Tag: change

What do you read for technical news?

It was just a few years ago that I regularly scanned a list of mainstream developer and IT rags on a weekly basis: ComputerWorld, Visual Studio Magazine, SD Times, JDJ, and the list goes. Then one day early last year the thought hit me and I was a bit stunned to realize that I’d stopped reading online magazines. The vast majority of my technical info was now coming from blogs, online help docs and dizzying amount of internet searches. So, what happened? I have some theories that I’ve been thinking over the last year, but I can’t really nail down anything for certain. So, it’s most likely a combination of these five concepts below.

Rapid Change. My first thought is that technology has been changing so rapidly that simply digesting the changes and understanding them takes a huge chunk of time. Huge. I’ve blogged about this a number of times. This trend cuts across the entire tech industry. The upside is that innovation happens overnight and fixes as well as new features come out quickly. The downside is it’s harder for everyone to stay on top of all the changes across updates to features, libraries, SDKs, smartphone operating systems and browsers.

Super busy. My second thought is:  in addition to staying on top the über release cycle of web and mobile technologies, I’ve been so busy with project work that I simply had to narrow the scope of what I was reading. It’s a balancing act and there’s only so much time in the day. Superfluous information seemed to just slow me down, or worse it felt like a distraction from the day’s objectives. And in today’s online environment there is such a huge flow of information. So, there has to be a way or mechanism for focusing and filtering the fire hose of inbound data.

Irrelevant Info. My third thought is that every time I try to go back and read mainstream rags that I find myself sifting through a bunch of stuff that isn’t relevant to my immediate or near-term needs. Like I mentioned above, a good portion of it often seemed to be superfluous. Don’t get me wrong: online magazines offer well written and well thought out information. But, I felt the extra information, or perhaps even information overload in some cases, slowed me down. If it takes time to sift through article after article looking for a specific topic, my inclination is to go back out to a search engine and narrow down my search parameters.

Online Search Engines. Search engines have done an excellent job of (rapidly) indexing online technical content. I don’t need to mention them by name because you know all the players. At work we’ve often joked about a pattern we call “coding by search engine.” The pattern goes something like this:  copy a class name or error message, paste it into the search bar and then skim through the results. If you have to go more than one page deep in the search results then stop and redo the search. Mostly gone are the days of sifting through reams of paper documentation or digging around in some esoteric corner of a vendors website. I don’t think most customers will stand for that anymore. I think more information is instantaneously available at our fingertips now than any other time in history. It is astonishing, really.

Forums. My final thought is the voice of the developer community has never been more important. Online forums, such as Stack Overflow, have become to be perceived as definitive sources on technical questions of all kinds and about all different sorts of programming languages. I’ve been in many conversations where, right or wrong, someone interjected with a comment about something learned on Stack Overflow, or similar sites. These sites are well indexed by search engines, the community can vote answers up or down, and many brilliant and knowledgeable players contribute their knowledge. These are excellent, speed-of-light resources that are freely available.

So, there you have it. This is my two cents of what I’m reading these days and why I think I changed what I read. Leave a comment or email me about how you get your technical info injection. I’m really curious to hear your experience.

* Clip art courtesy of Microsoft Office 2007.

The pace of technological change: Do Android’s really dream of electric sheep?*

Google’s Android v1.5 (Rev 1) was released in April 2009. In 2010, there were three major dot-X releases of the 2.x platform: v2.1, v2.3 and finally v2.3 in December 2010. According to Gartner in a February 2011 report, Android grew from 3.9% of the worldwide smartphone market, to almost 23% in the span of one year, from 2009 to 2010. That’s roughly 888% growth.

As a developer, I’m awed by the pace of change and the rate of adoption. I like being on the cutting, and now the consumer competition is furious for mindshare, and the mad push is on for developers to build applications that take advantage of the latest software and hardware technology. It’s a developers dream. Cool new toys, ever better functionality and hardware with new releases just six months away!

And while I like to simply pay attention to the technology and ignore everything else, I’ve been asked a number of questions recently by other developers who work in a variety of industries from around the world, and to which I have no answer. If you read this please share your thoughts:

  • How do we plan software development cycles around mobile phone system(s) that change dramatically every six months? We are talking about both hardware and software.
  • If I build an application now, will it still work on the next generation of hardware which will come out in one year or less?
  • Will applications that were built on the latest mobile OS still be backward compatible in one year?

What’s interesting is we have been faced with similar questions before when Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and even HTML 5 were announced. And, yes, they are changing the way we build applications and to a large extent changing what our users expect to experience. However, internet browsers have been around for a while, web development technologies in general aren’t exactly new, and all computers these days come with a pre-installed browser. But, all the sudden we could more quickly develop beautiful applications in days and weeks that used to take many months, or years. And, it’s been an eye-opener as far as our surfing experiences go.

Many commercial applications have never been more powerful with built-in charting and dynamic access to data with very graceful interfaces. These applications opened our eyes to what’s possible by letting us build applications independent of the machine they ran on. And, in a sense it was liberating. The idea of building one version of the software and then deploying it across many machines and devices became true. I, for one, touted that I no longer had to worry about esoteric items such as pointers and garbage collection. The browser took care of all that for the most part, even though it still had a few issues.

Maybe I celebrated too soon. What’s changing now is the pace of adoption which is in the form device that fits in your hand, and you can carry with you anywhere even when you hike, that accesses the internet, and that has similar functionality to a desktop/laptop system. Smart phone access is changing how people communicate: live, work and play. It’s becoming the primary connection to the internet in many parts of the world. It’s becoming a primary work tool while on the road.

We, as developers, are at the heart of this change and with a front row seat.

Our use cases are changing to accommodate people accessing our applications while they are standing in line ordering their morning coffee. We’re back to looking at native applications which don’t run in the browser and are subject to all sorts of interesting limitations and challenges. We are back to adapting code to different devices, limited battery life, testy internet connections, varying processor power, and dealing again with problems related to device drivers.

It’s funny that I caught myself thinking how nice it would be to have a software framework that would let me abstract away all these pesty problems that low-level code development entails: a sort of Flash Player environment for low-level code on a mobile phone. I mused about how easy it was to use FlashBuilder “Burrito” to convert my Adobe Flex applications directly to Android without having to deal with Java code (which works very nicely by the way). Or, do I build a rich functionality web app?

But, you know, I chuckled as soon as I had a requirement that asked for closer access to the smart phone hardware and operating system: things related to power management, and getting more information from the device GPS. Do I wait until the functionality I need is built into an abstraction library…or do I build a native application today? Which applications do I build for the web, and which application should be native?

These are all business question that many of you will also face. I’m certain it’s being asked thousands of times around the world. And ultimately, whatever the answer is… it will change the way we all do business.

*I pay full respect to Philip K. Dick’s 1968 science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, that served as the primary motivator for the movie Blade Runner which was first released in 1982.