Startup Happy Hour

I met Paul Urbanas at the startup happy hour last night, who created the game Parsec for the first computer I ever had, the TI-994a. That game came out in 82, way back when I was in second grade, and I played the hell out of it.

If you're in Dallas and haven't checked out the startup happy hour events at the infomart, you should definitely consider attending, you never know who you'll run into!

On the election and politics

I usually don't post about anything political, but what the hell, the election looms and I do have a few opinions.

The only thing I care about when it comes to this election and our candidates is the economy. If you chose your candidate based on any other issue, I think you should seriously reconsider your priorities. If the economy keeps plummeting towards disaster (and if things don't change it definitely will), you're not going to have much time left to protest in front of your local Walmart or an abortion clinic, you'll be too busy holding your place in line at the soup kitchen.

People need to wake up and start listening to the Austrian economists. They've been warning us for a long time now. Just listen to what Peter Schiff had to say back in 06.

The September Roundup

Okay, I admit, this post is at least a week late, but I've been so ridiculously busy that I just haven't had any time for blogging. As everyone knows by now, the first Android phone, the G1, will hit the shelves on October 22nd, so I've been working very hard to fix any outstanding issues that I can in our app, most of them are small, UI annoyances and such, but it's still work. The application is already polished nicely, but there's always more you can do.

The last week of September was exhausting, and I don't care to see the inside of an airport again anytime soon. T-Mobile put us up in the Le Parker Meridien, a fairly posh hotel not far from Central Park. WTF, that place is expensive. In the bar downstairs a draft beer will cost you $16, and don't be late checking out, or they'll hit you up with a $350 half-day charge. Not the kind of hotel I'd pick for myself, but I did appreciate the royal treatment that T-Mobile gave us.

This was my first time in Manhattan, and it felt like an alien world, so many people and structures scrunched up together. I can't imagine myself living there, I like my space. The UN was in session and the traffic was just absurd. As in, quickly roll down your window to fold in your side mirror so you don't scrape the car next to you kind of absurd.

The press conference itself was quite an event, I've never been a part of anything like it. They put our team on the very front row (the whole idea was to highlight us and the EcoRio guys as 3rd party developers leveraging Android's open platform model).



After the press conference itself, viewable here, I would have loved to get a five second introduction to Sergei and Larry, but no such luck! The press was herded downstairs, and we manned our kiosk giving demos and answering questions.

It was very interesting watching the press reactions to the G1. Some of these guys were all business. They would walk up to our kiosk and furiously study the device for several minutes without uttering a word. Others were much more friendly, asking questions, etc. I usually did fine until they brought out the cameras and then I would lose about 10 IQ points. Thankfully Alex and Rylan handled the video demos just fine.

We finally returned to Dallas very late Tuesday night. I managed to spend a little bit of time with my family, and then it was back to the airport. Google held a two day device readiness hackathon, the intent of which was to put a lot of the ADC 50 winners together in a room, and let us mix it up with the Google engineers and knock out difficult bugs/issues in our apps. It was an amazing amount of fun.

I had plenty of time to converse with a lot of the Google engineers that have been so helpful on the google Android groups, Justin, Megha Joshi, Diane Hackbod, Jason Chen, Dan Morrill, Dan Bornstein, and several others whose names I can't think of right now.

I also had the chance to hang out with a lot of the ADC winners, the Locale guys from MIT, Michael DeJadon (Safety Net), my friends Zach Hobbs and Amnon Sarig (TuneWiki), Anthony Stevens (Pocket Journey), Virgil Dobjanschi (Maverick IM), Jeff Sharkey (Compare Everywhere), Philipp Breuss (Wikitude), Mary Ann Cotter (Cooking Capsules).

We went out for drinks on Saturday night and had a good time, but despite all the socializing, I did manage to get some code written and have some very insightful conversations regarding android.

Sharkey and Rylan, scanning barcodes of course.


After hours at the Tied House Cafe and Brewery


Now it's well into October and there's still plenty to be done, so I better get back to it!

Off to Manhattan

I'm all packed up and ready to catch my early morning flight to Manhattan for the T-mobile press conference.

This will be my first ever trip to New York, and I'm really excited. It's not going to be a very long trip, so I doubt I'll have any time for site seeing. I'm hopeful that I'll at least be able to soak up the aura of the town a bit.

The world at large is going to get their first glimpse of the first Android phone. It will be interesting to see how people react to it. I hope it receives a warm reception. Many people (including myself) have waited almost a year for this unveiling.

It's going to be an action packed week, following the press conference, I'm off to Mountain View for 3 days to rub shoulders with some Google folk and try and put some more polish on ShopSavvy.

Android gaining momentum!

Judging by the number of job solicitations I've been receiving lately, I'd say that Android is building up some steam. Not surprisingly, most of them are for short contracts (6 months or less) on the west coast. However, if you jump back a couple months, there is virtually nothing on the radar.

Of course, since I just co-founded a new mobile development firm called Big In Japan with Rylan Barnes (author of GoCart) and Alexander Muse (evil startup mastermind), It's unlikely that I'll be entertaining offers anytime soon.

Trying to update TrivialGPS

As far as I can tell, the Android SDK's mock gps provider is broken in 0.9b, or at least, I haven't been able to get it to work. I spent a couple hours tonight trying to update the TrivialGPS tutorial, so if you're looking for a new version, you'll have to wait until this gets sorted out.

Nonetheless, I've committed some updates to svn, so maybe one of you out there can figure this out.

You can grab the source from here :

http://code.google.com/p/trivial-gps/source/checkout

Agile Java by Jeff Langr

I finished reading Agile Java by Jeff Langr several nights ago, so it's time for another book review.

The aim of this book is to teach the art of java programming using TDD (Test Driven Development), and it does so wonderfully. I would not, however, recommend this book to a first time programmer. If you have some programming experience, and would like to learn Java, then this book wouldn't be bad choice.

Writing good unit tests is a skill like any other, and that's the primary reason I picked up this text. Besides from the obvious, Jeff offers great practical advice on coding style and even naming things (the hardest thing in programming!). The book reads like sagely advice from a battle hardened coder, he's been there, done it, and this is the distillation of what works.

I'm not going to lie and say I'm disciplined enough to always use TDD, but this book helped me recognize the value of it. Now I'm actively trying to avoid falling into my old TAD (Test After Development) habits.