I’m a mechatronics/software engineer whose main area of interest is Robotics. I’m also interested in app development (iOS, Web) and human computer interaction. I'm an engineer at Shoes Of Prey.
In my free time I take photos of things, play squash, and explore the lovely city of Sydney.
Great post by Marco Arment on handling customer comments. The bit about pricing complaints especially stood out.
Someone saying they won’t buy at your price is just one data point. Each sale of your appis another data point. If you sell 100 copies of your app and get 3 comments on Twitter from people saying it’s too expensive and they won’t buy it, I’d say you’re doing great.
Your product will never be affordable to everyone (and some of those who can afford it won’t be happy about the price). If you can find enough people who attribute more value to your product than what you charge them for it, you have paying customers and a potentially growing business.
Cool interactive chart, I’d love to see something like this across more countries, but it might be difficult to collect the data … hmmm. Might be fun a weekend project.
I feel I’ve seen useful cases for certain types of duck wrapping, e.g Google Closure functions that take either a string or an element and getElementById if you gave them a string. If it’s well documented it doesn’t seem that bad?
The best part of this article was the beginning:
Duck-wrapping (verb): If it doesn’t quack like a duck, wrap it in a duck.
Back of the envelope calculations are great for estimating the answer to life’s biggest mysteries: “Could You Actually Build BioShock Infinite’s Floating City in Real Life?”
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly technology improves. I remember hearing about IBM Roadrunner beating the speed record for supercomputers (it feels not that long ago), and now it’s already obsolete as one?
#4 - Definitely true. I can’t believe how much free time I used to have, yet I feel like I get more done per week in the little free time I have now than I did back then.
#6 - “Let’s talk about this offline” has always struck me as a hilarious phrase when used in a physical meeting, offline.
Quite a few interesting points in this piece that I relate to.
Commodity based, e.g. Gold
Politically based, e.g. Dollar
Math based, e.g. Bitcoin
Interesting categorization of currencies. I was initially pretty skeptical about bitcoin, but I’m getting really curious about how a non-government-based currency (not necessarily Bitcoin) could work long term. I need to find more articles about this.
Interesting post on how not to and how to approach devs, if you’re looking to recruit them for a job at your company.
I didn’t realise it was possible to detect if the chrome inspector is open, pretty cool trick.
This is super exciting. A little hardware block that connects to your car’s data port and lets you track your driving patterns / behaviours, to help you be more fuel efficient as you drive. It also does a few other things:
It works via bluetooth so hopefully it’ll work on more than just iphones (as the images suggest).
Check it out here: http://www.automatic.com/
I’m really hoping this will be successful and make its way to Australia.
How can Moleskine, a company that makes notebooks and stationery products, push for an IPO at “a valuation between 22 and 29.1 times the company’s earnings last year”?
Filed under: Interesting things we can learn through machine learning.
I am an engineer at Shoes of Prey (www.shoesofprey.com).
My ambition is to develop technology that pushes the boundaries of what our tools can do to make our lives easier.
Specialties: programming, c, c++, python, objective-c, java, html, css, javascript, interaction design, user experience design
Being in a startup with a small engineering team, I work on a variety of areas in both the front and back end of shoesofprey.com. I have however spent the bulk of time on:
- Autonomous 3d rendering in Amazon's cloud, using blender, EC2, and Amazon Simple Workflows (among other smaller tools).
- Scaling of web servers on EC2 at the core software level, the server level (apache) and the infrastructure level (scaling with multiple regions for customers around the globe). This has given me a lot of DevOps experience, especially with AWS tools.
As an intern, I built social features on the site, to encourage sharing, inspiration and community growth. I gained experience with Python for Google App Engine and Google Closure (Javascript).
Having received commendable results in this unit, I was offered a tutoring position for it in my 2nd year. This unit teaches student engineers the basics of programming, using C as an example, but aiming at teaching the fundamentals that can be carried across to any programming language. I was involved in running tutorial-style classes as well as lab demonstration and marking. While teaching this unit, my communication ability improved and I became comfortable speaking in public.
I did 6 months of work experience here where I gained a number of skills and had a chance to see what real world engineering work is like.
Skills gained/improved were:
-Drafting with Autocad and Solidworks
-Engineering Design process
-Sourcing of components for engineering designs
-Working in a corporate environment