Saturday, 26 January 2013

Weekly bean - 25/01/2013

On Friday - as usual - we met at Canary Wharf in a Café to talk about the IT world, news, experience, technologies. I know, I know, we should be more creative about Cafes: we're visiting the same Starbucks too often... but who wants to explore when it's freezing outside. :)

Weekly news

  • Apple Financial Report
  • Google Financial Report
    • interesting that despite the huge effort to push Google Play it is still almost invisible in the revenue stream
  • Apple vs. Samsung
  • iOS vs. Android
    • Is Samsung afraid of Google closing the Android ecosystem? Is Motorola going to be a real threat with rumors about the secret X-Phone and more frequent hints from Google
    • Will Samsung fork Android? Will it go with Tizen? How about the other manufacturers?
  • Nexus 4 - Marketing hack?
    • We have a theory about the reason why Nexus 4 is basically unavailable. Google's goal with the aggressive pricing is to make Android phones cheaper in general. However, it doesn't want to scare manufacturers - because let's be frank, the Nexus 4 is stealing marker share primarily from other Android manufacturers rather than Apple or Microsoft. So it deliberately keeps the availability of the phone low not allowing it to be a huge success and allowing the partners to react. In a few months, when newer phones comes to the marker Nexus 4 won't be that desirable anymore so they can "solve" the availability problem - it won't affect sales that much.
    • Balazs: However, there are certainly some appealing things in the reasoning above I really-really don't believe in conspiracies. Any plan that involves more than 5 people to stay silent it is doomed to fail. Also don't underestimate how slowly things can work in big companies - even if that company is Google. I suppose we'll never know the truth - I'm just glad I've got my Nexus 4 in time. ;)

Weekly topic

  • Test Driven Development
    • TDD and SOLID priciples
      • What is the level where the Single Responsibly should be applied.
      • Single Responsibility in Java and modern (Scala & Groovy) languages
    • Levels of different types of testing - unit, integration, functional, etc.
      • where are the boundaries of the different levels?
    • What are unit tests for?
      1. Testing methods (or functions) removing the private modifier and spy the object.
        • The SRP is on method/function level
        • The design will be nice even in the class
        • Very simple tests driving the developer to write shiny classes
        • No real support for refactoring checking
        • Easy test maintenance because there are only a very few test involved.
        • Difficult Pairing
        • etc....
      2. Testing only on Interface/Class level
        • SRP on class/interface/interface method level
        • The in-class design is not necessarily nice
        • Real refactoring support, after refactor the test must be still valid.
        • Difficult to maintain - lots of dependencies
        • The test are sometimes very complex because of the dependencies
        • Good Pairing
  • Community activity
    • Balazs will start writing Android blog posts :)
      • Balazs: I'm doing so many interesting things nowadays with Android that I'd like to share some of the stuff with everyone. Also it will serve as a reminder for me. :)
    • More meetups etc.
    • Monthly Google Hangouts
      • Hungarian - English (?)
      • Three part
        1. News - free
        2. Gadgets - free
        3. Topic - voted before the Hangout

Next bean

The next bean will take place on 1st February at Canary Wharf.
New session - Weekly flashcard
Every (second(?)) week a small topic must be elaborated what can be put on a flashcard and easy to learn.
  • Lamport's bakery algorithm
New session - Weekly quotation
Every (second(?)) week we will talk about a sentence/paragraph/page/etc. from a book. The quotation must relate to the IT world.
  • Waiting for proposal
Topics
  • Code conventions
  • Modern languages - Scala, Groovy
  • Test frameworks
    • ???
    • ScalaTest
  • SVN - Git merge experiences

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