Month: July 2017

On Monday, July 24th, I will assume my new role as Lead Product Manager at Tampa-based software development company Sourcetoad.

Here’s what Sourcetoad does:

Here’s who Sourcetoad are (minus me, naturally), You can learn all about them on our Team page:

Here’s a local TV news story featuring Sourcetoad:

Here’s another local news story profiling Sourcetoad: Talent, innovation, smarts, tenacity drive growth of tech company in Tampa.

I’ll be providing Sourcetoad with technical, strategic, and customer management leadership as we enter a growth phase. We’re currently in the process of expanding the business, the customer base, and the office — and yes, our headcount too — as we move into some interesting and promising markets. My job will be to shepherd all our products (which I’ll talk about a little later) through their development lifecycle, from the moment when we first sit down with the customer and find out what they need, all the way to the maintenance and upkeep of happy customers’ working software.

The sample size is small, but our Glassdoor rating’s quite good!

The desk at the home office.

In the meantime, I’ll have a little over a week to finish some freelance projects for friends and associates at the home office before I report for my first day at the office. It’s a short drive — in fact, a bikeable distance — from home, and it’s in a pretty nice spot, too! Here’s a view from Sourcetoad’s front door:

I’m quite pleased with the way things have worked out!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

If you’ve even considered doing iOS development, chances are that you’ve heard of RayWenderlich.com (their home page is pictured above). They’re a site with over 1600 programming tutorials to date, a dozen iOS programming books (pictured below)…

…600 video lessons, and a consistently sold-out annual iOS developer tutorial conference. They are the go-to place for new and experienced iOS developers to learn programming languages and techniques for developing apps for the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and even MacOS. When I learned iOS development, I learned it from RayWenderlich.com. It’s a great honor to be invited to join them!

And here’s the article I wrote for them:

That’s right: its title is Augmented Reality in Android with Google’s Face API. Android and Google, not iOS and Apple.

Give the article a look! With a provided “starter” app, it walks you through the process of using Google’s Mobile Vision suite of libraries and its Face API to create Snapchat Filters-like app that draws googly eyes, a pig nose, and a moustache over any face detected by your device’s camera:

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might be surprised that I signed up to join the Android team. After all, here in Tampa, I run this meetup, not the Android one…

…I have an app in the App Store, but nothing in Google Play, and most of my recent mobile development articles are about iOS and Swift, not Android and Java. Plus, while I have an Android Phone — a Moto G4 — my primary phone is an iPhone 6S.

So why would I join the Android team, and on a site where fewer than 30 of its 1600+ tutorials are Android tutorials?

Because it’s a move towards a need and my discomfort.

Talk about moving towards your discomfort!

In January, RayWenderlich.com announced that they were looking for a co-maintainer for their open source project, Swift Algorithm Club. I applied for the position (you can see the text of the email I sent them here), but didn’t get it. However, as one of the top four applicants, they offered me the chance to submit an “audition” for some part of their site. The choices included:

• iOS team: writing tutorials or tech editing them
• MacOS team: writing tutorials or tech editing them
• Android team: writing tutorials or tech editing them
• Video team: making or editing their video courses or screencasts

The “smart” move would’ve been to audition for the iOS team. After all, iOS is their stock in trade, whether it’s on their site, books, videos, podcast, and conference, and the vast majority of their audience is there for the iOS content.

But they’re also expanding their scope to include Android programming, and out of over 1600 tutorials, they currently have fewer than 30 for Android. Android, as clunky and Windows-y as it feels to iOS users, runs on 2 billion monthly active devices as of May 2017 (that’s double Apple’s count in January 2016). It has deep penetration outside the affluent bubble of the First World and even within the First World’s less well-off corners (for one example, check out this article: The Accidental Classism and Unintentional Racism Of iOS Development for Children). And finally, the promotion of the Swift-like programming language Kotlin to first-class status as an Android development language with Android Studio 3.0 made it a more tempting platform for development.

The thought of writing Android tutorials is a little discomforting. I have more iOS programming practice than Android practice, but I’m counting on that discomfort to push me to be better. Comfort is nice, but comfortable people stagnate.

There’s also the matter of “the protegé effect” — I wanted to get better at Android programming, and the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Besides, as a seasoned tech evangelist, I’m an old hand at picking up new technologies and then teaching others how to use them.

This is from a couple of years ago — there are probably more people on the team now.

Ray tells me that they’ve got some great plans for Android on RayWenderlich.com. I’m looking forward to helping bring about those plans, and to the challenges that come with them. Follow me here — or on RayWenderlich.com — and see what happens!

In case you were wondering, Global Nerdy will remain an ongoing concern. I’ll still post articles here regularly; it’s just that I’ll also be posting Android programming tutorials on RayWenderlich.com, and getting paid for them too.

In case you were wondering, here’s a quick list of programming languages whose arrays start at 1 (made with the help of this Wikipedia page):

• ALGOL 68
• APL
• AWK
• CFML
• COBOL
• Fortran
• FoxPro
• Julia
• Lua
• Mathematica
• MATLAB
• PL/1
• RPG
• Sass
• Smalltalk
• Wolfram Language
• XPath/XQuery

Thanks to Anna Filina for the find!

Are you an exceptional community leader with technical, open source, and financial know-how? Are you looking for an interesting job where you’ll get the opportunity to help change the way financial services and other regulated industries collaborate? The Symphony Software Foundation is looking for its first Director of Community, and if you answered “yes” to these questions, this job might be for you!

The Symphony Software Foundation is a non-profit organization that is building a development ecosystem and open source community with the goal of fostering innovation in the world of financial services (or “FinServ”, as the cool kids like to call it). They’re behind the Symphony Platform, which enables enterprises and finance organizations to securely communicate, collaborate, and just get work done.

They’re looking for someone who can:

• Lead their community,
• own the global brand of the Symphony Software Foundation,
• attract new contributors to their efforts, and
• bring in new member organizations.

That person will be given the title of Director of Community, and would be part of their leadership team. The Director of Community will have the following responsibilities:

• Building and owning strategy,
• performing outreach and creating and delivering messaging for member organizations and the community-at-large,
• leading online programs and community-building field efforts to ensure a thriving global engagement for their community,
• building models, metrics of success, and growth strategies, all in the service of ensuring long-term success and growth of their
  community, and
• generally being the public face of the Symphony Software Foundation.

I’ve had some conversations with them about the position, and they tell me that they’re looking for someone located in New York City or the surrounding area, and who has extensive fintech/finserv experience. My disqualification could be your lucky break — if you’re the sort of person they’re looking for, email your application, along with your résumé or LinkedIn profile. Good luck!

Earlier today, President Trump (a two-word combination I thought I’d never have to write outside of speculation, satire, or “darkest timeline” science fiction) posted the following tweets, which have been rearranged to be read from top to bottom:

This makes about as much sense as a chicken forming an impenetrable Poultry Security Unit with Colonel Sanders. While the President said “I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion,” U.S. officials have said that hackers in the employ of the Russian government have penetrated various U.S. energy company networks, and intelligence chiefs including the Director of National Intelligence, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, NSA, and FBI have all testified that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

Even people from the President’s own party thought the idea was ridiculous:

• Lindsey Graham: “It’s not the dumbest idea I have ever heard, but it’s pretty close.”
• John McCain: “There has been no penalty. Vladimir Putin … got away with literally trying to change the outcome … of our election.”
• Marco Rubio: “Partnering with Putin on a ‘Cyber Security Unit’ is akin to partnering with [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad on a ‘Chemical Weapons Unit’.”

The President — who probably was more influenced by the backlash to this idea rather than expert advice — seems to have backpedalled on the “Cyber Security Unit” idea…

…which is both relieving and concerning at the same time. It’s relieving for obvious reasons, but also concerning since it’s a terrible idea to make such a bold statement and then go “just kidding!” half a day later.

Also worth reading: Marcy Wheeler’s article, On Trump’s Impenetrable Cyber Security Unit to Guard Election Hacking.