Lagrosh

In SF right now, and I don't get why people want to move here. You walk 2 blocks from the nicest coffee in the city to being chased by crackheads wanting your laptop. I guess it has something to do with the $150-180k/year, but still. The city has its beauty, the food is great, and the bay area in general and California is certainly amazing, but this city is really really strange. I think if I ever moved to the US it'd be to somewhere else in California (or NYC), not here.

I don't really understand why some people want to rush into new infrastructure & issues without properly looking at them and figuring out what works for us and what doesn't first. I mean, I'm all for moving to newer, better things, but moving to some beta thing that takes 2 months to do and then finding out that it doesn't work/do what we need would be a massive waste of time.

"Hey Mike, you're at WWDC. Yesterday they announced improvements to Bots & the new UI testing framework, along with Swift improvements!" "Yes?" "When are you going to finally use Bots for everything? When are you going to move all the tests to the new system? And why are we not writing everything now in Swift?" "We're not using Bots, it's not fully featured enough for our build requirements. We'd potentially eventually switch to using it as just one part of our build process, but it doesn't really fit with pipelines. We'll investigate the test infrastructure, but it looks like it suffers from a load of the same problems as UIAutomation, so I'd be surprised if we move to it right now. Let's do a spike where we try a few tests first, then see what's missing/works/where to go from there before we rush into things. As for Swift, it still has problems interoperating with ObjC, so let's see what we can/can't do first, especially as using frameworks won't work on iOS7 (25% of our users) and that's the best way to get things to work. Also, again, we need to spike it and see which tools exist/are missing and how we'd advise it for the future before we rush into things." "Mike you always hate on Apple & never want us to use anything they do. With you as a tech lead we'll never move into the future." - Me & My boss

Even with proguard? Holy shit what are you guys using.

I think that the tool will crash when reading a post written by Loz.

Hah. Ours is actually a bit better, but still even 2 things are hard. `Hard skills. What did they do well?`. `Hard skills. What could they improve?`. `Soft skills. What did they do well?`. `Soft skills. What could they improve?`.

Welcome to Software. Any company that uses 'architects' is doomed. At least your company is removing things from scope when the project is struggling. Most play the 'work harder' strategy which means 'write shittier code and don't automated-test or manual-test anything', which leads to systems in a far worse state than the original one. Also, most companies do go with the 'rebuild a new system' approach, which is generally flawed (not always, but usually). Disclaimer: I don't work for a company like that anymore thank the Lords (not the Commons).

On a similar note, my penis is bigger than both of yours. FACT

Free tops with slogans are for pyjamas/gym clothing. Every time I go to a conference I acquire a new incentive to go to the gym regularly.

Also just got a promotion and raise which is pretty cool. I feel I can't add things to this thread nowadays as my company is for the most part not retarded (not to say that retarded things don't happen mind). Also, that we have a technical path as well as a management path is great because I don't have to become a manager to make technical decisions & move up the ladder.

That's true in many countries as well. Been looking into being a nomadic contractor a bit recently (travelling country to country without being a tax resident and working for us/german/british countries). If you contract in Spain you pay similar to UK (somewhere around 43%), unless you pay a lawyer there to set up a company you belong to, where you get a reduction (to about 25-30%). That's not saying it's a good thing though. It's all a strange mire of shite.

The issue with austerity for reducing the deficit is that it's usually at the cost of growth. It's a damn Heisenbug. Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens. Hopefully we'll get some sort of reform, but it's extremely unlikely. Also, please don't end up with a referendum on EU. I've seen Visas in action for many different people visiting many different countries and every one of them is a retarded system. I don't want to have to choose between a retarded visa policy & becoming German.

Yes. Otherwise you end up with a 2 party system. The lib-dem votes right now just mean that the tories will continue to get the most votes. What I mean with the grand coalition, is that the 2 biggest parties don't usually end up in the coalition. The coalitions end up being based upon similarities of policies, not on having enough 'seats' in an arbitrary way. You end up with left + left + left or right + right or whatever as a result. Overall the parliament ends up representing the people. I think that a government should represent the people, and that's all. I think if a party gets 40% of the votes, attempts to implement their policies, and the other 60% disagree with the policy they try to push through, then it shouldn't get pushed through.

The 'Grand Coalition' is something that doesn't happen often, but sometimes it does yes. I don't think it's a big deal if this is 'the will of the people'. I think you're thinking of it the wrong way though. If it was proportional representation, then this wouldn't happen often. The last general election we'd have had lib dem + labour for example, which would have been far more representative of the voting.

Instead we have the House of Lords. A much more democratic system (though, strangely, one that sometimes vetos thoroughly retarded rulings inflicted on them by the Commons). As for proportional representation, it works totally fine in Germany, and other places (an example is that the left and the green parties are involved in the process more and more, and a few of the more crazy racists also get laughed at in public). I firmly believe that the UK system means if you're in an area that's dominated by a party you don't want, you may as well not bother turning up (one of the many reasons why people don't). I do agree that the UK system is based on voting for your local MP, except that it's retarded, and people don't do that (because we're not in a federal system, so the local MP doesn't do local things they just 'represent' you at a higher level). I like the idea of proportional representation, because if 2% of the UK is racist, then 2% of the the seats should be sat on by racists, and so on. The only reasonable way I can see against it, other than 'it's quite a lot of change and may be hard' is that you'll never get a party that can properly get its policies through. Having said that, I think if 60% of the UK voted against the party, maybe it shouldn't? I think it'll never happen though, as why would ANY elected larger party want to lose most of its power and potentially rock the boat? I hope the UK gets a failed minority govt. for this exact reason.

Todd: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ramesh-patel/growth-cameron-austerity_b_2007552.html It's not about 'Deficit isn't bad'. It's more about how the claims that Labour caused it, and that Tories are fixing it, is bollocks. Also, the NHS changes certainly seem like a huge mess and retarded to me. Gone from a cheaper UK system to a more German system. This isn't good. Having said that, I'm not voting as I don't think it's reasonable given I live elsewhere. Please don't leave the EU though, that would be not only annoying for me, but also massively retarded given the amount of trade between the rest of Europe & the UK. Everyone involved will lose there.

Yeah. And gross salary, which sucks here . I realised a year or so back it was easier to not reply to the form though. The default for not telling them is not that bad, so it was easier that way.

Damn. I'll be finished paying it.

We're already clubbing together enough money.

I disagree about app rewrites generally and there's a lot of literature about why this is a bad approach. Everyone loves greenfield projects, but usually you still end up with the same mess as before but with a different set of names & anti-patterns. Especially as bad codebases are more a byproduct of bad engineering practices, such as not constant-refactoring. Not testing, etc. If you work off of changes in branches that never last more than a day. State that pair-programming allows work directly on master (with feature switches when developing multiple features simultaneously). When not make it PR/code review policy. Modularise your codebase. Think about what can be POJ and what needs to be Android only. Think about layers (presentation/service/data/network/etc.). Usually you can come up with small step-by-step changes that gradually improve the lives of everyone involved.

Do you guys not use @Nullable @NotNull annotations & IntelliJ? https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/documentation/howto.html Everyone makes mistakes but that shit will minimise it. Having said that, it won't stop your 'get(0)' from needing checking. Also, is that not worthy of its own method? Given that it probably has a meaning beyond 'the first offer'. And then again, if it's in a test it's valid, because unit tests should always be simple and deterministic. So yeah, context needed.

On a similar note. A colleague and I will be travelling to London next weekend on 14th (morning) until 15th (evening) where we travel by train to Leicester to attend NSConference. On 18th (evening) we'll be travelling back down to London and then staying until 22nd (evening) when flying back to Berlin. Anyone fancy some food and drinks in London somewhere on the Thursday (19th) or such?

That article certainly explains why it's blue-black. Fair enough.

I agree it's very blatantly blue with gold trim. Looked before you posted in new tab first, then on this site. Both still obvious to me. Strange.

When we recruit people here we usually just look at their LinkedIn and use it as a basis for the interview. The recruiter is the one who looks at it. The CV is to kick off the simplest part of the interview where we talk about previous problems & whatnot. It really is only to get the interview. After that we assess you without referring to it again.