Mazamas

     

Well, this is a little embarrassing, but I need to postpone the Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile blog once again. You see, there was a pretty radical change of plans last month due to an unforeseen opportunity. But to talk about that we need to go back in time all the way to 2021. I joined the Mazamas, a mountaineering education organization, in 2021. In order to participate in any of the climbs however you must be a graduate of BCEP (Basic Climbers Education Course).

Lessons Learned at Q5id

     

I spent a little less than a year at Q5id. It was the shortest amount of time that I’ve spent with an employer. I specifically picked Q5id because the CEO already had accomplished two successful startup exits, Unicru, which was acquired by Kronos Inc. in 2006, and SureID, which was acquired by Sterling Talent in 2017. Despite this precaution, I ultimately found working for a startup full-time to be beyond my appetite for risk and moved back to employment with a larger, more established company.

Dexcom

     

I’m excited to announce that last month I started work in my new role as a Staff Software Development Engineer at Dexcom. Dexcom is a continuous glucose monitoring medical device company based out of San Diego, CA. The transition is a big change for me, for three reasons: The Staff Software position demonstrates the bifurcation of software career paths, the other software career path being management. A staff position represents a commitment to developing a deep technical knowledge of a chosen discipline.

Juggling Life

     

The last few blog posts have been a little more on the technical side, so to keep it balanced I figured I’d discuss my odyssey of juggling individual development, side-hustles, a full-time job, and raising a family. I’ll save an in-depth discussion of Kotlin Multi-Platform Project for next time. The “Hustle Lifestyle”, popularized in the early 21st century, has become something of a running joke. The Youtube channel KRAZAM even did a great two minute video lampooning the concept of the hustle in the tech world.

Swift & HackerRank (Part 2)

     

This is the second part in the series on Swift performance. If you haven’t read the first part, you can find it here. In the first part we analyzed two different implementations of Queues in Swift: one with a linked list (the list structure, non-existent in Swift, had to be created from scratch), and another from an array. What we found was that the array implementation was 500% faster than the linked list implementation.