March 12, 2014

Happy Birthday, WWW

25 years ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, read about it on Computer History Museum.

Seeing the pictures makes me nostalgic. I used WindowMaker when I started using Linux in 1999 and it’s inspired by NeXTSTEP.

Update:

Another legendary Tim made a nice post: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/03/11/The-Web-is-25 (that’s Tim Bray, co-creator of XML).

Also, celebrate at http://www.webat25.org/

February 27, 2014

Understanding Android Open Source Project

A while ago someone asked on Quora about some good ways to understand the AOSP. Although I don’t work with Android internals anymore, it was fun looking back into AOSP and finding some sources (no pun intended). Here’s my answer (edited for this blog):

Obviously, first go to AOSP site and follow the instructions to download the source.

Although outdated, take a look at Android Platform Developer’s Guide (it’s a copy of the old PDK, removed from Android site now). You can also check the source for older tags, such as gingerbread, probably under docs there are instructions on how to build the documentation. But don’t blindly follow them. Sometimes I find it easier starting from where things started instead of diving into what’s the current state.

February 23, 2014

The Setup

There are a lot of posts about how someone uses their computer to get the job done. One of my favorite sites that compiles a list of posts like that is The Setup. As I like to keep track of what I use, I’m doing my own The Setup-like post to open this blog.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Douglas Drumond, Android developer at Movile and organizer of GDG Campinas. I blog here about anything and on Roboto Dojo about Android development (in Portuguese). I’ve been working with Android since 2010, except for a brief hiatus when I opened my start up on business intelligence with some partners, although I never lost complete contact with Android. After failing with the start up, I came back to mobile development and now I focus 100% on Android.

July 20, 2013

My Git Workflow

Proceeding with my sequence of posts about version control systems, I’ll explain my Git workflow. It’s quite simple, after set up, the day to day workflow is as follows:

get the latest information from remote server: git pull --ff-only
create a new branch and switch to it: git checkout -b branch_name
work, work, work, then commit: git commit
go back to master: git checkout master
check if there’s something new: git pull --ff-only
merge my work back into master: git rebase branch_name
upload the modifications to server: git push

And since I reached the magic number seven, those are the seven steps.

July 17, 2013

Version Control Systems

A while ago, Fábio Akita from AkitaOnRails.com launched the campaign “Beginners’s Friday” intended to help the new generation of developers coming today. I’m totally buying into this idea and this is the first post I’m doing in that direction with version control systems.

Version Control Systems

What is a version control system? In the context of software development, a version control, revision control or source control system is a software designed to control changes to computer programs (as well as documents, sites and virtually whatever you want). Gone are the days of copying and pasting files and changing the name “index.php,” “index-2.php,” “index-now-works.php,” “index-now-it-really-works.php” and so on. In fact, those days should have never existed in the first place, since revision control systems are hanging around for a really long time (well, they’re older than me, as we’ll see below).

April 11, 2013

DevFestW Campinas

What is DevFestW?

Quoting the main site:

DevFestW is a series of community-led events that have technical sessions centered around Google developer technologies and platforms. DevFestW is focused specifically on bringing together women in the local developer community to teach, learn, code and network.

DevFestW Campinas

DevFestWs were supposed to be held in March, but we had to postpone ours to yesterday (April 10th) because of some problems with location. Finally, we got a lot of support from Dextraining to promote the event, from food to location, to video cameras to record the event, so we decided to do it even so late.

March 1, 2013

Waza Opening

Waza is an event promoted by Heroku, a PaaS company. In Ruby language world there is this tendency to name things after Japanese words (Ruby itself came from Japan, thanks to Matsumoto Yukihiro, a.k.a. Matz), although I have no idea if this influenced Heroku somehow. Heroku itself I don’t think it’s a Japanese word (at least I couldn’t find it in any dictionary I looked at). On the other hand, waza is a Japanese word meanining technique, so it makes perfect sense to name an event focused on technical knowledge after this word.

December 2, 2012

Thoughts on DevFest Brasil

Last Friday I went to DevFest Brasil (in Portuguese). Since Google won’t promote Google Developer Day anymore, the Google Developer Groups (former GTUG, Google Technology User Groups) are promoting DevFest. So, these events, instead of being backed up by a big company, are from community to community. I recognize the hassle that is promoting these, and I think the people from GDG-SP (São Paulo), GDG-BH (Belo Horizonte) and GDG-GO (Goiás) did a great job nonetheless.

November 30, 2012

My talk from DevFest Brasil is online

I just uploaded the slides of my talk in DevFest Brasil. See link on this page (if you’re on desktop, it should be on the right, if you’re on a smartphone, it’s at the bottom). It’s exactly as I presented. Later today or tomorrow I’ll add some presenter notes or some screenshots of the hands-on part.

Edit: just see the talks page

November 24, 2012

I’ll talk in DevFest Brasil

This year we won’t have Google Developer Day. Instead, Google Developer Groups are organizing their own events called DevFest. These are pretty much like Google Developer Day with some extras. For instance, in GDDs, we didn’t have codelabs with hands on, just 1h (approx) long talks about a variety of topics Google related.

One other thing that changed are the speakers. On GDD, all were Google Employees or invited by Google. On DevFest, the speakers are from community. There are some Google employees as well, but anyone could submit a talk, so I did it. When I saw the schedule, my talk wasn’t there, no big deal, there are a lot of great talks, mine wasn’t chosen, no problem. I would go to the event in any way. For my surprise, there was an error when publishing the schedule and, in fact, my talk is in.