JEEConf 2012 announcement
I’m going to have a speech on JEEConf 2012 in Kiev, on May 19. I’ll have 10 minutes to share my experience of working with Google Guava library and describe how can it make your Java code cleaner and more concise.
By the way, there will be lots of interesting people with great speeches, including guys form Oracle who works on JVM and an author of brand new JVM-based language Kotlin by JetBrains. I was a volunteer on JEEConf 2011, and it was really amazing. I hope this year it will be even better.
Cutting off informational flow
When I’ve only started using Google Reader I’ve subscribed a huge amount of feeds. The same thing with Twitter - I’ve been following a lot of people, often after only one tweet seemed to be pretty. At the beginning of this February I had about 250 feeds in Google Reader and almost 400 people I’ve followed in Twitter.
The main reason I did it was I’ve been afraid to lost something interesting and useful. But at some moment I realized that everything that is really interesting and really useful will be spreaded across Internet - it’s a nature of modern social web, where it is so easy to share anything anywhere.
Another problem with the huge number of feeds was amount of time that I had to spend just to scan all of items quickly. I think it was about half an hour - I mean, without reading, only scanning. Add here amount of time to read everything that looks interesting.
And of course I have no time to read entierly Twitter timeline. In my model of using this soical network, I’m reading it several times a day from 5 to 10 minutes, it’s less then half an hour in sum. I think, I had to spent about one and a half hour to read entier timeline from about 400 people I was following.
At the end I’ve decided to delete everything and unfollow everyone except those are really, I mean, REALLY interesting.
Now I have about 35 RSS feeds and less then 100 people to read in Twitter. I spend about 15 minutes a day scanning items in Reeder and adding most interesting of them to Readability to read when I have a time for it. And now I’m able to read entire Twitter timeline :)
The most useful thing that I realized that I hardly miss something important, but what I’ve get is that it’s much more easier to achieve “a clear inbox” - this magical state of peacefulness.
Online education
I’m living in Ukraine and studying in one of Ukrainian university. In Ukraine we have quite a big problem with education in universities. Unfortunately, professors’ job in Ukraine is poorly paid, so lots of people who really know a lot about some domain and can study other people gave up with teaching and switched to some commercial companies. It is not surprising that sometimes I know more about software development then my professors, because of real practical experience.
In other hand, I really fond of programming and computer science, and I want to study some advanced courses of this field. And I was lucky to find out about that Stanford university started 3 online courses last autumn. These courses were “Machine Learning”, “Artificial Intellect” and “Databases”. I’ve attended first of them, and I am not sorry about it. This was the most interesting and productive course in my life. I was so excited about this course, that even find a job in project, that includes some classification problems in it.
Anyway, after success of first three courses, a new company Coursera was founded by Stanford’s professors, who wants to make great education free and available all over the world. Now they have 7 courses already started and 8 more that will start soon. I’m attending three of them - “Algorithm design and analysis”, “Natural language processing” and “Game theory”. It takes from 3 to 5 hours per week per course to look all presented video lectures, answer quizzes and do programming assignments. And I feel that I really become a bit smarter with each task :)
Anyway, if you’re interesting in attending online courses on interesting fields from great professors, check out Coursera’s website, and also two other projects, created after Stanford’s first courses’ success - Udacity and MITx. They propose really great possibilities for people who want to learn something new.
How I switched to Mac
Almost a month ago I’ve implemented one of my old dream - I’ve bought a MacBook Pro and thereby become another Windows-to-Mac switcher. For several last year I wanted to do it, but Apple computers were too expensive for me. Now, with some help of my relatives I was able to buy a 13-inches MBP as a present for my 21st birthday.
First expression was wonderful, I have an euphoria for a week or so. Now, after a month of using it, I can formulate what makes this laptop such a great device.
Touchpad
I’ve ever thought using laptop without a mouse can be so easy and enjoyable. I was ought to bring mouse with my old ASUS laptop since it has awful touchpad - it was small and I always eventually touched it while typing. MacBook’s touchpad is quite big - I can move a pointer form one corner of the screen to another with one touch. It is clickable - so I will never click it accidentally. And the most amazing things are gestures. As far as I know most of them appeared only on OS X 10.7 Lion - I’m glad that I’ve become a Mac user during this version of OS. Gestures for turning on Launchpad and Mission Control, for making steps back and forward in Safari, for making desktop clean - all these thing really help you to interact with your laptop in easy way. I’m really thinking of buying a Magic Trackpad to have larger surface (for handy use with 24” external display) while still have those wonderful gestures.
Battery
MacBook has an amazing time of working from one battery charge. It can easily work for 5 hours if you browsing Internet through Wi-Fi or working with text. My favorite Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA, which perform some indexing and inspections all the time it works, consumes battery charge a bit faster, but you can be sure to have between 3 and 4 hours of developing.
In some months I hope to change an HDD drive to SSD one, and, besides performance improvements, I‘m waiting for impressive increasing of battery’s lifetime.
OS X
That was the main reason why I wanted a Mac so much. I’m a software developer so I really appreciate working with Unix systems. But at the same time I’m quite lazy and do not like to spent lots of time to solve simple and regular problems like making new device working and so on. I was an Ubuntu user for two years, but then I switched back to Windows 7 because I was tired of wasting time for things that wasn’t work out of the box.
And in my opinion, OS X is an ideal choice, because it’s a Unix “with a human face”. You have powerful command line interface, including bash and all common Unix tools. But at the same time, you have a beautiful GUI with excellent style, fonts and animation, that is just pleasent to use. OS X has a unique sense of simplicity, that neither Windows nor any Linux distro ever had. You will use the same shortcut to open preference window in ANY application. You will install most of applications just coping it to Applications folder (or with only one click in Mac App Store, if application is presented there). If you compare interfaces of Pages and Word:mac you’ll see and understand what I mean. Apple can build interfaces - both software and hardware - that is very simple, elegant and powerful.
Apps
When I was a Windows user, I has quite a lot of applications installed, but at the same time I was a big fan of web apps. I have used Gmail, Google Reader and even Twitter through their web interfaces - just because their were no desktop apps that would be better then web interfaces. Now I has Sparrow, Reeder and Twitter for Mac and they are beautiful. Application that is ugly but has a lot of function has a chance to become popular on Windows, but such app will have no chances on OS X. (Maybe, the only exclusion from this rule is MS Office for Mac - just because DOC is the most popular document format worldwide, and Pages doesn’t have extensive support of it.)
That is it. I don’t think that I’ve told something new or unique - all facts and impressions are widely spoken in the Internet. But I really think that all PC users should at least try a Mac platform, and maybe they will be as happy as me with my new laptop and OS.
