michaeltbuss

Despite Apple's polished WWDC presentations promising seamless development experiences, the reality often involves navigating buggy frameworks that aren't ready for practical use—even after the official release.

Hey all, I had a pretty wild debugging session recently and thought I'd write it up. Figured it might be helpful for anyone else in a similar late-night code crunch.

Let me know if it resonates with any of your experiences!

Location: Cleveland, OH, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not at this time

Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Python, Objective-C, Next.js, React, Ruby on Rails, Jest, Node

Résumé/CV: https://www.mikebuss.com/downloads/Mike-Buss-Resume.pdf

Email: mike@mikebuss.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikebuss/

Portfolio: https://www.mikebuss.com/portfolio

I am a software engineer with over a decade of experience looking for a remote position. Contract or full-time. Please reach out with any questions.

Location: Cleveland, OH, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not at this time

Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Python, Objective-C, Next.js, React, Ruby on Rails, Jest, Node.js, jQuery

Résumé/CV: https://www.mikebuss.com/downloads/Mike-Buss-Resume.pdf

Email: mike@mikebuss.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikebuss/

Blog: https://www.mikebuss.com

Portfolio: https://www.mikebuss.com/portfolio

I am a senior software engineer looking for a remote position. Contract or full-time. Please reach out with any questions.

I wanted to make something special for my son's third birthday so I used what I know about mechanical, electrical, and software engineering to build a "Memory Box".

In this post, I talk about the technical details of creating it. If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it. Thank you!

Thanks! I always forget to add RSS when redoing the site. Here's a link to that: http://mikebuss.com/rss.xml

Every night, at 3 AM, my cat will meow and paw at the bedroom door like a banshee. I tried everything to get him to stop, including the off-the-shelf air sprayers that trigger with motion.

Eventually, I decided to build my own. I 3D printed a case and trigger for an air sprayer can, created some electronics with an ESP32 and RF trigger, and wrote my own "motion detection" logic - this time with an ultrasonic sensor, which works much better in the dark.

Now, the cat knows that a meow or paw will get him sprayed, and my wife and I can finally sleep!

I also built an air filtration system for my 3D printer, a level checker for my water softener, and a custom keepsake box that only opens with an RFID chip that you can read more about on my blog: https://www.mikebuss.com/blog

There's no way a cart full of goods will scan properly if you roll through a scanner. RFID scanners don't handle RFID tags being stacked very well.

I'm having a hard time understanding who would buy this. Non-techies aren't looking for a solution to this problem. And, the moment you mention encryption keys in your marketing you've lost them.

For $499 and $99/yr (!!), I don't think you'll convince techies this a worthwhile product either. Maybe the ultra paranoid users. But, in my experience those are also the people who can build their own solution.

$99/yr is insane for this. Here's the reasoning they provide in their FAQ:

> Internet service providers normally don’t provide their customers with networking capabilities that are required to run an email server. In most cases, upgrading to an expensive business class internet service is needed. The subscription service that is part of the Helm service handles this for you without you having to upgrade your ISP.

> We handle all fees associated with domain registration and renewal when you create a new domain for your Helm. In addition, we also provide storage for offsite encrypted backups and include access to new features, service and security patches.

Their home page at ghost.org literally says "Ghost is a fully open source, adaptable platform for building and running a modern online publication" at the top.

A really popular iOS developer just had one of his app updates rejected because it linked to other iOS apps: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/554119074893275137

He was only linking to 5 or so apps, and it was hidden away in a Settings menu.

I really wouldn't invest too much in having this work for iOS.

Leap Motion isn't nearly as accurate as they show in their videos. I have one and it's completely useless for anything more than a simple "swipe left" gesture.

> the fact that Cydia recommended it to our large base of terminal-using developers for a long time by accident

Do you have more I can read about this? That is really interesting!