Posts

When I first started this blog many years ago, my intention was to publish here regularly. I have never kept that schedule. My posts are sporadic at best. I’m often quite busy and when push comes to shove writing hasn’t been as big a focus for me. Sometimes I take my notes in paper journals, other times just in my head. Well, I’m going to make an effort to return here. Make an effort to contribute more. I’m also going to make an effort to consolidate my different personalities here. I have a bunch of websites where I post photos. I have a several places where I post personal thoughts. I’d like this place to be a hub for all of it. Hopefully you will be hearing a lot more from me soon. ...

Not sure about how many of my fellow Villanova Alumni are working as a software or hardware engineer in Silicon Valley. I know a few. One of my friends, Arts & Sciences 2005 is out here working on his own start up. Another ECE department grad is working for another software/hardware deal on security in SF. Not to mention John Hennessy, president at Stanford University. In the mail today was another request to donate to the Alumni Fund and send in a note about where we are and what we are doing. While there is merit in sending this to the university, posting it here serves the same purpose in my book. ...

At work we were trying to create a custom UITableViewCell. We wanted something that looked like this: Here are some of the factors that made this problem more difficult: Our one custom cell was in a UITableView of regular cells The fonts for each of the items in the cell were pretty consistent with the rest of the table view Like every other cell, we wanted to it to be indented based on cell.separatorInset I looked at several ways to approach this. I tried using a custom table view. I tried subclassing a UITableViewCell. I finally landed on trying to override the tableView:willDisplayCell:forRowAtIndexPath: and it is worth explaining why. ...

Over a year ago I switched roles in the software engineering field. I started working as an iOS developer for a company called Flywheel. We are a start up in the transportation industry. Our goal is to provide safe, reasonably priced rides from professional drivers with the entire hailing and paying process handled from your personal mobile device. The goal is to make the experience as seamless as possible for the end user. You take out your phone, find a pickup location, the app hails available cabs, and you are notified when a car is on it’s way. When you get to your destination you can adjust the tip or just leave your default. Your credit card is automatically billed so you can worry about what you need to do next. ...

It’s been over a year since I left my roll at Motorola working with a team of very talented web developers on Montage. During my time with that group I worked on a side project for automated testing called “Screening”. I wrote a couple of posts (or at least one post) about chromedriver which we used to power screening. Still, one of the big personal accomplishments for me during that time was being published at Ars Technica. I was one of three authors on a post about the tools we were working on. The project has since been abandoned, but you can read about it here. ...