Getting Started

Hi! I'm Robert; I'm a software engineer who's worked at a bunch of large companies (IBM, Apple, Google) and some startups and small companies (Berkeley Softworks, Intrinsa, Fungible). I've also been in academia and in research.

This blog contains some stories from my career - the odd and interesting twists, personal interactions, frustrations, and little victories. Many of these stories are ones I've told to coworkers, my interns, and to graduate students or researchers to explain how software development actually gets done in industry.

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Coffin Lights and Mac OS 9

When I was learning theater lighting in college, someone gave me the worst advice: “never tell the union stagehands that you’re new and don’t know something. They'll just mess with you mercilessly.” I took that to heart the first time I did lighting design for a play with real stagehands. I wanted to look like a professional, so when I was working with the crew to position and shape the light beams, I imitated my lighting design instructor. “That light: please cut it here [motion above my head for the place where the light beam should be cut off with the metal shutter in the light], here [left side cutoff], here [right side cutoff], and here [motion with my foot at the bottom limit of the light.] I moved over eight feet, repeated the pantomime for the next light, and repeated across the stage. On the night the show opened, I was up in the lighting booth with the stagehand who would run the lighting cues during the show. We were both looking at the closed curtain, lit up...
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The Worst Bug I Ever Wrote

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Berkeley Softworks recruiting advertisement. We definitely weren't IBM. The worst bug I ever wrote happened on the first day of the project, and I still remember making the edit that introduced that bug. During my second year of college, one of my friends got a 6 month “co-op” internship at IBM in Boca Raton. She came back with a ton of confidence, a long distance boyfriend, and a bunch of stories about working on real software. Up until that point, I’d been just trying to get through my classes. After her stories of freedom and paychecks, the idea of working someplace real felt like something I could - and should - do. So I signed up for the U. C. Berkeley engineering school’s co-op program, sent out some resumes and waited for a response. The first place to get back to me was Unisys , a business computer manufacturer in Southern California that had just been formed by merging old-guard mainframe makers Sperry and Burroughs. Unisys flew me down to Orange County (first...
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