I apologize for the lack of posts lately, a lot of things have been going on that kept me from blogging. I have been following the CS101 course on Udacity, and it’s been great so far. It teaches the fundamentals of computer science using Python, my favorite language. I’m three weeks into the course, and I can say without a […]
CS101 with Udacity
My app on the Android market
Months ago, I published a small app on the Android market, it’s called “Height Converter”. What the app does is that it takes a length, in metric units, and converts it to imperial, and vice versa. It works on any device running Android 1.6 and up. I have only tested it on 1.6, 2.2 and 2.3, but it should work […]
OAuth
Recently, I started writing a twitter app for Android, nothing big, just something to practice making apps with. That requires some knowledge with OAuth, which twitter, among other websites, uses for authentication. What differentiates OAuth from the regular path of authentication – using a username and a password – is that the app does not have access to your login […]
Android app development
Sorry for the long hiatus, but I was really focused on Android these past couple of months, so I had nothing useful to write about. I do now, so here it is. I started with the Android developers website. While it’s really good, and you’ll still spend a lot of time reading the content there, it’s not really beginner-friendly. The […]
Programmer Competency Matrix
I’ve stumbled upon this page a few months ago, and I really liked it. I’ll admit that it’s not the only measure of how competent a programmer really is, but it provides some good advice on how to get better at learning different aspects of software development. It measures a programmer based on his familiarity with computer science concepts, software […]
Learning Python
I recently started learning Python again, as I’ve had interest in it in the past, but stopped for some reason I don’t really remember. I don’t follow a single source, I make use of videos, books, and random googling for answers. I was following the MIT course I mentioned in an earlier post, Google’s Python class, and two books, “A […]
Reading "The Pragmatic Programmer"
I’m currently reading this book And it’s been very good so far, it has a lot of good advice for working programmers. It’s not suited for beginners who want to learn a programming language, but it has advice on programming philosophy, and how to handle some situations programmers usually face in the workplace. It’s not very large (352 pages), which […]
Watched an MIT lecture
I watched This lecture and it has been very informative. I learned the difference between Static and Dynamic typing, as well as the difference between strong and weak type checking. Static typing states that once a variable has been given a type, it cannot be changed until it goes out of scope. Dynamic typing is the exact opposite of that, […]
I passed the exam!
I just took SCJP – or OCPJP if you prefer – earlier today and I scored 70%! It took me about an hour and a half to finish, about half the allowed time. I was going to go over my answers once more, but I just couldn’t resist the temptation of finishing early, specially that I was confident in most […]
Hello, World! in Java without main()
While I was reading the SCJP book, I came across the concept of initialization blocks, or init blocks for short. Those blocks of code get executed before any method code is executed. One kind of these blocks is static init blocks, those get executed immediately after the super constructor has finished execution. This made me think, “I could output text […]