Developer news roundup: Android, iOS/Swift, and regrets and mistakes

Android

Click the screenshot to see it at full size.

• Android Studio 2.0 is out of beta and in general release! Among the goodies in this version are:
  • a much faster, more fully-featured emulator,
  • faster builds with Instant Run
  • Cloud test lab integration to test your app on a wide variety of devices from within Android Studio
  • Better findability for your app in Google searches via app indexing code generation and test
  • GPU debugger preview for OpenGL-based development
  • IDE features from IntelliJ 15
• Smaller, faster Android apps with ReDex. Facebook uses ReDex, their in-house bytecode-optimizing tool, to make their apps faster and smaller, and they’re now open sourcing their tool and making it available for all Android developers. Here’s the link to the GutHub repo.
• Rumors that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android development. The Next Web says that they heard this from “sources”. Read the article, and follow it up with this one: 4 no-bull reasons why Swift on Android won’t come swiftly.
• Android Marshmallow (a.k.a. version 6.0, a.k.a. API 23) doubled from 2.3% to 4.6% over the month of March. I’m part of that statistic, as the update for my 2nd-gen Moto G came out during that time, and I installed it.

Regrets and mistakes, part one

This question appeared on Server Fault on Sunday:

I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).

How I can recover from a rm -rf / now in a timely manner?

Most of the answers were along the lines of: “If you’ve got backups, you’ll be fine. If you don’t, you’re about to go out of business.”

iOS and Swift

• If you read only one blog about Swift programming, make it Erica Sadun’s. She’s forgotten more about iOS development that I’ll ever learn. In a recent post, she tells us all about getting ready for the API pruning that’ll happen when Swift 3.0 — which is coming soon — is released.
• When to use an enum, and when to use a protocol. Be sure to read the whole thing, but the practical upshot is, if you’re trying to represent a finite number of cases or variants for a type, such as days of the week, shirt sizes, planets, and so on, an enum will work just fine. However, the more you’re trying to model different behaviors or add functionality for each case or variant, and especially if you expect to add more cases or variants, you’re probably better off going with a protocol or class.
• Here’s a good reason to avoid using class names in #selector.
• This one intrigued me, so I bookmarked it for my own reading later: Oscar Swanros explains how he deals with JSON in Swift.
• If you’re an experienced Swift developer and are willing to move to Cupertino, your dream job just opened up:
  

  We’re hiring on the Swift team. We don’t need wizards, rockstars, or ninjas, just experienced devs interested in compilers. Hit up @jopamer!

  — Joe Groff (@jckarter) April 11, 2016

Regrets and mistakes, part two

From My Biggest Regret as a Programmer:

I could go on and on but the key is that you can’t make changes in how people do things in a technical sense unless you have the ability, the authority and the opportunity. Once you make that call and assuming you find the right places to grow, the sky is really the limit.

When I was on TV (Computer Chronicles) in early 1987 showing our product Trapeze the other presenter was Mike Slade who was product manager of Excel. At the time young me thought him some random marketing weenie (young people can be pretty stupid). Yet he started all these companies later including ESPN, worked for Apple in various leadership roles, was a good friend of Steve Jobs and started his own VC firm.

And today I am still just a programmer. Who’s the weenie now? I doubt I will ever be able to really retire. Thankfully I am still good at delivery (I was recruited into my present job by a former manager who needed what he knew I can do) but still all I will be until I croak is what I am now.