Squidee App Development

Squidee - Web and Mobile App Development by me!

I've always said that if I ever won lotto I'd start a company doing web development mobile apps, unfortunately theres no lotto money but I have decided to go freelance and work on a few of my own projects and some other exciting stuff. So I'm excited to announce that I'm now working under a new company called Squidee

I'll still be posting on this website for blog posts but for any web or mobile app development work this is my new 'brand'

Throwing an Engaging Party

Checkout my top secret engagement party invite with a difference http://topsecret.lukedurrant.com

:)

Interview with a google (vampire)

Turning down a job at Google is a strange thing to do for a programmer  and I shouldn't really call google a vampire because they aren't. I'm sure they're a great company to work for. I've read numerous blog posts which describe how good they are. Its just not something that I'm looking for at this stage.....

Turning down a job at Google is a strange thing to do for a programmer  and I shouldn't really call google a vampire because they aren't. I'm sure they're a great company to work for. I've read numerous blog posts which describe how good they are. Its just not something that I'm looking for at this stage. Last year two fortune 500 companies (google and amazon) contacted me through linkedIn, (biggest reason to make sure you have a complete professional profile available online especially linkedIn).

Well technically I didn't actually get as far as a job offer but it sounds better when I say it like that. I got to the 3 or 4th interview depending on if you count the first chat that I had with the google recruiter. A very good casual chat. It was halfway through the last interview that I decided to finish it. You probably want to know why a programmer would say no to google but I'm actually not sure why. I guess its a combination of things.  It was very flattering  that they had contacted me and I wanted to see where it went but half way through I knew I was wasting my time and theres. I didn't want the job the only reason I wanted it was because I could say I've worked for google, which most people would tell you is the wrong reason. Google as a company have great ethos and principles but I just didn't want to become a monkey in a room plugging away in a room on a project that will get cancelled half way through out of my control.

If you've come across this post because your trying to figure out what questions a software engineer will be asked in a google interview your going about it the wrong way. If your trying to pretend your better a better developer than what you are your a fool. This goes for any interview. To get a job offer at google you usually have to go through at least 6 interviews unless your a brilliant con artist your going to get found out and look like a fool.

Facemash fool proofing your code, don't count on it

Be sure to have a look at my new project Bingy Bongy our first interactive children's book app is going feature a Bat and sign up. Ok I finally got round to updating the facemash.com.au website I created over a year ago. I thought I'd just checkup on the code as I noticed the site was running very slow. If you don't know the history of my facemash its a site that I created in a day just as a  "proof of concept" and for a bit of a laugh after watching the Social Network Movie.

Far to often I go back to my code and say wow what was I thinking this was a major what was I thinking (I'm blaming the fact that I smashed it up in a day). The Facemash voting log has grown, grown alot! At last count to around 1 184 713, yeah thats right over 1.1millon votes have been casted! I'm surprised its so many although I shouldn't be because the site gets around 400 visits per day and on some days will peak at over 1000.

So I went on a quest to find out why the site was so slow I knew it was something todo with the Facemash Log table since it had over 1.1 million records, turns out I was doing not 1 but 2  SQL Count queries and this was being done for each display picture being display.  At the time I probably though "ah it'll be fine" it won't get that much traffic. Well this is proof, that the KISS principle isn't always the best.

Here is the offending code

public static int GetWinCount(Face face)
        {
            int count = 0;
            using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["Default"].ConnectionString))
            {
                SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand();
                command.Connection = connection;

                command.CommandText = "SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM FaceLog WHERE (FaceID1 = @FaceID AND FaceID1Winner = 1) OR (FaceID2 = @FaceID AND FaceID2Winner =1) ";

                command.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter("@FaceID", face.ID));

                command.Connection.Open();

                count = (int)command.ExecuteScalar();

                connection.Close();
            }
            return count;
        }

What started all this code optimisation is over the past weeks, I've been trying out a few different hosting providers as I'm currently paying $99US a month for a VPS server in the US which I feel is too much (I've got several different blogs and websites on not just this one). I've finally settled on Amazon AWS, and I'm quiet pleased Volume snap shots are a nice feature. So it just shows if your like me and you'll got a couple of sites ticking away take 10 minutes to have a look at the old code and make sure you weren't trying to KITS (Keeping It Too Simple)