Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

How to build Android application and keep your sanity

Today is is a big day and I am celebrating. I am celebrating together with my teammates the release of the ImpreStyle Color application for Android, version 1.0.0, demo. It took all four of us to working hard over a much longer period of time than anyone would be willing to admit, but we pulled through.

While there are many aspects, details, and lessons that we’ve learned during this period, I’d like to focus on the ones that are mostly related to the actual Android application development and publishing. I share this for the next time I decide jump into something like that, as well as for anyone else who considers such a possibility.

And before you run away scared, let me tell you this. It is possible. And the fact that we’ve accomplished it proves it once again. As 500,000+ other Android applications currently available on the Android Market.

Continue reading How to build Android application and keep your sanity

GitHub Enterprise announced

GitHub – the place to host and manage your source code – announced the release of GitHub Enterprise. GitHub Enterprise is a self-hosted version of GitHub. What I find the most interesting is the pricing.

GitHub Enterprise is priced at $5,000 per 20 users, per year. It comes with everything you need in one tidy package: code browsing, code review, issue tracking, wikis. No extra software to buy, no extra software to install, no extra software to manage.

The target is not on the disk space (understandable, with your own severs) or private repositories, but on the number of developers. $5,000 per 20 developers per year is $250 per developer per year, or about $20 per developer per month. That’s not too much, especially when compared with the salaries paid to the same developers each month. A fraction of the salary.

So, not only GitHub Enterprise is an excellent option for those companies that cannot use third-party hosting for source code, but it is also a Christmas present for those companies that work on a lot of projects. With private repositories, the price of a regular GitHub organizational subscription can go up pretty fast. With GitHub Enterprise you’d be able to have everything in-house for a tiny fee, compared.

It’ll be interesting to see how well this business will go for GitHub. It sounds viable to me. Convenient and not too expensive. With easy OVF-based installation, that would work on many virtual machines (VMware, VirtualBox, etc), with additional features for enterprise integration (LDAP!), I don’t see why not.

Zed Shaw : Why I GPL

Zed Shaw, the guy behind a lot of code and several books, shares his thoughts on why he is now switching from simpler, more permissive licenses like BSD and MIT, to GPL. Most of the Linux people and GPL fans would easily guess the reasons, since they’ve popped up in pretty much every license related flame war. But it’s nice to hear from someone who did actually experience the theory, and who really knows what he is talking about.

I’ll always be an open source developer, but quite frankly, we’re dying off because the companies who use our software do not give back. The irony of the situation is that, in order to improve my motivation to do open source, I have to charge for it.

I obviously won’t ever charge an open source project, since they are honoring the unwritten contract: If I give, you give.

But the days of quick-flip corporations and ingrate programmers making money on my software are over. My new motto is:

Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.

If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you. If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.

Welcome to the GPL camp, Zed.

The important field

This xkcd comic strip nails one of the most frequent problems with modern web interfaces. Web forms will ask you confirm and re-confirm anything and everything, but the actual important information that is easy to make a mistake with. The rule of thumb here is, of course, only ask to confirm the password fields, because the data in them is not visible, so it does make sense to check that the user actually typed in what he thinks he typed in. Asking to enter email address once again is stupid, because, email address is usually displayed in a visible field, because email address is a frequently used string, which most people type automatically, and because the user won’t bother with re-typing but will just copy-and-paste from a previous field.

Think Like a Git

Being a sysadmin and web developer I read plenty of technical documentation – manuals, tutorials, howtos, and so on and so forth. Most of it is usually very dry and boring. Unless, of course, we are talking about Open Source Software. That area is often very human, with plenty of humor and an excellent examples.

Today I came across a very nice website which explains how Git – the de facto version control system in Open Source community – works. The site is called Think Like a Git. Very well structure, with simple, easy to understand language, and excellent navigation.

I’d also like to mention the design separately. So often do technical people end up using generic templates that aren’t very well suited for longer texts, quotes, and code snippets. So often do designers overdo things making documentation nice looking, but impossible to read. Think Like a Git is not like that. It’s beautiful, yet clean, fresh, and simple. My eyes are actually resting while I flip through the pages. Nothing annoys or disrupts my attention. It’s all about Git. Bravo!