Hung Truong: The Blog!

Five Simple Steps to Becoming an International™ Conference Speaker!

A few years ago, I made a goal for myself that I would start speaking at conferences. In the past I had gone to quite a few awesome conferences and I really admired the folks who could get on a stage, share a bunch of knowledge and inspire an audience to do cool stuff. While I had a bit of experience with public speaking (I spoke at some local iOS/Android meetups and moderated two panels at SXSW back in ’11 and ’13), I wanted to try for a “real” conference spot.

I think the conference that convinced me to start applying was Swift Summit, which I attended in 2015. There were a number of really inspiring talks, and the community felt really fresh and welcoming. One interesting aside: I learned after joining Lyft that no fewer than three of my current coworkers on iOS spoke at that conference (Keith, Sam and JP, though only Keith was working at Lyft at the time) and a few others attended that year. I’m not sure if that’s correlation or causation at work.

Updating My Blog and Killing Wordpress!

A week or two ago I got an email from Google telling me that my blog had once again been hacked. I’ve written before about getting hacked and I basically knew how to unhack myself, but I put it off for a bit until I checked my website again and noticed that Chrome was warning me to avoid it! This was pretty much the last straw. I decided to move off of self-hosted Wordpress and switch to something a bit more secure.

Introducing DeadRinger: An iPhone X Lockscreen Replica

I got an idea the other day when I was looking at my co-worker’s iPhone X sitting on a desk. I thought that I could have mistaken it for my own phone, since iPhone X comes in two colors and you have a 50% chance of having the same phone color as any other person. I was thinking that if I did mistake it as my phone and entered my passcode, I’d basically be transmitting the key to all of my personal data.

2016: A Hung Truong Year in Review

It’s been a while since I wrote a year-in-review on this blog, let alone any blog post. 2016 was a big year though, so here’s some stuff I did.

In January Emily and I moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan where we had been living for a few years (Emily since grad school and me since the last time I moved back from Chicago in like 2012) to Seattle, Washington. I’ve loved Seattle ever since I moved here in 2009 to go work for Microsoft, and it’s great to be back! I’m working for a coffee company in Seattle called Starbucks (yes, I get free coffee). I get to work on their iOS app and make latte art in my spare time. Here are some highlights:

On Writing Successful Fart Apps

Last Thursday, Apple held an event where they announced a few things, including a refresh of the Macbook Pro line that killed all of the good ports and added a touch bar to replace the function key row. I was actually in a meeting during the announcement but I had heard of the touch bar through a story about a leak. Someone on Twitter put a bounty of $5 on the first fart app for the touch bar and a friend retweeted it to me.