Extraordinary, Driven, Passionate, Imaginative, Remarkable, Phenomenal, Seasoned Developer Wanted. Apply within.

Recently spotted on the Internet:

Open Positions

• Extraordinary DevOps Leader
• Driven JavaScript / Node.js Developer
• Remarkable PHP Engineer
• Imaginative iOS Developer
• Passionate UX/UI Designer
• Seasoned Python Developer

(Really. I didn't make these up.)

---

I wondered if I'd qualify for any of those, if I have the necessary qualities, even supposing I possessed the requisite hard skills...

Extraordinary?

No, I don't think I am extraordinary. Most humans are not extraordinary. Most humans are pretty ordinary. That said, I've certainly done some unusual things. The most unusual was probably dropping out of my corporate programming and design job, with all its advantages of good income, city lifestyle and boringboringboringboring to live out in the sticks on a rural smallholding, trying to be self-sufficientish, growing my own food, supplying my own water, brewing my own beer, and learning. Always learning...

Driven?

Yes, I confess, I have been driven.

Back in late 1999 into 2000 I did a gig that involved me living and working in Switzerland for about six months, on and off. Not in Switzerland as much as in one particular Canton that has (I was told) specific IP treaties with various other parts of the world that were (I was told) essential to the success of The Venture.

I was accommodated in particularly upmarket lodgings -- an apartment in the same building that housed the offices and personal home-away-from-home of one of the Money Principals of the venture -- one of the 0.0001%. Lovely views of the lake, famous Alpine peaks visible in the distance, clouds permitting. I had some lingering contractual obligations back in Cape Town that required me to commute between Switzerland and SA every fortnight. Business Class, naturally, at the expense of The Venture. Man, I accumulated a lot of frequent-flier miles that way.

Each time I landed back in Zurich, The Venture's minions would arrange for a taxi to schlepp me from the airport to the office. And what a taxi. Not some grotty yellow clapper with slightly sticky seats and cigarette-infused upholstery, oh no! A Mercedes limo, all leather and walnut, and Herr Geissler's pidgin English offering to take me via the scenic route as I reclined in luxury in the back watching through the blacked-tinted windows as the chocolate-box chalets went whooshing by. The trip from airport to office took around forty minutes, unless we took the scenic route.

One time, though, something went wrong, and the minions failed to arrange for Herr Geissler. Some communication breakdown. By now quite familiar with the ins-and-outs of Swiss travel, I simply took the train. There's a station right beneath your feet at Kloten airport Terminal B. To my delight I discovered that, even with a change of trains at Zurich Hauptbahnhof, the trip took only twenty-two scenic minutes by rail and Swiss chronometer, and deposited me a pleasant, three-minute walk from the office. After that I took the train whenever I was given the choice. I never commuted with Herr Giessler again, except for one last, wild time. But that's subject matter for another story altogether.

So: Driven? Yes, I've been driven. And I prefer the train, thank you.

Passionate?

Yes, I sometimes get passionate with my wife... occasionally I've been tempted to get passionate with other people. It has generally not ended well.

The thing about Passion is that it's all hot-bloodedness, sweaty palms, thumping heart, furious emotion and throbbing other bits. And bloody short-lived. Is that really what you're looking for in an Android Developer? Or would you rather hire someone who will see the project through the inevitable rough patches where your client suddenly and unreasonably invokes the corporate lawyers' jotts and tittles and throws a cast-iron spike through the limpid clarity of your gifted UX designer's heaven-inspiring vision, rewriting the spec into something dreamed up by the by-blow offspring of Dante Alighieri and H P Lovecroft on bad acid after a hard night jamming black-metal and burning Norwegian churches?

If that's really the sort of Passion you're looking for, I think I'll pass.

Imaginative?

Is there a single human-being on this Earth, of average intelligence or better, who is not imaginative? Just watch a small child persuading its parents that, No, I am NOT tired, I do NOT need to go to bed just now. Hell, even my dogs are imaginative when they're trying to persuade me to take them for a walk.

Then, too, I have been known to make claims of being a Writer (I don't say Published) of Science Fiction stories. That certainly takes some imagination. But then I had lots of practice. I learned from a Master. I went to a really strict Boys' High School, you see, along with my best mate, Roy. And Roy was one of the Naughty Boys. Constantly getting into trouble with the powers that were. More than half the time it was not even his fault and he was merely the unwitting victim of circumstance. He had some sort of genetic predisposition towards attracting trouble to himself. Consequently he became a Master at Talking His Way Out Of Trouble, and, along the way, I learned a whole lot from him about the art of fabricating stories. I learned, too, that the stories often don't need to be particularly plausible. Just good enough for the people who want to be able to pretend to believe. And that's all it takes for Science Fiction.

So: Imaginative? Yes, I think I'll own that one.

Remarkable?

I am never quite sure of the word "remarkable". Does it mean that I've done something that other people find odd enough to want to remark on, or does it mean that I am "able" to make "remarks" about odd stuff, thus being remark-able? I suspect (duh) that when you say you're looking for a Remarkable Engineer you mean the first sense -- you want someone who is "remark"-worthy. The trouble is that you don't say what they should be remarkable for... is it their dress-sense, the oddly clashing colours, pink shirt and purple neckscarf topping olive drab pants rolled up to the knees that they think make some sort of declaration of disdain for the world of conventional fashion and the sheer quantity of metalwork rivetted through the flesh of one ear so as to cause their head to lean markedly to one side? I'd certainly remark on that.

Not that I'm pointing a finger, mind. Not me. Very tolerant, I am. Peoples lifestyle and dress choices are their own, and frequently the least interesting thing about them. After all, it is pretty certain that I do or have done some things in my time that might give other people cause to remark on me. Like the sleeveless Afghan goatskin I affected back in the earliest of my student days. At least until the blackened pinhole burns multiplied like some ebonite ur-acne. That was probably remarkable. At least, the smell probably was.

So: Remarkable? Yeah, I'll 'fess up to that one, too.

Phenomenal?

Well, "phenomenal" is the adjectival form of "phenomenon", which one dictionary defines as "an appearance or immediate object of awareness in experience; a thing as it appears to and is constructed by the mind, as distinguished from a noumenon, or thing-in-itself."

I have long held the theory that the practice of software development (writing programs, to be less pretentious) is exactly the Practice of Magic. I mean, look at the Sorcerers and Wizards of fable and fantasy. (It is entirely Terry Pratchett's fault that I always want to spell Wizard with two Zs.) No, seriously, I am not even joking, here. The Sorcerers and/or Wizards (delete where not applicable) confine themselves to smoky dungeons/high garrets/dark towers, surrounded by piled-high stacks of grimoires, crafting intricate and eldritch spells in arcane and incomprehensible languages. Enchantments that, upon release into the world, wreak havoc, mayhem and general confusion. (I believe we call it "Disrupting Entrenched Monopolies".)

Remind me again: What's the difference between programming and sorcery? And Javascript really is pretty cryptic and arcane, isn't it. I wonder what DevOps opportunities there might be at Hogwarts, and do they do Agile at Mordor. (I doubt it.)

So I contend that software is all "a thing as it appears to and is constructed by the mind". By that measure, then, all software is Phenomenal. So, in using the word "phenomenal" in relation to writing code, you said nothing at all.

Seasoned?

Seasoned? What does that even mean -- a "seasoned" developer? That I've been left out in the Sun too long? That I smell a bit ripe? I don't want to know.

I can chuck some salt and pepper over myself if you like. Chilli flakes, even. MSG. Is that seasoned enough?

Finally?

Finally!

While it was not specific to any of the positions you advertised, in puffing up your dev group you invite me to "work with an absurdly talented group of people..."

I think I'll join the circus then. The Bearded Lady. The Dancing Bear. The Siamese Kittens. The Sword Swallower and the Tattooed Map Lady whose Ass Can Be Seen From Her Elba. Absurd and talented, all. Maybe they need a Scrum Master...

Turning URLs into URIs: shrtn - A URL redirector/shortener.

The shutting down by Google of their project-hosting has forced me to migrate my URL-shortener project to BitBucket (because Mercurial is so much nicer than GIT), and along the way caused me to take it upon myself to resuscitate the project. For one thing, I've passed out URLS that rely on it residing at 1.mikro2nd.net, and, as things currently stand, those are dead links. For another, I've figured out a second, more important, use case for URL redirectors than mere shortening. 

While shortening URLS may have some (highly debatable) utility, I consider them to be, on balance, a harmful thing. They make the link destination opaque, and the poor sucker clicking on them has absolutely no idea where they might end up. Then, too, the indirection allows the redirector host to potential introduce any sorts of mischief or stupidity into the user's browse path. These are not insurmountable problems, just small stumbling blocks in the path of the concept, but they do argue for considering URL-shortening to be harmful. Or at least seldom accruing benefit to the clicker.

What they do buy you is the ability to gather ego-gratifying statistics on who clicked your links, which can give you a measure of how well your voice is heard in the social Internet. An oft misleading measure, to be sure, but sometimes some measure is better than none, as long as the user of said statistics remains aware of their limitations and biases.

There is, though, a very legitimate and compelling use for the idea of redirectors: They provide a bridge between the world of URIs and the world of URLs. (For the longest time I was a bit hazy on the distinction between the two, but I'm better, now, thank you.) A shortener (or redirector) service allows us to publish identifiers of stuff (I'm trying to avoid the "content" word having developed a nasty allergy) to the 'net without worrying about the location or address of that stuff. For example, I might have published a document (or an application or a collection of photographs or whatever) using some file-hosting service. Let's call it odearieme.com. Now it turns out that odearieme.com was also hosting a bunch of stuff that the American copyright fascists decide they want disappeared. So they have the FBI kick down the doors of ohdearieme's hosting centre with the aid of a compliant country's spook services, and they steal remove the servers holding your perfectly legitimate and legal "stuff". Too bad. Anybody hanging on to the URL you gave them referring to ohdearieme.com is now stock out of luck. Had you used a redirector, though, it would be no problem. All you'd have to do is upload a copy of your "stuff" to a new file hosting service ad change the destination URL in you redirector. This is, indeed, as useful thing, and, after all, exactly what they Domain Name System is all about.

So there's my compelling use-case for a URL shortener/redirector, and I still have a couple of hundred words to write to reach my day's target. Let me describe, then, some of my other thinking around this little project.

I've already implemented two or three different storage schemes for the "database" that the server needs in order to work, and exactly which one gets used for a given deployment is merely a configuration issue. So what's another one? The trouble is that it is becoming cumbersome to include all the storage implementations, along with their dependencies, in the final deployed product. I know that many, if not most, developers would just chuck everything and the bathtub into the deployment, but it offends my sense of neatness. I want to build a number of separate artefacts: one that contains the actual redirector server, and then one for each storage scheme. That way a deployer (or, heavens forfend, an actual System Administrator) can deploy only the exact artefacts they need. This also means that updates to one module don't necessitate a refresh of the entire system. More immediately, it means that I want to build a number of separate artefacts for this project, rather than a simple WAR file, making Maven a much better fit than the straightforward Ant build generated by Netbeans, so I'm having to (at last) learn something about using Maven properly. I guess I'll learn to live with the tediously slow builds, though it does feel like the 1990's called and want their Makefiles back.

Then, too, I'm of a mind to host this thing (at least my own personal redirector) on Google's massive cloudy infrastructure. Given the meagre volumes of data I'll be shifting (which, presumably, speaks volumes for the paucity of my Social Internet Fu) I'm pretty-well certain I can keep hosting it there free for all eternity—or until Google decide to shut down their cloudy hosting engines or make them for-pay only. If or when that happens I guess I'll have to move the redirector back onto my own infrastructure, so I don't want to lose the ability to deploy to my own (Tomcat) application server. That means teasing out the deployment configuration and infrastructure-specific stuff from the core of the redirector code itself. All sounds reasonably doable for me, and I'm using the exercise to polish up my Mercurial, Maven and AppEngine skills, not to mention brushing up on changes in the Java language and APIs. I might even use it to improve my Javascript skills or get properly to grips with one of the JS front-end frameworks.

Darker Corners of Android: BroadcastReceivers and Intents

Not all in Android-land is lightness and brightness. A few dark corners and cul de sacs await the unwary, ready to trap us in sticky tarbaby snares of mystery debugging. One such is a case we recently encountered in relation to BroadcastReceivers and the way Intents get delivered to them.

I've written previously about implicit Intents versus explicit Intents in the context of describing a useful code-pattern for preparing Intents. To briefly recap, explicit Intents name the class of the component they are aimed at whilst implicit Intents simply describe the desired action they intend to trigger and allow the Android intent-delivery system to find the best-matching component to handle the Intent. Indeed, a better naming scheme might have been "broadcast Intent" for implicit Intents and "unicast Intent" for explicit Intents.

BroadcastReceivers can be registered for receiving broadcast Intents in one of two ways, either through a declaration in the Android manifest file, or via a dynamic registration by another component.

If you register a BroadcastReceiver via a manifest declaration, then you must provide the class-name of the receiver implementation. To communicate with the receiver, you broadcast an Intent – either one that matches the receiver's intent-filter (if it was declared to have one) or an Intent that specifies the class-name of the receiver. In this latter case it's hardly a broadcast, really, since the Intent is directed at a specific target receiver. Nevertheless, this is a perfectly valid way to send events and information to a BroadcastReceiver.

If you dynamically register a BroadcastReceiver – by calling Context.registerReceiver() – you supply a BroadcastReceiver instance and an IntentFilter describing the sorts of Intents that should be passed to the receiver. And herein lies a small gotcha. You register an instance.

If you try to send an Intent to the receiver by naming the class of the BroadcastReceiver, it will never get delivered. Sending the Intent using something like

Intent i = new Intent( this, MessageReceiver.class );
sendBroadcast( i );

won't work. The Android system will not match the Intent you declared to the class of the BroadcastReceiver instance you registered. The only way to send Intents to dynamically registered BroadcastReceivers is by having them match the IntentFilter attached to the receiver when it gets registered.

Explicit Intent matching just doesn't work in this case.

I've put some example code on github that demonstrates all this. There's a simple BroadcastReceiver (the MessageReceiver class) that gets registered dynamically by the MainActivity. The MainActivity instance then tries to send Intents to this receiver instance using two different methods. First it sends an Intent that matches the Action declared in the receiver's intent-filter. That Intent gets through successfully. Then it tries to send an Intent that explicitly names the MessageReceiver class. It never arrives.

As much as I love the eventful nature of Android software architecture I view this as a bug (Come on guys... How hard would it be to do a getClass() on the instance that gets registered?) but it is what it is. It took us a day or so to figure out why Intents were mysteriously failing to be delivered to an otherwise perfectly ordinary BroadcastReceiver, so I thought I'd save you, Dear Reader, the trouble. It's pretty straightforward to cope with (rely on Intent actions rather than explicit Intents) once you know of this issue, but I have not seen it documented anywhere in the Android reference materials^ε.

Share and Enjoy.

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^ε If anyone does spot a description of this in the official docs, please do let me know!

Android Patterns: Manufacturing Intents

Activities, Services and BroadcastListeners are the basic components of application structure in Android. They are all started by firing an Intent that causes the Android system to activate them. There are two very different kinds of Intent that might activate an Activity: implicit Intents, and explicit Intents.

We present here a useful pattern for creating those Intents in a way that makes code more robust and easier to maintain.

For the purpose of simpler description we'll talk about starting Activities using Intents, though the same pattern makes most sense when used (with due care and discretion) for all components.

Implicit Intents

Implicit Intents do not name the specific Activity they trigger. Instead Android looks for the best match between an Intent's content and any Intent Filters declared by the Activity. This is what happens when your application's main Activity is started by an Intent that has its action set to ACTION_MAIN and its category set to CATEGORY_LAUNCHER.

Implicit Intents and their matching by IntentFilters is the key way that applications are able to interact with the entire ecosystem of applications and services in an Android system. It allows us to run an application that (for example) makes use of a web-browser or email client without having to embed all the functionality of a browser or email client in the application itself; we can merely assume that a suitable application exists in the ecosystem, and all our application has to do to leverage that capability is to fire the right Intent. This system of implicit Intents is one of the most powerful aspect of Android, and one which many applications fail to use well. How many applications have we seen that try to provide their own web-browsing capability, ending up providing some half-baked, crippled web-page fetcher-and-renderer, while we know perfectly well that the system almost certainly hosts one or more full-fledged, powerful web-browsers, if only they would just fire an appropriate Intent instead of trying to go it alone.

Explicit Intents

Explicit Intents are Intents that name a specific component – an Activity, Service or BroadcastReceiver – as the thing to be activated using the components class name. As soon as an Intent names a specific component, all other forms of Intent matching against filters is abandoned, and Android activates only the specific component, without any regard for the other bits of data the Intent may carry.

In terms of Activities, explicit Intents are used to implement in-application navigation between Activities, and many of the target Activities will not have any associated IntentFilter at all, so there is no other way to activate them other than with explicit Intents fired form other parts of the application.

Pattern

Each Activity, Service or BroadcastReceiver should provide a factory that returns template Intents for starting that Activity, Service or BroadcastReceiver. In the simplest case – say an Activity started by an explicit Intent – this might be a simple factory method:


public class ListManagerActivity extends Activity {

    public static Intent getStartIntent( Context context ){
        return new Intent( context, ListManagerActivity.class );
    }
    ...
}

In this most elementary form such a factory method is not, by itself, very useful. It becomes ''much'' more compelling when the Activity in question expects or requires certain additional data to be present in its starter Intent:


public class ListManagerActivity extends Activity {
  public static Intent getStartIntent( Context context, UserInfo userData ){
    checkNotNull( userData );
    final Intent startIntent = new Intent( context, ListManagerActivity.class );
    startIntent.putExtra( EXTRA_USERINFO, userData );
    return startIntent;
  }
  ...
}

In this case we achieve two worthy objectives with this simple factory method:

1. We make sure that the Intent that starts the ListManagerActivity always contains the userInfo extra that (presumably) the activity absolutely requires in order to behave correctly, provided, of course, that we only ever manufacture start Intents for ListManagerActivity using this method, and never by calling new Intent(...) – something that can quite easily be checked using various code-quality audit tools.
2. We keep the code that builds start Intents (with their extra data) close to the code that consumes those Intents (and that extra data) so that, if we change the notion of what data an Activity requires, we're already in the right place in the code to make the corresponding fixes to the manufacture of those Intents, rather than having to hunt around all over our codebase.

There might be more complex cases where components get started using a variety of different Intents. Perhaps Intents might carry different extra objects or flags affecting the component's behaviour. Perhaps the component might be activates using implicit intents with varying options for their data URI. Indeed, a common mistake when passing a data URI in an implicit Intent is forgetting to correctly set the mime-type for the data URI, in which case matching the Intent against an IntentFilter mysteriously fails.

In such complex cases it may be appropriate to supply several Intent-factory methods in the class that gets activated. It may even be desirable to provide an Intent Builder class:


public class ListManagerActivity extends Activity {
    public static class Builder {
        private Intent startIntent;
        public Builder( Context context, Foo mandatoryData ){
            startIntent = new Intent( ListManagerActivity.class );
            startIntent.addExtra( EXTRA_FOO, mandatoryData );
            startIntent.addFlags( FLAG_ALLOW_NEW_ITEMS );
        }
        public Builder addVitamins( final Vitamin nutrient ){
            startIntent.addExtra( EXTRA_VITAMIN_ID, nutrient.getId() );
            return this;
        }
        ...
        public Intent build(){
            validateIntent();
            final Intent constructedIntent = startIntent;
            startIntent = null;
            return constructedIntent;
    }
}

TL;DR:

Don't create start Intents for Activities, Services and BroadcastListeners willy-nilly in myriad and random places all over your codebase. Rather have each such component class provide factory methods or builders to manufacture those start Intents.

This ensures that

• the Intents carry all the necessary data that the component expects, 
• that the data is added in close proximity to the places where it is consumed, so that changes in the requirement are easily mirrored in the corresponding changes in the creation and structuring of that data, and
• mandatory data required by the component can be reflected by mandatory arguments in the signature of factory methods, ensuring that required data cannot be easily forgotten.

Netbeans EE Dependency Madness

Dredging up an ancient persona-time web-project and dusting it off caused me to reinstall the Base-EE module for Netbeans - long my IDE of choice. To my dismay, Netbeans pops up the following list of dependent modules:

This is madness!

I will never be using JSF, IceFaces, PrimeFaces or Struts. There will be frost on the ground in Hades before I ever use any part of Spring Framework without being severely and repeatedly bludgeoned with a blunt instrument. And if I ever do choose to host a webapp "in the cloud", Oracle is probably going to be my very last choice, though I can understand them being desperate to punt their wares in an IDE that they do, after all, fund in some measure.

So why are these listed as required dependencies? It might be that the EE Base module uses some features from those modules, in which case, why have those not been broken out as separate modules, this being one of the huge strengths of the Netbeans Platform?

Something is very smelly in the nation of Netbeans!

Web-design HowNotTo

Seen recently on a mailing-list I receive:

> These guys stock 29mm Crown Caps http://www.africancork.co.za

Went off to take a look at their website...

"You have to be logged in to view our products"

They have to be joking! I can only assume that they actively hate it when people want to buy their stuff. Needless to say, I bounced.

Do people really still misunderstand the nature of the web that badly when we're already more than 10% of the way through the 21st Century?

Google Groups: The Orphan Child

It's been quite a while, now, since Google rearranged the menus providing links to their various sites and tools. And right from the start Google Groups has been Missing In Action. At first I thought it might just be a small oversight, but evidently it's a deliberate design decision.

Google Groups: Nowhere to be found.

I wonder why... I find Google Groups to be one of the most useful tools they offer, especially when I am working with people who are not very net-savvy -- those who are not as comfortable with web-based tools as I am. The only rationale I can come up with is that Google would like us all to migrate over to g+ and abandon the somewhat old-school "forum" style that is Groups. Ain't gonna happen!

Unless they force the issue by killing-off Groups, in which case I will hazard a guess that existing fora using Google Groups as their carrier will simply hike on over to elsewhere that does provide a forum-style interface.

I'm not a huge fan of forum-style UX, and I avoid it as far as possible, but it is something simple and familiar to many people, and so sweetly occupies a place where it is the best thing to use because it is the simplest thing for the largest number of users. I do hope it's not going to vanish completely in a stupid attempt to force everyone over to g+... (Like what Microsoft seem to be trying to do to their user-base.) That would be,... well, not quite Evil, I guess,... but certainly quite an unfriendly move.