Rob Janssen

All | Unread | Read

Why Software Engineers are (Vastly) Undervalued

Update: After publishing this post, I’ve heard from a ton of Yahoo’s telling me that it is now a much better place to be thanks to Marissa Mayer’s positive changes.  Marissa’s first order of business has been to make Yahoo a great place to work.

Why I Have Given Up on Coding Standards

Every developer knows you should have a one, exact, coding standard in your company. Every developer also knows you have to fight to get your rules into the company standard.

FizzBuzz Still Works

I recently interviewed some programmers for a couple of available positions at CTS, the startup crazy enough to take me as its CTO.

Message-Oriented Programming

I just finished a project that used a Kinect’s computer vision tools to gather information about people nearby, then communicate with other hardware to adjust the environment. (Vagueness due to NDA.

Death by Million Cubes

I was really looking forward to that game. Not because I find it an interesting game — far from it. I was looking forward to it because there are two things in life that I find more interesting than anything else: technology and human behavior.

My First BillG Review

In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. "Excel Macros," we called it.

The Internet is not a black box. Look inside.

Change something, hit refresh in the browser. "Why is that cached? What's going on?" Change something else, hit refresh in the browser. "What's the deal?"

Wasting Money on Cats

Did you get this little box in the mail this week? The little cat can be used to scan barcodes which appear in magazines like, um, Wired, for example.

Adventures in Unicode SMS

I remember one of my first weeks as an Engineer at Twilio, I tried to send Unicode chess pieces to my phone. I was disappointed to see the characters not come through to the handset.

Noda Time v1.0 released

Go get Noda Time 1.0! Today is the end of the longest release cycle I've been personally involved in. On November 5th 2009, I announced my intention to write a port of Joda Time for .NET. The next day, Noda Time was born - with a lofty (foolhardy) set of targets.

This Read-It-Later-list is just that, bookmarks of stuff I intend to read or have read. I do not necessarily agree with opinions or statements in the bookmarked articles.

This list is compiled from my Pocket list.