webpage or document. This lets me keep my context instead of losing it at every page turn. If I forget the train of thought, I can scroll back a few lines and pick it right up.

There are two steps to enable this.

First, open any book and tap in the middle. Select the "Aa" icon at the top. Go to the Layout tab and turn on Continuous Scrolling.

Now you will have a problem. The selfie camera's circular hole cuts into the scrolling area. To my eyes, it is disorienting and annoying to have everything else scroll but that camera cutout sits there.

To fix this, go to Settings / Display / Camera cutout. Scroll down to Kindle and change its setting from "Auto" to "Hide Camera cutout". This takes away a few pixels at the top of the screen, but you have plenty of display space available. And no disorienting black circle as you scroll.

You may still prefer a physical Kindle device, but with these two settings, the S24 Ultra is now my favorite Kindle.

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Remote: Yes, or hybrid if nearby

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data

Résumé/CV: https://www.geary.com/resume.html or https://www.geary.com/resume.pdf and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/

Email: [email protected]

Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:

• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.

• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.

• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.

• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.

• Technical and general interest writing.

Open to full time or contract.

I look forward to talking with you!

That was not Donald Trump. It was John Barron. Everyone knows who he is!

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Remote: Yes, or hybrid if nearby

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data

Résumé/CV: https://www.geary.com/resume.html or https://www.geary.com/resume.pdf and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/

Email: [email protected]

Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:

• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.

• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.

• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.

• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.

• Technical and general interest writing.

Open to full time or contract.

I look forward to talking with you!

16KB and no floppy drive. That was my first PC!

I could get the extra 48KB memory for less than IBM charged. More importantly, double sided floppy drives were already on the market but you couldn't get them from IBM at any price.

So I went to a local component supplier and got a pair of double sided drives. They worked "out of the box" in DOS, but unsurprisingly, only side 1 of each drive showed up as A: and B: drives.

So I wrote a TSR to add C: and D: drive letterss which were side 2 of each drive.

It was super easy.

Later I heard about a fancier TSR that combined side 1 and 2 of each drive into a single drive letter with twice the capacity.

But that was a much more complicated task, and I was happy enough with my four-drive-letter solution.

Full title:

Engineer used 360-degree cam hidden in bag of snacks in attempt to steal DRAM process tech for China — IT security team pinpointed perp due to camera's leaky wireless signals

Thanks for the correction! It was a long time ago that I used TypeScript, and making things worse (for my memory) it was an Angular project.

So today, most people and teams avoid the parts of TS that require compilation into different JS, and --erasableSyntaxOnly lets you enforce this, right?

The other one I read about was parameter properties in constructors.

And thank you for the correction! It was quite a few years ago that I used TypeScript, and I think the landscape was different then.

Making things even fuzzier in my mind, this was an Angular project, and it was hard to keep track of what was Angular and what was TypeScript.

It sounds like people these days actively avoid the parts of TypeScript that require translation into different JS code.

That is true only if you confine your TS code to be pure JS plus type annotations.

There are TS constructs that require compilation into equivalent JS, such as enums and namespaces.

Location: Menlo Park, CA

Remote: Yes, or hybrid if nearby

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data

Résumé/CV: https://www.geary.com/resume.html or https://www.geary.com/resume.pdf and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/

Email: [email protected]

Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:

• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.

• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.

• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.

• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.

Open to full time or contract.

I look forward to talking with you!

For anyone unfamiliar with the meat reference, here is Terry Bisson's delightful 1991 short-short story, "They're Made out of Meat":

https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...