Tag Archives: lean

Android Development – Stack Careers

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I’ve been itching to get into Android development for some time now. I must confess my ultimate goal is to create games for Android, but I actually can’t do that right now for some reasons I won’t explain here (contact me privately if you’d like to know more). That’s ok though, because creating games is a more complex undertaking on a platform you’re not familiar with. I needed something to get my feet wet, so I chose to create something that is simple but still useful.

‘The Lean Startup’, a book by Eric Ries about how to create successful products and services, proposes a method for accomplishing that goal:

  • Leverage validated learning
  • Scientific experimentation
  • Iterative product releases
  • Measuring progress
  • Gaining valuable customer feedback

To accomplish this, the book defines a ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP). An MVP is “a version of a new product which allows collection of the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

The general idea is that you should develop something extremely simple in quick order, put it out there, and use it to gain feedback early and begin successive iterations to improve upon it. The advantages are numerous, but most notably is this: If you spend a lot of time scheming and planning out a project and developing without releasing it for a while, you may end up developing something that isn’t quite what your customers want at best, and at worst is something completely useless and opposite of what your customer actually wants.

androidSo I decided to build an Android app that is really simple with limited scope so that I could get something out there that provides value early and is open for feedback loops.

If you’re familiar with Stackoverflow (I really hope you are if you’re a software developer) you may be familiar with Careers 2.0. It’s a job search site tied in with the Stack Overflow crowd. Unlike traditional StackExchange sites which have full APIs, this site has only a limited RSS feed for job seekers (there is no API for employer or resume/CV data, which makes sense given that it’s a source of revenue for StackExchange). I chose to make an app that leverages that simple RSS feed data.

Here’s what parameters this simple RSS ‘API’ supports:

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/feed
    ?searchTerm=ruby&location=seattle&range=20&distanceUnits=Miles

Given that this is my first Android project, I knew I needed to limit my scope as much as possible because a non-trivial amount of time and effort would actually be just in learning the Android SDK and development process. So to further limit the scope of the effort, I decided I would only implement the skill and location search abilities.

I learned all about Android concepts like activities, intents, and the lifecycle of such things. I learned best practices for network communication, xml parsing, asynchronous work off of the UI thread, and more. I kept a set of bookmarks and guides that were helpful to me along the way, with the intention of writing a blog post series on basic Android 101 development in the future (keep your eyes out for this soon).

48 hours of effort later I have a first iteration suitable for release. Behold, ‘StackCareers’:

Stack Careers Stack Careers

It’s nothing amazing I suppose, but it does one job and does it well (those Unix guys in the days of yore were on to something). If you check it out, I’d love your feedback and suggestions.

Stack Careers app on Google Play

Google Play is a trademark of Google Inc.

The Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow names and logos are trademarks of Stack Exchange Inc.

 

 

How To Hire Great Developers

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In a previous set of posts I talked about how the difference between an average developer and a great developer is enormous, how bad developers can effectively cancel-out your good developers, and why you therefor need to hire just the very best.

So how do you tell if someone is good? or bad? What are the core competencies and key indicators of an ‘A’ player developer? And how do you interview for them?

Great Developer Key Indicators

The following is a list I’ve accumulated over time. It’s never complete, and certainly up for discussion, but in my experience is a pretty good set of indicators for whether a developer is an ‘A’ player or not.

Great developers:

  • Can deal with many levels of abstraction simultaneously.
  • Are masters at managing complexity.
  • Know space and time trade-offs of the major data structures.
  • Understands multi-threading, resource locking, and how it’s implemented.
  • Understands that simple is better than complicated, every time.
  • Has used a DVCS (git, mercurial, etc).
  • Are masters at managing expectations.
  • Plays with new technologies and languages and stays aware of upcoming developments.
  • Understands what TDD is and why it’s a valuable practice.
  • Is likely to develop iteratively and incrementally, adding value with each release.
  • Understands how to accomplish loose-coupling and encapsulation, especially in things that are likely to change.
  • Is not a lone-coder who goes dark for long periods of time.
  • Knows how to communicate well, not just with developers, but all levels of management and stakeholders, and can adjust communication vocabulary/style per context.
  • Knows SOLID principles and practices them effectively.
  • Recognizes that code reviews are excellent ways to improve yourself, both as an author or reviewer.
  • Can grasp the bigger picture.
  • Doesn’t just accept work items and marching orders, but also proposes alternatives and improvements.
  • Knows 1 procedural language, 1 object-oriented language, 1 functional language, 1 scripting language, 1 statically typed language, and 1 dynamically typed language. (There is much overlap between these categorizations)
  • Fluent in major design patterns and how/when to implement them.
  • Knows most of these books:  Code Complete, Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, Mythical Man Month, Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, Programming Perls, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, C by K&R.
  • Keeps up with development blogs/twitter/podcasts.
  • Is highly passionate about software development.

Bad Developer Red Flags

There are some simple things you can do to immediately weed out the really bad developers in an interview scenario.

  • Have them write FizzBuzz; believe it or not most developers do poorly on this, and it’s a great way to identify them early on in the process.
  • Ask them what the last new language or development environment they learned was. If it’s been a long time since they’ve learned a new one, that’s a red flag.
  • Ask them what they think a great developer’s best attributes are. If the answer isn’t in the list above, it’s probably a red flag.
  • Have them explain dependency injection to you, and a simple example. If you get a deer-in-headlights response, it’s a red flag.
  • Ask them to solve problems that involve in-place manipulation of a linked list or string. If they don’t understand pointers or space/time complexities of a problem, that’s a concern. ‘Reverse a linked list’ is a good one to ask.
  • Find out if they have a GitHub/BitBucket/Codeplex/SourceForge.  Look for evidence of development both inside and outside of work.

What NOT To Do

  • Don’t ask questions that are just quick facts. A programmer that knows what port IMAP runs on isn’t going to be a better programmer than one who doesn’t. Knowing little C compiler optimizations doesn’t make you a better programmer.
  • Don’t just ask questions with verbal answers, or open-ended answers. Actually have them write code on the whiteboard. A lot.
  • Don’t use questions that are common enough to where they could be googled before hand or memorized.
  • Don’t just be satisfied that someone answered something correctly. Talk to them about their solution. Ask them to modify it. Ask them to test it. Challenge their thinking.

This is an organic post, and I suspect I’ll add many suggestions from readers.

 

Work Smarter, Not Harder

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During the industrial age it was common to hear people romantically refer to their work ethic by the incredible number of hours they worked. The calculation many people had in their minds was that working a ton of hours correlated to long term success. This actually made a fair amount of sense, given that if you put in N hours, you might be able to make N widgets, wheras if you put in N+5 hours, you could make N+5 widgets.

This Isn’t Manual Labor

Software development doesn’t work like that. It’s been a long time since there was a strong case made for equating more hours input with more success output. In fact, working with software is much more about working smarter, not harder. You can put in quite a small amount of hours done intelligently and get out a spectacular output of success. In terms of overall success, it’s usually a combination of elegant technical solutions married with great opportunities.

How It Relates to Agile

Many software shops that have historically been using a waterfall approach find it challenging to accept that 100% resource utilization isn’t valuable. It’s much more important to prioritize work, limit work in progress, and deliver working software early/often. Just because someone is freed up does not mean that we should stick them on a new project, because what you’ll end up with is just a divergence in the number of things you’re trying to accomplish. Ultimately this leads to a lack of focus, and a dilution of talent across too many objectives.

Related book: The Mythical Man Month

Succeed By Failing

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How do you define success? Is it by counting the number of successful software projects you’ve completed, how many people downloaded/used them, or what kind of job title you have? It’s actually lot easier to define success that way, but it’s not the truth (at least from my perspective). I define success as having learned from past failure.

Let’s take a look at a quote from Carl Sagan:

“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
― Carl Sagan

Not Everyone Can Be 1st Place

Fearing failure is something that can lead to “everyone is a winner” syndrome. It’s often unpopular for people and organizations to own a failure, so often what you’ll see is everything being treated as a success (at least when viewed from a manufactured perspective). What’s even worse is if you have a situation in which the person or organization is unable to measure success against a stated goal. If you don’t know there’s a failure, you can’t correct against it. Being able to measure against your stated goals is also a great way to get rid of guesswork or politics associated with what people ‘feel’ is the best thing to do. Facts and numbers tell the true story.

Cycle Time

So let’s say that we understand failing is a good thing, because it allows us to not fail at that particular thing again, and hopefully we gain some validated learning from it. But isn’t failing expensive? Either monetarily or emotionally? Not if you fail early. And the point isn’t to fail; it’s to understand why the previous attempt failed and be able to analyze and correct it. If you learn to shorten the cycle time, you won’t have invested a lot in it, and you’ll be able to pivot to the success path faster. The cycle time looks like this:

  1. State a goal.
  2. Identify a way to measure against that goal.
  3. Try it, and validate your attempted method of attack with your measurement method.
  4. Failed? Go to 1. Success? Huzzah.

Failing early is failing cheaply. Eric Ries wrote a book “Lean Startup” which discusses this, and he refers to it as being almost like an automobile engine, with the increasing revolutions of the cycle causing the engine to crank over, and at some point the engine really gets going and becomes a sustainable way of operating.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas Edison

“Success is 99% failure” – Soichiro Honda