Category: Uncategorized

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.

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:

• Zillow ends its dumb legal crusade against McMansion Hell blogger
• An online housing giant picked a fight with a one-woman blog. And lost.
• Zillow and McMansion Hell bury the hatchet after nastygram rouses internet’s ire

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.