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):
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:
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:
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:
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.
Every week, I compile a list of events for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs in and around the Tampa Bay area. We’ve got a lot of events going on this week, and here they are!
Every week, I compile a list of events for developers, technologists, and tech entrepreneurs in and around the Tampa Bay area. We’ve got a lot of events going on this week, and here they are!
The image of Streisand’s Malibu house that led to the naming of the Streisand Effect.
Creative Commons photo. Click to see the source.
When the humorless real estate media company Zillow sent student Kate Wagner a cease-and-desist nastygram over her hilarious architecture critic site McMansion Hell, they probably didn’t realize that they would become the new textbook example of the Streisand Effect, and that they’d lose that battle before it even began.
If you’ve noticed how tacky large suburban house architecture has become in the past couple of decades, McMansion Hell is for you. It’s a blog that features hilarious critiques and takedowns of house design and decor that are promoted as good, but in fact are so bad that they’re BAD (a concept put forth in Paul Fussell’s excellent book — and these days, a timely one too: BAD, or the Dumbing of America.
McMansion Hell used photos of terrible large suburban houses from Zillow, which is fair use, but probably embarrassing for Zillow. That’s why they sent their nastygram, in an attempt to scare Kate into shutting down her site:
Oddly enough, Zillow didn’t even own those photos, which made their claims even more bogus.
Thankfully, the EFF stepped in. Their lawyers talked to Zillow’s lawyers, and Zillow backed down, issuing these mealy-mouthed statements:
“We have decided not to pursue any legal action against Kate Wagner and McMansion Hell.We’ve had a lot of conversations about this, including with attorneys from the EFF, whose advocacy and work we respect. EFF has stated that McMansion Hell won’t use photos from Zillow moving forward. It was never our intent for McMansion Hell to shut down, or for this to appear as an attack on Kate’s freedom of expression. We acted out of an abundance of caution to protect our partners — the agents and brokers who entrust us to display photos of their clients’ homes.”
It may not have been meant to appear as an attack on Kate’s freedom of expression, but tell the truth, Zillow: it was most certainly your intent for McMansion Hell to shut down.
And now Zillow look like fools:
Remember, the Streisand Effect was the result of trying to suppress pictures of a mansion, which is pretty much what Zillow were trying to do for many more houses. We should call it the Zillow Effect now.
A couple of Saturdays ago, I helped out at the Tampa edition of Xamarin Dev Days, a full-day event where attendees found out more about Xamarin, Microsoft’s cross-platform mobile-and-more development tool. saw development demos, and participated in an afternoon workshop where they built their first Xamarin app.
If you missed the event, you haven’t missed the opportunity to learn! The presentations we gave were local versions of the official presentations, which you can check out below.
Xamarin comes built into Visual Studio, which you can get for free for either Windows or Mac. I did my demos on my Mac, while my fellow presenters did theirs on their Windows machines.
Introduction to Xamarin
My presentation at the recent Xamarin Dev Days event in Tampa was modeled after the official “Introduction to Xamarin” one, shown below. This demo walks you through the process of building an image search app with Xamarin for both Android and iOS the “native” way, where the solution has three distinct parts:
This is a “best of both worlds” approach, where you get the benefits of “write once, run on all your target platforms” with the application logic part of your app, and the “native look and feel” benefits of having Android- and iOS-specific UI code. The downside of the “native” approach is that familiarity with C# and the .NET framework isn’t enough; you have to also be familiar with the libraries and techniques used in Android and iOS programming.
Xamarin’s plugins provide a way to deal with platform-specific coding through abstraction. The demo above uses a couple of plugins to provide cross-platform functions to check for network connectivity and display alert boxes, tasks that you’d normally have to perform separately for Android and iOS.
You may also find these videos useful:
Intro to Xamarin for Visual Studio: Native iOS, Android, and Windows Apps in C#
Building Your First Android App with Xamarin for Visual Studio
Building Your First Android App with Xamarin for Visual Studio
Russ Fustino gave the Xamarin.Forms presentation at Xamarin Dev Days. Xamarin.Forms provides a way to write a single application that runs on all the platforms that Xamarin targets by having you code to a single UI, which then gets rendered using each platform’s native UI elements and “look and feel”:
Here’s the presentation that was the basis for the one Russ gave:
You may also find these videos useful:
Building Your First Xamarin.Forms App with Xamarin for Visual Studio
Customizing Xamarin.Forms UI
Greg Leonardo gave his version of this presentation, in which you build you first cloud-connected app using both Xamarin and Azure:
You may also find this video useful:
Connected Mobile Apps with Microsoft Azure