kalyan02

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.

I wish you the best of luck.

Absolutely. Corporate/Enterprise accounts can opt-out of it.

If you post them somewhere, I'd love to read.

Brilliant. I love indian railways and keep wishing for frequent open data set releases. Looking at your notebooks, my interest has rekindled again.

What are your thoughts on geocoding names of stations, to obtain GPS coordinates with better accuracy? It would largely be a one time effort imo.

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.

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?

It was introduced on 1st of April and was definitely on the frontpage for few days.

They also have a blog post [1] about it.

[1] http://www.redditblog.com/2015/04/the-button.html

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?

The least they will need to stuff in there are the life support systems (food,air,etc) to deal with delays/emergencies

Right time is when you think your project solves the same problems others may be facing and you think you need an extra help in furthering your efforts or when you have lost interest in the project

From a completion standpoint, an MVP sufficient to convince people that it has value

I am 24.

Oldest code online is from 2006 - I was 17 at that time.

PHP web counters - http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?tx...

And some open source web designs - http://www.opendesigns.org/profile/kalyan/

Self-Taught myself when I was around 14; Joined a CS course at 17; Am 24 now;

I started learning c/c++ because I found books lying around and found the compiler installed on my windows 98. I later fiddled with some HTML at school and picked up with CSS & JS to show off cool/pretty things. I tried building small games and php websites until I moved to college where I picked up backend development.

Once I got into college, I started taking up freelance projects as a hobby for extra cash. But a professional job didn't happen until I graduated.

I guess, I misinterpreted. Its a pretty good idea. I wonder if there are any existing forums/groups already out there.

While I appreciate the initiative, I dislike being asked for feedback for a closed product in an open forum. There is nothing to do on the site other than subscribe with twitter/email.

Even 3 years back, competent programmers, fresh out of college, capable of doing half as good as work required to develop exploits and attacks, get paid atleast 5-8 times as much. While I understand the point you are trying to make, your exaggeration makes me doubt the validity of your other points.

You should be able to run it on windows as it is, by checking out the source and executing ./run.sh script or simply 'python main.py'.

Building the standalone shouldn't be hard to do it with py2exe.

That is some ingenuity in sneaking the easter egg in, under the watchful eyes of so many others. I always thought, easter eggs were a mutually agreed upon things with a company and never occurred to me that they may involve having to go great lengths. Now I can't help but wonder, how many of the recipes on the site have easters inside them.

Build something. Anything. Small or big, doesn't matter. Just build - in your free time. If you don't have free time, make time. What to build? Pick something that you wish software/hardware did, but you don't know any that does.

Seems to be heavily inspired from Gmail and all the latest Google's new design hoopla!

Awesome nevertheless!