I’m definitely getting back into Android development, I’m remembering that feeling of ‘Surely this should be easier than this!’. All I wanted to do was to schedule a local notification which behaved similarly to a push notification pop-up. That is, as well as showing the small icon in the status bar I wanted it to pop up on screen to notify the end-user. All seems fairly easily, I found this code for how to schedule . . .
A recent discussion at work made me realise that over the past few years learning Android development I’ve managed to build a short but very useful list of links for starting out. Not a really detailed post this time around, but hopefully these links help at least one person, let me know! Development environment: We started out using Eclipse, but now feel that there is only one IDE to learn, Android Studio 2.x How to . . .
I can still remember my first phone interview for a job. I had no idea what to expect so really wasn’t looking forward to it, but it can’t have gone too badly because I got the job. Now that I’ve been lucky enough to progress in my career to positions where I’m conducting the other side of the phone interview I’ve been quite surprised how little it takes to stand out from the crowd: 1. . . .
Sometimes, no matter how much you prepare, you’re just going to have a bad interview! I just wish someone had given me that nugget of advice when I was starting out. If you’re into fitness, as you’re probably painfully aware, some days you can be really looking forward to a run/swim/workout. But when you start you just can’t get into it! In these situations, people generally have no problem classing it as an off day . . .
In my previous articles I have written about are you investing in your own career and starting out in software development. But there is another important question, is your company investing in you and your career? In my current role, I am lucky to work for a great company that values its teams/employees and have been able to implement/roll out the following for my development and test teams: For the development team, individual PluralSight subscriptions. . . .
If you’re trying to begin your career in software development it might feel like all the positions you see are asking for previous experience and there are few opportunities to gain that required experience. In my opinion, as a relatively new industry, it feels like we’re currently going through some growing pains. Companies are struggling to find suitability qualified mid/senior developers but very few organisations have a plan in place to help train the juniors . . .
As developers we are in an interesting, potentially unique, industry where the bar for entry is extremely low. A large proportion of the population have access to computers / internet and many of the popular languages / IDE’s are free. In fact you can start your development career with just a browser and notepad/textedit, learning HTML/CSS and Javascript and extending to Node/Angular and many other JS frameworks. This low bar of entry continues throughout the . . .
Today we were updating our Apple push notification certificate as it was due to expire (why do they only last a year). We’ve done this many times before and know the process well; but for some reason, today after deploying the updated certificate every call to create the PushSharp instance returned the following error: The specified network password is not correct We went through the standard process of repeating the creation/deployment of the certificate, then . . .
After learning both iOS and Android development about 18 months ago we’ve not really had many enhancements needed in our mobile applications, with any changes just needing our existing knowledge. In reality, this has probably meant my knowledge has actually decayed; which is a shame given the challenge of initially learning mobile development we went through. To try and remedy this; as a side project, I’m looking to rebuild our existing application from scratch with . . .
I’ve recently been lucky enough to get a Surface 2 Pro to play with – the top of the range 8GB RAM, 256GB storage version. I’d been looking at the Surface 2 for a while, wanting to see what Windows 8 is like on a small touch screen device – I still think the surface could go either way, it’s not getting the traction of other mobile devices/platforms and Windows 8 is certainly not without . . .