Career safety checkpoint

As another year begins, I found myself struggling to get to sleep before the first day back at work.  This wasn't a new experience for me as I seem to recall the same sort of nervousness before the first day back at school as a child.

I consider this time of year to be a bit like travelling between very different timezones - just as I have gotten accustomed to going to bed late and sleeping late the following morning, it's time to adjust back to the work life routine.

One of the many thoughts that occurred to me when I should have been blissfully sleeping was whether my skills are still as relevant to my chosen career in software development.

In the morning I woke up early and decided to have a look at some source code from a system that my current project will be interacting with...

A section of code that particularly stood out to me involved something like 12 branches of if / else checks, where each comparison was against a constant defined earlier in the class, and each outcome also involved another constant.  This could easily be condensed down to two or three lines with one conditional expression by replacing all of the constants with a single Map.

I'm sleeping much better.

Mobile development experience

Even before acquiring my iPad (today) I have been thinking more seriously about getting into developing for mobile platforms.

I have been along to a couple of presentations about Android and cross-platform development for Android and iPhone so have picked up some useful ideas.

Since I don't have a Mac I think I will have to target the Android platform first.

Hopefully the development won't involve as much trial and error as was required for the Windows Mobile development work I did for Pocket PC applications a few years ago.

Anyone remember the HP iPAQ? That's the sort of platform that we were targeting back then - along with the early generation of 3G phones that came with Windows Mobile.

The .net Compact Framework didn't really have enough ways of hooking into the capabilities of the device back then, so we had to resort to integrating third party Visual C++ DLLs to get at the text messaging and GPS capabilities for location based services.

Trust me

Lately I've been liking the expression, "Sometimes it's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission".

In my case it's not a matter of doing something without asking, but rather not doing what has been instructed.

Past experience just won't allow me to schedule testing with a third party when my client still needs to verify their approach has been approved. Admittedly it's nothing as critical as aircraft landing (that was a previous project), but it still has potential to waste time and money.

Of course I will never see that money as it was never mine, and I will inevitably be criticised for the communication delay.

Explaining will take longer than apologising, but I'm not the kind of person to apologise for doing what I feel was right.