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Mirta Dozar
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As an experiment, some automation leaders in the Partner Device Engineering group put together a plan for a small (no more than 20 people), invitation-only, happy-hour style event at a Palo Alto restaurant / loft space for the evening of Wednesday, June 8th. We structured the concept off of similar successful initiatives by other teams at Netflix (both the Design and Data Engineering teams had run small, invitation-only dinners in the past). The theory is that a smaller group can yield deeper conversations where folks would have the opportunity to chew on ideas and share insights together over the course of a few hours. Of course, good food and a few drinks always helps too. Invitations were sent to individuals that the group determined to be thought-leaders in the automation and quality space.
Wanting the conversations to progress organically, we had intentionally avoided setting any fixed agenda for the evening. All participants were encouraged to pick up their name tag, grab some sea scallops or ceviche, a glass of wine or bottle of beer, and start chatting with other professionals in this space. We were all eager to engage and quickly found ourselves knee-deep in some amazing conversations about the challenges of going global, separating environmental issues from application failures, and the role of QA in a development organization.
Over the course of the evening groups of 3 - 5 people formed, each locked into meaningful discussions. As we had hoped, the format yielded deep-diving into challenges that, turned out, were more in common than we thought. For example, on the challenge of going global, the discussion quickly dove past internationalization approaches and into questions around how to manage spotty network conditions, service latency, and cross-region data replication. Since this was about QA and automation, the focus was on how to replicate and create automated tests for those scenarios.
From Netflix, we shared how Partner Device Engineering tackles the many challenges of testing devices for certification, global partners, and how we have teams that are dedicated to building testing platforms like Netflix Test Studio.
The evening went longer than originally planned, but ended with restaurant bagging up some left-overs for folks who were too engaged in conversation to eat much. At the end, attendees left with an overwhelmingly positive review of the event, with comments specifically calling out the caliber of the conversations, the variety of people we all got to know, and of course the fantastic food.
One of the clear take-aways from this experience was discovering how valuable forums like this can be for building communities and fostering innovation. It was exciting to see how talented minds tackle some of the common challenges that we all face.
The first time I saw "The Usual Suspects" was in January, at the Sundance Film Festival, and when I began to lose track of the plot, I thought it was maybe because I'd seen too many movies that day. Some of the other members of the audience liked it, and so when I went to see it again in July, I came armed with a notepad and a determination not to let crucial plot points slip by me. Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care." It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the movie to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests.
The story builds up to a blinding revelation, which shifts the nature of all that has gone before, and the surprise filled me not with delight but with the feeling that the writer, Christopher McQuarrie, and the director, Bryan Singer, would have been better off unraveling their carefully knit sleeve of fiction and just telling us a story about their characters - those that are real, in any event. I prefer to be amazed by motivation, not manipulation.
The movie begins "last night" in San Pedro, Calif., where an enormous explosion rips apart a ship. Who set the explosion? Why? A cop named Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) wants to know. He has one witness to question: a shifty-eyed, club-footed criminal named Verbal, played by Kevin Spacey with the wounded innocence of a kid who ate all the cookies. Kujan and Verbal are closeted much of the time in the cop's cluttered office, where Verbal lives up to his name by telling a story so complicated that I finally gave up trying to keep track of it, and just filed further information under "More Complications." The story is told in flashback. We learn about a truck hijacking some weeks earlier, and the five suspects who were picked up by the police. They're a mixed bag of low-life characters, played by Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro and Kevin Pollak, in addition to Spacey. I'm not sure if they were all involved in the hijacking, but the way Verbal tells it, in jail they began to plot a much larger crime, involving millions of dollars of cocaine.
This is no ordinary heist, because the dope belongs to a mysterious figure named Keyser Soze (sounds like "so-zay"), a Hungarian mobster so fearsome that when some bad guys threaten his family to get to him, he kills his family himself, just to make it clear how determined he is. This Soze is like the hero of a children's horror story; the very mention of his name curdles the blood of even these tough guys. But no one has ever seen him, or knows what he looks like. And then there is Mr. Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), Soze's right-hand man, who is himself so sinister that we begin to wonder if perhaps Kobayashi himself is Soze.
The interrogation between the cop and the suspect falls into a monotonous pattern: friendliness, testiness, hostility, a big blow-up, threats, reconciliations and then full circle again. We hear amazing stories about Soze (one survivor of the boat explosion, with burns over most of his body, drifts in and out of a coma but can talk of no one else). As Verbal talks, we see what he describes, and his story takes on an objective quality in our minds - we forget we're only getting his version.
To the degree that you will want to see this movie, it will be because of the surprise, and so I will say no more, except to say that the "solution," when it comes, solves little - unless there is really little to solve, which is also a possibility.
My wife's iPhone 4s has 11.1GB of "documents & data" that is Messages (saved). How the heck do we get rid of those so she can free up needed space on her iPhone? Deleting the message threads doesn't affect it when we sync.... AARGH
Thanks, but... I'm at a loss. Been trying to make head or tails out of this "Documents & Data" for a couple of weeks now, since I found it chewing up 29gb out of my 64gb phone. I'm pretty sure I know the solution -- factory reset, reload apps, etc., but am still hopeful there's a less painful way to correct this. Searching the Apple forums and Google, it seems no one has really found a good answer, however.
After plugging my 64gb iPhone 6s in and bringing iTunes up about a couple of weeks ago, I noticed with a bit of alarm that this "Documents & Data" category was chewing up a little over 29gb (!!!) of space. So, I went through, deleted a few apps, cleared out some old messages and some old voicemails, etc..
Unplugged the phone, restarted, plugged the phone back in. Now, iTunes was reporting that Documents & Data were taking up 19gb of space. Quite an improvement, but that's still a pretty good chunk... So, figured I'd back up and delete my old photos (about 1gb worth) off the phone. Tracked down and found another small app I could delete. Restarted and plugged the phone back in. iTunes fires back up, and now reports Documents & Data are taking up 26gb (!!!???). This made no sense to me whatsoever as I didn't open any apps or install anything, but that's where it still stands today -- still around 26gb.
This included native iOS apps like Photos & Camera, Music, Messages, etc. I know that's not 100% accurate, but I would think it should at least be in the ballpark. iTunes, for comparison, reports this:
I don't know. I'll give it until this weekend to see if I can figure anything out... if I don't by then, I'll just get the wipe and reload over and done with. If I do have an epiphany, I'll be sure to post here what I figure out.
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