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Recently my 4.5 year old son started playing “Mastermind”. This is a game where one player picks a 4 color code, and the other player has to guess it. After each guess, the first player lets the guesser know for how many colors both the color and position were correct, and how many only the…

At JustTalkTo, we realized early on that the idea is not deep tech. There isn’t really a good justification for machine learning, deep learning, a kernel driver, or low-level optimizations. What we do have is a kick-ass product and the tech to back it up. One of the more interesting pieces of tech that we…

A couple of months ago I went to Geekcon. For those not familiar – Geekcon is a “conference/hackathon” for makers – you come, build a ridiculous project, eat some food, barely sleep at all, play a bit with other people’s projects, and then go home. The idea about the project being ridiculous – it has…

Over the last couple of months my team at Flytrex had occasion to use intervals more than once, and in both cases the team asked me, “What’s the right way to solve this?”. Since this is a common problem, I thought I’d write a short post about it. Most interval problems seem deceptively simple, while…

It seems common practice to have a staging and production branches for deploying your code. A common pattern is to push (or pull request) to these branches, then merge the changes. Then, some system watching this branch will notice, and deploy to the appropriate environment. (Another way this is done is with tags, but I…

It always starts with an itch. Today, there aren’t really many good apps to teach kids to read Hebrew. The best one is “Kesem’s Monsters” – and when I tried getting my son to play it, it annoyed me. He liked playing it – but I thought it wasn’t teaching reading all that well. About…

Logging is a critical part of every serious project. If logging is not important in your project – you’re probably doing logging wrong. Here are a few lessons I learned over the years running multiple projects. 1 – Reserve ERROR for errors, and everything that is not a bug in your code shouldn’t be an…

In part-1 I described how we validate flight-networks at Flytrex to make sure that no two nodes of a flight network are too close. Now let’s turn our attention to validating that no two edges are too close. First, how does one define “edges being too close”? What is the distance between edges? Here’s a…

I recently published a home project I was working on, an app to teach children to read Hebrew. I wrote it originally to help my son learn to read Hebrew. In an early version my son was very excited to play it. He quickly understood the principle – see a word, then tap one of…

Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to work with freelancers. Recently a friend had a bad experience looking for freelancers, and I tried to help her find new ones. That prompted me to write a bit about my method. While not completely foolproof, it will increase your chances of finding better freelancers. Defining the…