Each week, the HuffPost Code team meets to discuss the latest tech news and interview special guests for the Floating Points Podcast.
Season 2: Episode 1 - Jar Jar Abrams
Does the Amazon Fire Phone live up to it’s extreme name and will it set the world ablaze with its Dynamic Display? We commence Season Two of Floating Points with a heated discussion on what we like and dislike about the Amazon Fire Phone.
Likes: The phone’s size is substantial and the hosts agree that it will set the stage for future iPhone and Android designs. The Firefly magic scanner app also gets a thumbs up, especially from those who live near a Best Buy because Best Buy is the unofficial Amazon Showroom. Dislikes: The price point does not undercut iPhone or Android as we suspected it might, the 3D claim seems more like a gimmick than a feature and the phone is not waterproof. Would the hosts recommend purchasing the Amazon Fire phone? You will have to listen to find out.
The phone discussion is followed Google I/O predictions and Google I/O wishes. We are 90% certain that Google will unveil some watches and will not unveil, or mention anything related to Google Glass. We would like Google to introduce the Google contact lens, announce that Google Fiber will be widely available and discuss their plans for the Big Dog robot – is that too much to hope for?
Special Guest:
In Season One, we discussed Thinkful because it was the first online education company to announce a Swift language course. Evan Schneider, an engineer at Thinkful joins the Floating Points crew this week to discuss his role at the company and give us insight into their curriculum. Is Thinkful's online, self-paced program a better way to learn how to code than a bootcamp? Schneider discusses the benefits of being a Thinkful student and reveals their most popular course. If you are interested in learning Swift or learning how to program, do not miss this segment!
The Hosts:
Katelyn Bogucki is the Editor of HuffPost Code, The Huffington Post's source for information about development and design. Prior to HuffPost, she worked at Uber. Katelyn loves reading and writing about computer engineering and is especially interested in cyber security and functional programming.
Tom Biegeleisen has been a software engineer at the Huffington Post for the last two years. Prior to Huff Post, he worked in the start-up space as both a front- and back-end engineer. He holds a bachelor's degree from Columbia University.
Andrew Fader was born in New York's historic Hudson Valley, 30 miles north of Manhattan and not "upstate" New York as some have claimed. Andrew learned BASIC in 1996 and created some of his first autobiographical web pages. Discovering IRC, BSD, and GCC, among other three-letter acronyms, he attended Carnegie Mellon. He has worked at school and wealth management software startups, and with clients from social networks to government databases. He now enjoys applying the sublime combination of Ruby, Rails and JavaScript, like dipping a ripe strawberry in molten chocolate.
Dulio Denis, born and bred in Manhattan, is an iOS Developer at Dog on a Horse where he spends his days deep in Cocoa ensuring the Topps Apps like BUNT, KICK, and Huddle are the best iOS Apps in the AppStore. After coding on his Commodore-64 in High School Dulio attended Columbia where he earned a Computer Science degree from the Engineering School and interned at Apple. These days Dulio works on his own apps under the ddApps label and hacks on his Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu where he tinkers in his Open Source Software oasis.
The Sound Editor
Mark Riechers has more than eight years of media experience in roles ranging from social media manager and podcast producer to film critic and science communicator. He's worked for publications including The A.V. Club, The Isthmus, Dane101 and others, on topics spanning engineering, entertainment, medical technology, research economics and video games. Currently based in Chicago, Mark writes, produces and provides technical support for Arts Extract, a podcast and blog for art criticism in Madison, Wisconsin. He also occasionally finds time to enjoy a video game, a nice dark beer and Netflix originals..