Motivos Inversos

My Galaxy Nexus just arrived, and I can’t tell it apart from my iPhone 4S

Love Dan Lyon's sarcasm regarding the whole controversy of Samsung ripping off Apple's designs. I hope you can guess I don't think they are (neither does Dan).

Apparently, Google starts focusing on Android design

Android Design

The website is very well designed and contains lot of useful guidelines to design Android apps. Together with the inclusion of the Holo theme in all Android handsets, this is another step in the right direction.

Come on Google, keep them coming.

If you have the urge to add complexity, just go home early

I've talked about this before (link in Spanish). A one-sentence resume of the entire post: You ain't gonna need it. Want more about the topic? Google it.

Anyway, I just read "How (not) to write Factorial in Java" by Bill Woody (late to the party, the post is one year old), and despite I'm not sure how he goes from a factorial function implementation to the conclusion of his article, I really love the final sentences, so I'm copying them here and bolding some words here and there to make them resonate even more:

The biggest complaint I have with many Java developers is that they develop a whole bunch of really bad habits. Specifications are unclear, or they think someday the code may need to be extended into a different direction. So they write a whole bunch of overblown architectural nonsense, sight unseen, thinking that the additional crap someday will help out and make things easier.

(...) Because a year from now they wade through all this excess baggage written at a time when they thought they understood the domain of the problem (but clearly didn't), instead of having simple code (...) that they can revise as needed, they wind up with the most over-engineered pile of nonsense that no-one can possibly understand.

So please, do us all a favor: if you have the urge to add complexity because "someday we'll need it, I just know it!", or because "it’s not sufficiently flexible enough" or "we need reusability in our code" or (God help us!) because it’s "cool" – just go home early. Watch some cartoons. Rent Inception on DVD.

And stop creating extra work for us in the future for no good reason.

You can sign my name next to these affirmations. They are not originally mine, but I agree 100% with them.

A case in favor of private variables and functions

I just read "A case against private variables and functions in JavaScript" by Miller Medeiros, and honestly I'm not sure what to think about it. I understand the reasons that made him change his mind, but I also think that encapsulation is one of the most important pillars of OOP.

In short, his point is to favor public variables and functions over private so anybody can jump in and hack his way into whatever he wants to do. Obviously, if I have a private member you can't change its value from the outside, so you will be screwed...

But that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

Marking a member variable or function "private" is a design decision as important as properly organizing your class hierarchy. You can't just go "all private until I need public". It's way more complicated than that. Mastering it requires experience and knowledge, and there's no a rule of thumb to do it.

Going the other way around (fuck it, let's make everything public!) it's even worse. Giving everybody control over the internal state of a class is the worst decision we can make (no, we are not grown ups). I've been around for enough time to know what happens when developers start messing with the values of public fields. Suddenly things stop working and nobody can figure out why.

Resuming, you should pay special attention to what you make public on your classes: if you want other developers to overwrite the behavior of your functions, then fine, make them public. If something is interesting only for your class, then make it private. Never ever sacrifice encapsulation because of what could happen tomorrow.

As a bonus, IMO variables should never be public. If you want to grant access to the value of a variable outside your class, create a function to access it.

I know what Miller is doing in his code, and I think he is doing it perfectly fine. Problem is that he might was a little bit bold in some paragraphs of his post. Or maybe I freaked out when I read the title. Who knows.

Blogger, I appreciate your changes but that's not what I asked for

What a coincidence: I was talking about it yesterday and a few hours later Google posted "Engage with your readers through threaded commenting" on their Blogger blog.

Thanks Google for moving forward, but I think you are using the wrong road.

Where is Google+ in all this? Seems confusing to me that you are throwing G+ everywhere in your products, and going forward with a "custom-made" commenting system for Blogger. Something doesn't add up here.

I hope you have strong reasons for doing this. It took you 5+ years to revamp comments on Blogger, so I basically lost all my hopes in seeing G+ taking over here.

But again, thank you for doing something.

Beautiful, yes. But wake me up when it takes over the iPadJan 11, 2012

Asus Transformer Prime

They say is the best Android tablet out there. Specs blow the iPad out of the water, but we all know it's not about specs anymore. At the same price point, I'm sorry, but they are not going to make a dent on Cupertino's sales.

Like Gizmodo says: you should buy this if you know you don't want and iPad. Wondering how many people really don't like the iPad.

Comments are off on the blog, but you can try in Google+

Yes, I disabled the comments on the blog for various reasons:

1. I had to deal with spam. Too much spam. Freaking tedious hours wasted removing spam.
2. Maybe less than one percent of you read the comments anyway.
3. Comments get in the way of the article itself. They should be in a separate page/place to avoid drawing the attention from the real content.
4. Too many trolls logged in as "anonymous" saying not-nice things about me and my family.
5. It doesn't matter what you do, they just look ugly on the page.

Comments will be coming back at some point when Google+ takes over (you can read this post here of me asking Blogger for some deeper integration with Google+), but for now they will stay off.

However, that doesn't mean that you can't communicate with me regarding one post. Every single one of these posts is shared on Google+, so you can add a comment there and I will answer as always. There is a catch though; you have to follow my Google+ profile in order to find the posts :(

Hope this doesn't bother too many people.

Logging in the cloud

Take a look to this site: Loggly.

Great idea and very useful. I've been thinking about this for a while, and today a college brought up this startup to the conversation while talking precisely about doing something like this for our own applications.

Can't wait to try it and see how it goes.

Anyway, I think every developer with a real application out there should think about using something like Loggly. Or maybe create his own personal version. Keeping logs of our apps is really really important.

Is SQL Server installed on your phone? No shit!

A friend of mine defending his now dead Windows Mobile piece of crap phone: "... And also, it has SQL Server installed on it!".

No shit! Seriously? I'm so jealous right now! I've been dying to have a phone with SQL Server on it. It's so important for me being able to create databases and install them on my phone, and access them remotely, and run some queries, and create stored procedures... because it supports stored procedures, right? What about triggers, views, and functions? Wow!

Enough sarcasm.

Now you wonder why Windows Mobile never took off in the first place. I hope you don't have this much unnecessary freedom with the current version of Windows Phone.

P.S. Somebody told me that Windows Phone has a Windows Registry! You know, that "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/whatever" key collection. After that, why not to port Visual Studio and make it run there?