Cameron Gaertner

With the job market for software devs in a lull and layoffs becoming more and more common, it’s more difficult to get hired these days. I recently had to find a job in this market myself, and it was a challenge. Here are some of the things that helped me. Make IRL connections If you live in a larger city, it’s likely that there are events or meetups nearby. I recommend using meetup....

Having used Qt for the past few years in a cross-platform app, I’ve come across more and more issues that keep piling up on mobile, to the point I’m beginning to think that Qt is not the best choice in 2023. While Qt is still quite good for desktop development, there are several areas it is lacking in mobile dev. The goal of this post is to highlight these areas for both developers evaluating Qt, and for The Qt Company to understand developer pain points....

I have a tablet that’s about ten years old. I’ve used it to read a lot of great books. Although I don’t usually install applications on it, I went to do so the other day. Despite being connected to the Internet, I was met with this message. Wondering if there was an issue with my connection, I tried to open duckduckgo.com in Chrome. Ah, a certificate issue. That must be why I was unable to connect to the Google Play Store....

I recently spent some time learning how to debug third party Android applications. There are many methods listed online, but most don’t work. Today, I’ll explain why most of these don’t work and explain one way that does. You can skip down to What works if you’re only interested in that. First lets get into why this may be useful. With dynamic analysis you can See live code flow - can be difficult to determine in static analysis especially with obfuscated code Read data not available to you, including checksums, user information, and more Find the code you may want to patch Enabling Debugging: Ways that don’t work Here’s a few methods of debugging Android applications that I found do not work, no longer work, or only work in some cases....

Recently after upgrading to Fedora 30 and installing VLC Media Player, I started experiencing crashes (segmentation fault) since the first attempt to launch. As you can see, there’s a segfault from 0x00007ffff7fdc19a in do_lookup_x () from /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 This means nothing to me, but I’ll tell you how I fixed it. Search around the web and lots of people will recommend updating or downgrading Mesa drivers, reinstalling VLC, rebooting, etc. There’s even a bug report with the same symptom here....

I had some issues after running a dnf update that completely borked my installation. I run KDE Plasma on Fedora 29 with an Nvidia 760Ti card, and I wanted to share some of the process I went through in recovering without having to do a fresh installation, in case it can help anyone. Note: I am not a GNU/Linux expert, and this advice is given without any warranty. Attempt at your own risk....

I made a Spotify ad blocker for myself and anyone else who is sick of Spotify ads on mobile. The app is very lightweight and automatically mutes and unmutes the phone when Spotify ads start and stop. It requires notification access as that’s how it tells if an ad is playing or not. It uses very little battery life. I would appreciate any feedback on the code or implementation. You are free to check out the source, make a pull request if you’d like to add something, or download the latest APK on Github....