Aug 10
David MartinezUncategorized interviewing
Interviewing is difficult. Technical vetting is even more difficult. You only have an hour to determine if the person knows his/her salt.
I've been doing a lot of these lately, and I seem to be getting slightly better at them. In my worry to make sure we don't hire the wrong people, I eventually settled with this as a way to break the ice and start talking difficult problems. I call it the mind map method of technical vetting, or the Mind map approach to interviewing.
The problem
Basically, you only have an hour or two to completely technically vet someone on what may be 20 years of experience. Even if you yourself are very smart, there's simply not enough bandwidth in the world to guarantee a level of competency. And certifications are usually no help, because none of the stuff in there tends to relate to real world experience for your particular type of position.
The other problem is that the candidate is likely to be nervous at their best and sometimes plain scared out of their wits - even if they're the perfect candidate. Not exactly conducive to your best thought processes. You don't want to skip someone just because they're nervous or the shy type.
So what to do? A little workshop with a mind map.
I thought about this originally when I interviewed a now-coworker. So he helped me test-drive it. Maybe part of the success is that it worked the first time I tried it? Anyway, I've been using it for a little while now on the technical vettings and it seems to have worked so far.
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interviewing
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Jul 09
David MartinezUncategorized
Is it too much to ask for a decent personal finance software package for OS X? I have used Quicken on PCs since 3.0. MS Money is also nice although I never really used it for more than trying it out.
I had heard Quicken for Mac was not as far ahead as the Windows version. But I thought, "the Windows version is so good, how bad can it be?" Boy was I wrong.
The app looks and feels like it's put together in a rush, with no attention to detail, by people who got their first course of OSX development about a week ago. It is BAD.
technorati tags:
osx
finances
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May 02
David MartinezUncategorized
Just an Airport Extreme N base station. After a few small problems, I hooked it up to the network on one side and to an USB hub on the other, and it's doing great. It's nice not to depend on the desktop machine being up to share the drives and printer.
technorati tags:
osx
mac
network
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Apr 13
David MartinezUncategorized
For Unix and Linux users, OS X is more of a lateral move, thanks to OS X's BSD underpinnings. Unfortunately with all the market-speak it may drive some smart engineer-types away from trying it out, since all of the every day things you live with is either buried deep in the developer documentation or behaves strangely out of the box.
I haven't found a document that covers this all together, so here it is, the basics to get comfortable if you're a command-line type of guy:
technorati tags:
osx
unix
linux
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Apr 10
David MartinezUncategorized
I wish it wasn't true, because I like it better when people share, but WiFi security in Mexico is very good. Every household seems to have its network secured. I see 7 or 8 access points whenever I open the laptop, but no open ones.
Dang. And I needed to get some e-mail done with the office. And of course this blog posting will have to wait until I'm at a cybercafe as well 
Actually, I found a new mall that has an open WiFi on its food court. Slow, but sweet.. Now where's the Tacos al Pastor?
technorati tags:
wifi
mexico
Mar 23
David MartinezUncategorized
These are pretty funny..
Novell releases Get a Mac spoofs
The first video plays off the Win/Mac rivalry and pokes fun at how the industry often ignores Linux and its surprising (to some) user base size. The second video is arguably funnier, as it does a great job of poking fun at the way MS and Apple market their products while pointing out open source software's advantage of being a community effort. [digg - tech news / apple / dig]
technorati tags:
funny,
linux,
mac,
windows
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May 01
David MartinezUncategorized
Virtual Appliances are nano-sized virtual machines with web user interfaces for deploying instant infrastructure and applications.
Virtual Appliances Home
Now that I'm using Linux as my laptop, I've been using vmware for some testing and whatnot, and I've really come to appreciate using virtual machines. This crew is creating mini-VM's, devoid of everything but the application to run, for the server side. Their tomcat VM weighs in at only 65 Mb. I thought it was specially clever.
May 01
David MartinezUncategorized
I got busy again for a little while as I settled in a new environment. But I am finally back. I have linux as my primary OS now (had not done that since 2000).
I now do Software Development and Architecture Consulting with a bunch of great people I know and trust.
So expect postings to resume shortly.
Mar 17
David MartinezUncategorized
For my latest pet project I used subversion. I enjoyed it so much I switched everything to it now, and I set up an area for my source code repository, where you can gasp at my ugly code. I replaced the "Projects" section of the sidebar here with a link to the repository instead.
I like this so much better than my prior solution at sourceforge because it can house both my public and private projects with a minimum of server jumping. It's also on machines I have a bit more control over. And subversion is just miles better than cvs.
technorati tags: subversion, versioncontrol
Mar 02
David MartinezUncategorized
The site was down most of the day, but we're back up now. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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