I'm A New Guy Again

After a long period of thought and reflection, I decided to accept a position at a new company a month ago. It was hard to leave my old job as I had made quite a few friends, but it was time for a new challenge. A month in, I am very happy with my decision.

My new position uses a completely different technology stack. I’ve gone from maintaining older Struts applications with no ORM tools to now working with the following stack:

• EJB
• JSF
• Seam
• JPA/Hibernate

I had conversational knowledge of these, but had never taken the time to actually get my hands dirty and gain some experience. That was a fault of my own, but I am now knee deep in them each day and enjoying it.

So far I have only done some small things with each of these, but I will be starting a new project soon and expect to have this stack mastered by its completion. Wish me luck!

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Moving Inside the JVM

I am becoming more and more interested in JVM languages like Groovy and Scala. I truly believe that these languages created to run on the JVM are going to slowly displace Java. Java is beginning to suffer from neglect as it has not been pushed forward like it should have been.  Closures still not being in Java is the perfect example. Too many developers have been calling for this feature and it is supposedly going to be in Java 8, but I will be surprised if it makes the cut. Groovy and Scala already have support for closures, so I figure if these languages are already pushing forward I am going to jump on the train rather than wait for Java top catch up.

Steve Jobs, R.I.P.

I just heard the news that Steve Jobs has passed away at the age of 56. I knew he had to have been ill for him to let go of reigns to his Apple machine and sadly I was correct.  My fellow nerds should take a small moment and reflect a little in his honor.

Though I often disagreed with the manner in which he made some of his decisions on developing applications for his platforms, no one can argue with the success he brought to Apple and what he has done to innovation. In my opinion, Bill Gates brought some respect to nerds, but Steve Jobs made being a nerd cool. Think about it. When have you ever seen people of all walks of life stop what they are doing to check in on an announcement being made by a man in jeans, a black turtleneck, and white sneakers?

Rest in peace Steve Jobs. If I achieve 10% of the things you did in your short life I will be overly satisfied.

The Big Flaw in the Android Experience

My team at work is starting to make a big push to start having more of a mobile presence. This meant that I had the privilege of being sent to a training course for iOS development (via Pragmatic Studio).  I had only done some minor Android development before this so I was fully prepared to give iOS and Apple the stink eye. Something strange happened though. The more I sat in the class and worked on writing apps for iOS, the more I started to see what I consider the biggest flaw in Android. What is that you might ask? Android does not have a common look and feel across the OS and apps.

The more I wrote apps for iOS, the more I realized how each app had a common look and feel.  Even though they had different styles, they all had similar behavior and button/field placement. I could easily pick up any iPhone and open an app I would know how to navigate and what to expect in the screen layout.  When I open my Android phone, it is quite the opposite. If I open 10 apps, I can expect to see 10 different screen layouts. This is annoying to have every app behave differently and does not provide a sleek UX . Google needs to get a handle on this somehow.

I know Google has refrained from going the Apple route of thoroughly reviewing all apps submitted to the App Store, but they have to come up with some solution to the UX problem if they truly intend to dethrone the iPhone. If it was me, I would just review apps to check for obeying UI and security guidelines. That would still give developers the confidence that their app would easily and quickly pass through the approval process and make users more at ease.