Coding without IDE

I'm observing strange phenomena.
More and more developers when asked to write code on whiteboard or on computer without IDE with code assist is almost unable to do so.

I'm not saying that this is bad thing. It is strange for me, but I'm not able to say if it is bad.
In normal circumstances they have access to IDE which will help, so in theory they are able to use memory and brain power to code on higher level instead of remembering APIs.

My own way to train algorithms is to write code on whiteboard, and latter rewriting it to online judge system (which usually doesn't have code assist) and checking how it works, and if code does not compile it means that I made mistake and need to work on this.
But I'm not exactly sure if it is good way ;-)

From other side, if dev is able to write code on whiteboard he or she is usually better....

My working theory is that better short term memory and higher IQ means that someone may be better at programming, and problems with writing code on whiteboard are showing that given person may have some problems in those areas.


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Bloggerid cannot post images....

Title is for catching Google searches ;-)
But it also describes current behavior of Bloggeroid.

From last week it stoped to publish images. Main, and only cause is fact that Google disabled Picasa API which was used by Bloggeroid.

As far as I can say from looking into Google Photos API it cannot be used as alternative, because it doesn't let embed images in pages.
Or at least I didn't find any info how to do it.

As I can see increase of number of problems with publishing went up 18 times.
But now stabilised at 3.5 times more than before disabling Picasa API.

I'm not sure if I should do anything. I may disable app in Google Play Store, or remove possibility to publish images, or find some other solution.
From users perspective last one would be the best, but because I'm not posting too much pictures to any of my blogs (mostly because I prefer to blog from computer ;-)) user number 1 isn't pushing too much...

So for now I will not do anything.

In general this shows two problems:
1) Bloggeroid is a mean to publish posts to Blogger, so it is fully depend on another product, any disruption in this product means problems for app,
2) in case of free apps, or apps which were sold for price in given moment authors don't have too many incentives to keep apps running.

Lessons from it (for me):
1) do not build products depending on other products,
2) if you are using mobile app use app from owner of service,
3) abo is better than one time price.


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I hate 6 o'clock....

I never had New Year resolutions, but in 2019 I will try to wake up at 9 ;-)
Mainly because of this that by last 2 months or so I need to wake up at 6....

I hate this...
But it can be wven worse sometimes I need to wake up at 5:30, and at 6:11 I'm already on streets of San Francisco ;-)



So I promise myself, when I will be back in Poland I will try to wake up at 9 or latter, as often, as it is possible ;-)

One plus of waking up so early is that I'm in office before 7 (when I wake up at 5:30), or 7:20 when I wake up at 6:00.
Thanks to this I have about an hour of time without any interruptions.

But usually I prefer to have this in the evening ;-)


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Me in SF Moma...

Today I was in SF MOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)...
I'm living nearby so I though that this may be good idea to visit ;-)

And I'm proud to say that I don't understand anything ;-)

But I really liked Sol LeWitt creations, but I was trying to find probably too much in those.
I spend about 10 minutes in room with his Wall Drawing 273 and I still didn't grasp rules...
Because for me some of his works seems like some kind of puzzle ;-)

I saw Mark Rothko art and I don't get it ;-)
But thats cool that it is presented and some people are able to read it :-)

Here things I liked the most :-)

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Happy Darwin's Day!

Wind down is cool :-)

On my phones I have already Android 9, and Digital Wellbeing installed.


And I really like Well down feature.
You can see its effects on picture below:

Between 23:00, and 7:00 my screen display everything in grayscale :-)

Assumption behind this is that in such case screen is not so interesting, so you are not drawn so much to it when you should prepare to sleep, or sleep.
Additionally it make most of apps simply ugly, and it is a hope that you will avoid those apps ;-)

As far as now I like it :-)


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Yeah!
Assuming everything will go well I will go to event "Sam Harris & Yuval Noah Harari - Understanding The Present" in San Francisco in Masonic :-)

I love Yuval Noah Harari books - "Sapiens" and "Homo Deus", I love Sam Harris podcast (to be honest I didn't read any of his books, I started Free Will, and listened to Waking Up).
And this event is near premier of newest book of Yuval Noah Harari :-)

So it should be interesting ;-)


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Programmers love to over complicate...

Did you notice that programming use to be easier?
10 or 20 years ago you were spending more time writing code than now?

It is true for me.

10 years ago I was coding at work in Java and JavaScript. We were using MyEclipse and SVN without branches.

My day was something like this:
- update sources from SVN on trunk,
- look for info about stories,
- code:
  - write code,
  - run code,
  - update sources from SVN on trunk,
  - commit code if it was ready in given part,
- update sources from SVN on trunk,
- commit code (still if it was ready)

This was easy.
We had in each moment almost the most current source version on our machines.
We didn't have any CI tooling, but each time you updated and tried to build, and something was failing you were sharing with this and was trying to fix problem.
Without special monitors showing CI results.

Each week we had manual weekly build (written in ANT!), and QAs were testing this version.

It was working.
It was fast.
It was stable.


How it looks usually now?

You are coding with Java and JavaScript + ReactJS + Webpack + Gradle/Maven + Nexus + whatever else + GIT/HG with tons of branches.

Your day looks something like this:
- update from master (or current release master),
- resolve conflicts,
- commit,
- test on your branch (but it may take too much time),
- push to your branch,
- wait for tests,
- in case of failing investigate,
- look for info about stories,
- code,
   - write code,
   - wait till it compile,
   - run code and some tests,
   - commit code
   - push code,
   - wait for tests,
   - look why some UI tests are failing,
   - run those tests again,
   - and again,
- create pull request,
- notice that in the meantime somebody else commited to master code he or she was cooking by last 5 days on own branch,
- merge,
- commit,
- squash commits (because somebody will complain that you have multiple commits),
- push,
- LINT or PMD or Sonar complaining,
- yeah, not in your code, but you needed to change some legacy code in class with 6 kLOCs....,
- hack Lint/PMD/Sonar,
- commit,
- wait for tests,
- CI is slow,
- create ticket for restarting CI,
- you need to stop because you have one of Scrum meetings,
- CI works again!!!!,
- tests are failing,
- again UX tests

I may little exaggerate, but from my perspective it too often looks like this (in many companies).

It seems that developers want to make things more complicated.
Or maybe it works in this way that some people have good ideas and intentions,  but those latter are half baked, or introduced only because...

In several companies I saw problem with Maven.
Maven was in HQ and in other sites it was too slow.
So it was always decision, big managerial action "we are doing our own Maven repo which will sync-up with master in HQ!".
This was done.
After some short time people started to realize that they don't see most recent SNAPSHOTs, but after tinkering with /etc/hosts and making repo name resolving to IP of this Maven repo in HQ everything was starting to work.
From this time, in 1st or 2nd day each of newly employed was instructed to do changes in /etc/hosts....

Why? Because everyone is able to read on StackOverflow or something similar about setuping copies of Maven, but configuration is not so trivial....

(I'm still amazed that in one of companies they were extensively using ActiveMQ, and tried even to configure backups... but after trying they realized that it was much more complicated to configure and maintain so they simply killed backup ActiveMQ server without even changing apps configuration....)

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