Blog | Kurt McIntire

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My name is Kurt McIntire and I’m a software engineer living in San Francisco, California.

I blog about software, business, and fitness. Currently, I work as an iOS Engineer at Lyft. On the weekends, I'm an elite Spartan Race competitor and trail runner.

In 2020, I...

Spent a month traveling around the Southwest US.
Started (and subsequently shut-down) a machine learning startup called SharpML.

Earlier in my career, I built and ran a software development agency called Vektor Digital. I also organized and ran the San Francisco iBeacon and BLE Meetup. In recent years, I helped grow the mobile team at Cisco Meraki, launching Meraki Go and a re-write of their enterprise mobile app.

Blog

07.21.2020

Check out my interview on The Entrepreneur Ethos Podcast

Check out my episode on The Entrepreneur Ethos Podcast where I talk about making it a point each day to Read, Write, and Sweat. ... Read more

04.15.2020

Why and how I use Gatsby.js

I use Gatsby.js for my personal blog and Gear List . Both sites are primarily static, blog-like content. Gatsby helped me get these sites up and running quickly. After a year of growing and customizing these sites, I’m pleased to report that Gatsby... Read more

04.10.2020

Machine learning vocabulary

Here's a list of terminology that I encountered during my machine learning studies. I'll push updates to this blog post as a living document. Basics Model - A function or algorithm. - Example. I can use a model to predict the value of a home, given information about that home (number of b... Read more

04.08.2020

Building an image recognition model to classify home types

Can you guess what type of home this is? In this blog post, I break down my process for creating a machine learning model that predicts the architectural style of a home, given an image. I'll walk you through the whole pro... Read more

03.31.2020

Mini retirement, traveling the Southwest US

At the beginning of March 2020, my wife and I quit our tech jobs and left San Francisco for a month-long roadtrip across the Southwest U.S. We started planning this trip 6 months earlier, so we were excited to hit the road on March 2nd. At the time of departure, COVID-19 was still relatively new in... Read more

02.28.2020

Let's quit our jobs

In February of 2020, my wife and I quit our jobs. After two years working at Cisco Meraki, I was ready to step away from my role as a senior software engineer. I worked with amazing people and had the opportunity to launch the new Meraki Go product line. I became a much better engineer due to my im... Read more

12.01.2019

Migrating to TypeScript

In 2018 I led an effort to migrate an existing Javascript codebase to TypeScript. One year after the implementation, I find it to be an overwhelming success. New engineers say that navigating the codebase is easier, and long-time team members say that we have less bugs. The motivation When I ... Read more

11.01.2019

My thoughts on React Native

The first six years of my engineer career was spent building mobile apps the native way, with Objective-C, Swift, and Java. Since I know how to build mobile apps natively, I didn't spend much time considering cross-platform mobile app technologies like React Native, Xamarin, and Cordova. Not only d... Read more

09.25.2017

Shutting down my software agency

2018 Update: Shortly after writing this article in 2017, I joined the team at Cisco Meraki. There, I am a Senior Software Engineer. I work on the mobile team, and am hoping to see it grow in the coming years. Vektor Digital has been my passion project for the last four years. Along with my co-foun... Read more

11.16.2015

Crafting and launching successful beacon apps

At Vektor Digital, we were early to hop on the “beacon train” in 2013, and after a few years, we still believe there’s a bright future for proximity based user experiences. During that time, we’ve been lucky enough to work on 10 smartphone applications that use beacons and bluetooth low energy. Ove... Read more

03.27.2014

Everyday mobile, a coffee shop UX study

Today I stopped by one of my favorite coffee shops. Unexpectedly, I ended up diving into a fun conversation about mobile user interface design and optimizing for barista tips. After placing my order, the barista swiped my credit card and handed over an iPad running a Point of Sale app. The app sho... Read more

11.09.2013

Zero to coder

2014 Update: Though FixMyCity was shutdown in 2014, this article shares my favorite recommendations for building your first app-based startup and learning how to code. My co-founder, Matt Holmboe , and I are proud to announce our newest app, FixMyCity, is now ... Read more