With the recent acquisition of Posterous by Twitter, and the announcement that the Posterous product will end some time in the near future, I decided it was time to migrate to a new blogging platform. After playing Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr at previous times, and then rolling my own solution based on Sinatra for a while, I had gotten comfortable with a micro-blogging platform managing my personal code portfolio. Posterous met that need perfectly, and I felt great supporting a local company, and one that I almost took a job with.
Tumblr is very similar in a lot of ways, but has much better community support, so I decided to launch with my new domain and start migrating away from the old one. Hopefully this will meet all my needs for the immediate future, and if not, I hope it's be easier to migrate my data away from Tumblr than it was to import it...
I can't forget to say "great job to everyone at Posterous!"
Check out my new blog at tysmith.me
The Android app I worked on at Handmark for a year is finally on the Android Market. Powow is a full text message replacement for the device. Read about Powow in my previous post and get it today!
Download it now!
As I prepare to make the move to Evernote, I'm assisting in locating my own replacement at Handmark. It would be great to have time to train this engineer in the intricacies of the current project before I leave in December.
Handmark is a great company to work for, allowing an extreme amount of creative control and flexibility. This engineer should be extremely driven and will be responsible for taking Powow to the next level and for introducing new products based on original IP entirely.
Although I've primarily worked in Android at Handmark, I've also had the opportunity to work in Ruby on Rails. This included leading the charge and starting the process to convert the company from PHP to Rails for all future server projects and working with the sysops team to implement this hosting architecture on EC2.
Requirements:
- A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (or equivalent experience)
- 6+ years of software development experience
- 3+ years Java experience (preferably client side)
- 1+ years SQL experience
- Source code control understanding (experience with Subversion preferred)
- Experience developing consumer-focused Android applications is highly preferred
One or more of the minimum requirements can be replaced with hands-on Android experience. If there is an Android application you have developed that you would like us to consider along with your resume, please reference such in the cover letter or online application.
Handmark has both a Kansas City, MO office and Southlake, TX office.
Ask me any questions you have about working for Handmark and I'll be happy to have a discussion with you.
Please send any resumes to Tim Massey
via Handmark Job Listing and Handmark Facebook Page Listing
As some of you are aware, my wife and I have been deliberating on a move to the Bay Area for quite a while, and near the completion of Powow, we decided it was time to pursue that further. I considered the option to move out there and work remotely for Handmark, but thought it best to get immediately involved in a company out in SF to boost my personal network. I decided to follow two paths to locate companies I was interested in. I picked products I can't live without and took a look at the parent company, and I also chose some of the top Y-Combinator companies.
After making a list of about 20 companies, I introduced myself to six, Evernote, Dropbox, Yelp, Posterous, AirBNB, Heroku. Of these companies I went through phone screens and setup onsite interviews with Evernote, Posterous, AirBNB, and in the last minute, through a Reddit contact, Funzio.
I scheduled 3 days to do onsite interviews for the four companies, and was in San Francisco earlier in the month to walk through these. I'll review the process below, however I'm going to refrain from bringing up specific problems as this would be rude.
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After 8 months of development time, the first version of Powow has been released on the Sprint ID packs. Powow is a full SMS and MMS replacement for your android phone. It's packed full of features like blocking contacts, favoriting contacts, and a popup message window.
I worked as the lead Android developer on this project as well as the Ruby on Rails upgrade server. I also worked with sysops to get the hosting platform in place and testing running an EC2/Unicorn/Nginix/SimpleDB stack.
Look for it soon in the Android Market or get it now from our hosted site.
Download it now!
A while ago I was working on a Rails implementation with a requirement to upload data on a recurring interval and allow the site administrator to set that interval. I love the Whenever gem and decided I could modify that to suit my needs. I found the best way to implement this in my specific scenario was to load the rails environment in the schedule.rb file, and pull from the db whenever the binary was called to generate the crontab. This does add overhead to the application, but generally only when a deploy is done, or when the administrator specifically modifies this number. Through the web interface, I provided the administrator a setting to control, and through Activerecord callbacks, I executed the whenever binary to regenerate the cron.
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Earlier in the week I released a library called RESTclient-Android to make web services consumption on Android much easier. Due to an overwhelming response on correct patterns to implement this library, I have added a RESTclient-example to the project. This example will show you the proper way to use a service to consume data on a regular basis to keep the user up to date. It also binds to the current activity such that it can be updated while the user is in the application. The example used retrieves the latest tweets for #android and displays them, but it would be very simple to consume any service in a similar manner.
I used the Commonsware library CWAC-wakeful to eliminate the need for managing my wakelock and simplifying code in my below example. The base architecture of this implementation requires 4 files on top of RESTclient (or any way you want to make an HTTP request): The activity you wish to bind to, the service to do the heavy lifting, the receiver to catch the alarm broadcast, and the receiver to catch the boot request.
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In a recent project I wanted a more abstracted http library to consume RESTful resources. Coming from a Rails background, I decided to go looking for a rest-client implementation. I came across Calling Web Services in Android Using HTTPclient and found it to be a great start, but I really needed more functionality. Introducing RESTclient-Android, a modification of the previous link to support four REST verbs, HTTP basic authentication, and JSON body posting.
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