Don't call it "MVP"

2015-04-06

Lately there’s been a lot of discussion about an alternative architectural pattern for Android development. The acronym that’s being used to denote this alternative pattern is “MVP.” I think that “MVP” is an inaccurate and confusing designation for this pattern. In this post, I will say why I think “MVP” is a bad name for the pattern, and I’ll suggest a different name for referring to it. What is “MVP?” There are plenty of blog posts out there that describe the “MVP” pattern, so I’m not going to do that here.…

How to Keep your RxJava Subscribers from Leaking

2015-03-24

Edit: Shortly after writing this, I realized that the solution that I present here isn’t very good. I’m leaving it here just in case it can serve as a building block for better solutions. Sometimes you don’t have control over the lifecycle of your Subscribers. In these cases, to avoid leaking your Subscriber, you have to unsubscribe from your Observable when you’re notified that your Subscriber is about to be destroyed.…

Why Pirating is Probably Wrong (.java)

2015-02-22

Why Ayn Rand's Psychology is Probably Wrong (or trivial)

2015-01-24

**Edit: **Some have pointed out that I’ve misrepresented Ayn Rand’s position in this post. From what I can tell, they are right. Either way, I still think the argument presented here is interesting and accurate as long as we change the conclusion to “Psychological egoism is probably wrong (or trivial)” I’ve met a surprising number of people in my life who believe that no one is capable of altruism. These people believe that everyone always acts to further their own interests.…

Build Apps Smarter With Archiva and Gradle

2015-01-18

Dependency management in both Eclipse and Android Studio can be a serious pain. Now that we have gradle, there’s a better way to build android apps: we can configure our library projects to publish maven artifacts to a maven repository and we can configure our app projects to consume those artifacts. Once projects are setup to produce and consume maven artifacts, building an app with many dependencies becomes much more manageable.…

An Alternative Multiproject Setup for Android Studio

2014-10-03

Google’s Gradle Plugin user guide recommends a method for configuring your gradle files to build multiple projects. That method has some shortcomings. In this post, I will briefly explain Google’s recommended configuration, note its shortcomings, and recommend a different way to configure your gradle files to support multi-project setups in Android Studio. The Google Way This picture illustrates how Google suggests we handle multi-project setups: our main “app” module is supposed to depend on library modules that reside within the project directory.…

A response to Your Comments on "Why Paul Graham is (sort of) wrong about philosophy"

2014-05-27

First, I want to thank you guys for reading, criticizing, and commenting on my post. Given that there’s so many other excellent things you could have been reading, I’m honored that you spent a little time on what I’ve written. Now, let’s respond to some comments: Credentials A couple of comments came up about my “credentials.” Here’s some info: I studied philosophy and religion as an undergrad at the University of Central Florida.…

Why Paul Graham is (sort of) Wrong About Philosophy

2014-05-26

A couple years ago, Paul Graham wrote an essay about philosophy. The essay, on my reading, makes three central claims: Philosophy has largely been driven by our failure to realize that our words are imprecise. This failure is the result of failing to search for useful knowledge. We can do philosophy better if we filter out thoughts that don’t meet a usefulness criterion. While I agree with a lot of what Graham says about philosophy in his essay, I think Graham is wrong on some of the more important points he makes.…

How to Break into a Mobile Dev Career in 10 months or less

2014-05-22

A little less than a year ago, I decided that the philosophy professor scam was too risky for my wife and I. Instead, I decided to pursue a career in app development (and maybe do a tech startup). About 10 months after that decision, I got two internships at two companies as an Android Developer.¹ Hopefully, one of these internships will turn in to a full-time gig (and I have some reason to think that this will happen).…

Why I'll Probably Try to Manipulate You

2014-05-21

I became a hippie when I was a freshman in college. When I say I became a hippie, I don’t mean that I wore tie dye t-shirts all the time, smoked a lot of weed, and listened to “All you need is love” all day. I was a hippie even though I owned zero tie dye t-shirts, wasn’t cool enough to get invited to the weed parties, and had never heard that famous Beatles song that more conventional hippies love.…