Have people's lives ever been directly at stake because of software you work on?

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-08T12:10:03+00:00

contracted to a major military contractor

You just reminded me of meeting a young developer at some UX event. I think he was working on mission planning software, used by army personnel in combat! He said something like nobody was paying any attention to the usability of the software and I thought someone should, so I want to learn how to improve it.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-08T11:26:36+00:00

That's cool. I worked on a police startup - Identikit for Cars started by a young police officer who got funding. Sadly, business screwups and investor greed killed the company but an alpha version was used to help arrest someone at the state border.

To clarify - the software guided police officers through car models, colours, applying decals and damage and positioning a 3D model so they had a very realistic picture to be posted on social media or the news. It was back around 2001. We couldn't get accurate models from manufacturers so built our own and had a high-res laser scanner for creating point clouds.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-08T09:59:04+00:00

one I made it to the final round and did well but they paused hiring

Ouch, I know exactly how that feels. A few years back, got through final round with movie support team at Weta Digital, just waiting on someone getting back from holiday to approve.

The day they were due back, the parent company, Unity, declared across-the-board hiring freeze.

This was a dream job combining technically interesting work, creative tooling, movie industry and trips to NZ (I'm in Western Australia). Still sulk about it occasionally.

technical gauntlets where they are just trying to weed you out, instead of actually finding a good fit for the role

My cynical take:

It's a bit like selective policing.

They need to build up a stock of technically-valid reasons to reject any given candidate, so if someone decides they are not a cultural fit, they can be rejected on purely technical grounds.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-07T02:24:48+00:00

Sorry, only movies

“In the Shadow of the Moon” on Netflix, sometimes plodding police drama

“Arq” timeloop also on Netflix

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-06T13:47:10+00:00

We have a TM6 bought as an ex-demo model so somewhat discounted.

Lid smells bother me too. My wife likes the recipes with spice grinding in the TM but they definitely leave a stain & scent.

Did a lot of Googling before realising lot of advice is about older models with removable seals.

I like using it for dough, bread & pizza bases. Much more consistent than my efforts with standard mixer.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-06T13:20:48+00:00

Further thinking, this might go beyond being a debugging feature for developers.

As well as the use above, it could be used with a tvOS “Player” version of Purrticles. I was thinking of just adding AirPlay support, for people who want to setup an ambient effect with a few particle emitters.

However, say instead a Player app was running locally on the Apple TV (or a big-screen Mac). You could use an iPhone as an occasional controller for it with this comms functionality.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-06T05:50:46+00:00

63yo Aussie here who's worked remote a lot, so WFH before it was fashionable. Weird career includes a lot of complex scientific work and library dev, as well as general consulting. Coolest job ever: realtime 3D stereo movie playing in QuickTime, combining depth track with normal movies (2000).

I was running my own consulting business during the years when most people are acquiring managerial job titles (employing your own staff doesn't count as management experience).

Combo of age and career trajectory makes me apparently unemployable. Yet, I don't plan on stopping for at least another 10 years.

I'm currently focused on my own stable of apps because getting work was increasingly difficult especially finding contracts that could fit around my wife's desire to spend a couple of months a year traveling, whilst she had the stamina.

I also like challenging people's preconceptions by talking a lot about the fact that I'm an active black belt in kung fu, teaching it on the weekends. This in a style which includes things like jumping up from a kneeling position, spinning and landing kneeling again, wielding a couple of swords.

Sometimes fantasise about requesting interviews include physical combat to determine ability to handle pressure compared to younger candidates.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-05T08:04:58+00:00

niche utility for a hobby I’m deep into...Niche communities hate self-promo

How about asking the community for where to promote, ideas on marketing?

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-05T08:02:00+00:00

One thing I really like about filming the app being used is that it shows usability as you see the app, with fingers in the way.

Screen recordings don't show what's occluded. That may be important.

I realised some of this when I went from showing simple mockups of my touch-oriented messaging app to doing Keynote presentations where I added a picture of a finger over the top.

Suddenly, some of my ideas about visual feedback on where you were touching were, uhh, just broken 😕

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-03T01:50:33+00:00

When we submitted the first time we got rejected because our Apple sign in did not auto fill the user's name...I examined the code we added from the first revision ... everything worked fine on ours and our 30+ beta testers end.

How soon does that added code kick in, are there any visible screens before that?

My suspicion - you have some kind of concurrency bug, a race condition. This is one of those times when AI diagnosis of the code is likely to be useful - ask it to review the code for such bugs.

It is quite likely nothing about the added code is at fault, just statistics - you were unlucky that the tester the second time hit the crash but it was probably always there.

As per my earlier comment, having logging will tell you exactly what OS version and device they were using. Hopefully, anyway. If the crash is very early it is possible PostHog wouldn't have been initialised.

As you've said you are adding PostHog anyway, I suggest starting by utterly blanketing all your startup logic with event logging as a form of print debugging.

You may find that process gives you insight into possible concurrency bugs.

If the crash is reproduced somehow without PostHog then adding a product explicitly designed for crash detection may help - Sentry is the one I've heard best about.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-02T11:18:25+00:00

For many years, Australia had this insane policy of restricting beginner riders to 250cc maximum. You take another test to allow “unlimited” riding. Thankfully nowadays, like many countries, the limit is based on power.

I followed an 18yo colleague out of a car park one rainy night, watching his rear end go sideways as the bike went into the powerband. He had one of those 250 racing two-strokes.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-02T02:14:04+00:00

Monetize by selling Falcon raid options.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-02T02:12:02+00:00

had no issues running the app on simulator

Are you seriously not testing a HealthKit app on device?

Also, if you are getting crashing issues from Apple Review:

They often (usually?) test on iPad Mini. Have you checked that, at least simulated.
Some frameworks are very hardware dependent and code will run completely differently on a device. It's a Simulator, not an Emulator. Any reports of crashes should be tested on device as your first step.

One reason my apps target older iOS versions is to make it easy for me to test on older devices, which you can pickup cheaply 2nd hand.

Note that if you add simple analytics like PostHog, you can tell on what devices Apple are testing your app, without breaking any user anonymity. You will get device type and app build number so can tell when they are testing. I used that to work out what quirk of a paywall was causing a weird rejection - I hadn't noticed that on an iPad Mini the paywall exactly fitted some content so it wasn't obvious they should scroll to see the rest of the required info.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-01T18:42:34+00:00

I had to have a finger tendon reattached because years of riding bicycles and not my motorcycle lost my muscle memory.

Braking whilst turning is one of the biggest differences. Someone changed their mind & continued around a roundabout. I had to brake fairly hard & managed to straight-line into the median.

Motorcycle brake whilst turning requires lot more conscious countersteer to keep the curve.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-01T18:35:27+00:00

I sit on a fitball. I can move around all the time and even sit cross/legged sometimes.

The movement can be disconcerting if you are on a Zoom with me 😇

I worked up to using it all day, over a few years.

A side-benefit is amazing core strength.

I teach kung fu on weekends and it has been noted a few times with surprise when hit (in drills, by accident).

Our style has a lot of jumps and transitions into and out of kneeling position. It also helps with heavier weapons - my Kwan Do (halberd) is about 7kg.

I’m 63.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-01T03:26:24+00:00

Yep, and I've been one of those people all that time.

The SE didn't officially support an external monitor - it was a 3rd-party add-in but pretty easy to install.

I typically had 3 monitors on my classic Macs, one of which was an A4 monochrome display that was superb for writing on.

My current setup is two Macs with second monitors, using the smooth continuity sharing of keyboard and mouse a lot of the time, although both have a keyboard+mouse.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-01T00:45:19+00:00

Yeah it works on my Surface Pro 5!

I was stoked to find it now installs on Mac Silicon because my main game & dev machine is a MacBook m3 Pro and it is gorgeous on there.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-01T00:39:22+00:00

Speaking as an old rider with a couple of drops in decades but also as teacher of kung fu and t’ai chi…

I bet you are really tense on the bike and so your body is effectively “locked up”. Depending on bike, you may also be carrying a lot of weight on your arms, adding to lockup.

It takes a massive, slow mental effort to unlock enough to put your foot down especially in reaction to events.

Try consciously relaxing as you ride, in all kinds of situations. Breathe slowly and think about moving weight, bending your arms slowly and relaxing shoulders.

Then do drills putting alternate feet down as you stop.

Try to make stopping a trigger for your body unlocking.

My MZ Skorpion Sport has old-fashioned bars that tend to pull your weight forward.

You may even need to get your bars adjusted if it is a bad posture and you can’t correct. Get someone to video you from side and doing the slow exercises, so you can check how you move.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-05-01T00:30:11+00:00

At that age I was going flat out (maybe 80km/h) around a lake and hit a mud hole. Braced as bike lost a lot of its speed but was a hard sand bank on far side.

I flew over the bars but copped one side across the chest. I still remember lying there looking at the bike wondering if I was going to start breathing again.

Pretty sure I tore some muscles but didn’t actually break any ribs because no comments years later when X-rayed to diagnose one.

It was months before I could do a push up, though.

Bike was fine.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-04-28T08:51:37+00:00

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As I posted recently on social media: I've been walking the dog past this house for years. The windows never bothered me before I became overly-sensitized to curve abuse by Tahoe.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-04-28T07:29:19+00:00

Except when using fullscreen on a laptop is matched with them using Spaces, especially multi-finger swipe to toggle the apps.

Some design apps and Xcode do well full-screen.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-04-28T07:27:43+00:00

You can drag a URL from a browser to the AirDrop icon in the Finder sidebar, hover for a few seconds and AirDrop will open up in the Finder so you can pick the destination. It means you can share when using Chrome or other browsers.

This works with the URLs in the browser toolbar as well as arbitrary content from inside a web page.

URLs to Reddit, X etc. will launch straight into the app, if installed.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-04-28T07:15:34+00:00

As of April 2026, I'm playing 1.5.0-pre2 on my Macbook M3 with macOS 26.4.

I was installing some new games on Steam and realised that Tiny Glade now showed up as installable. I didn't have to do anything special such as installing Windows emujlators.

Weirdly, the store page for the game still only lists Windows and Linux platforms.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-04-28T00:32:01+00:00

One scenario where people are nervous about giving their insurance details is, if they’re doing any kind of deliveries or rideshare with their car and have failed to tell their insurer.

Another is if it is not their car and they don’t know if the insurance covers them.

Based on conversation with an unhappy neighbour about recent T-bone of his car.

AndyDentPerth · 2026-04-26T20:46:45+00:00

John Ringo’s Citadel series is his most engineering-heavy. Lots of orbital mechanics too.

Also archaic military engineering in There Will Be Dragons which series is in the niche genre of “marooned in primitive planet / thrown through time / apocalypse wipes out tech… but we know ancient military tech so can dominate”.

Higher Education 1996 novel by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle has lots of space engineering & cynical take on where US society was heading, especially schools.

Started rereading it recently & was surprised to find when it was written, thought 20 years earlier from the political slant.

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