Category: Miscellaneous

I recently represented the Philadelphia Google Developers’ Group, a group I have been helping manage for close to 9 years, at Technical.ly’s Super Meetup event, an event that brought together local technology and entrepreneur communities for an evening of social festivities. And while Zoom events don’t have the same vibe as the in-person events that the event has traditionally been, the Technical.ly crew did a good job bringing people together for an evening of community talks and nerd-trivia 🙂

As part of the event, they had the group leads talk about how the groups have fared during the pandemic. You can read all the responses here and I am pasting mine here as well

The question gave me a little time to reflect on our setup, and generally we are doing the best we can of a really weird situation. I am really looking forward to a time when we’ll be able to meet face to face again but that doesn’t seem like its going to be anytime soon. But the virtual nature of all meetups has given us more opportunities to collaborate beyond our local neighborhood.

Probably the biggest change has been the activity on our Slack account which we had only recently moved to, as we moved away from the larger PhillyDev Slack community. That decision seems to have been the right one and I hope more folks from our Meetup.com page join us there.

The virtual events have allowed us some non-traditional events as well like Mike Zorn’s book club meeting every Monday evening where we are going through books on Kotlin and Android programming and some co-viewing events we are running in collaboration with the Google Cloud team that have been personally very educational as well.

I recently attended a virtual event hosted by Promptworks which was really interesting as well. I hadn’t realized till that event that Zoom offered breakout rooms which is great. I might try that for our next event. Anything to lower to speaker/attendance ratio which makes the conversations feel more intimate

Catering seems to be becoming a part of some events as well. The Google events we helped with had catered lunches through Grubhub which was great (who knew Grubhub had a corporate events group 🤷‍♂️) though the Promptworks team won that round with some amazing food and wine delivered to the attendees. It might be too expensive for monthly events but might be an option for special occasions

Video collaboration tools still feel poorly designed for a professional communities though. Most are designed around a talking-head + shared screen experience and aren’t nearly as collaborative or inclusive as in-person events. There is an opportunity for a product here, though it would have to be with a very different business model, since most communities don’t charge their users to attend their events and so can’t afford to pay for individual seats.

Maybe its something a company like LinkedIn could be interested in offering to professional communities?

It’s always nice to be recognized. And since part of the purpose of this blog is to serve as a historical record of my professional life, figured I should post about it here before I lost the link to the sands of time 😉

https://www.fullstackacademy.com/blog/developers-that-work-in-media

I am a chronic doodler, and have always struggled to keep my notebooks clear of doodles and seem more “information heavy”. So watching this video was quite an eye opener:

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Another link from Time here goes deeper into a study that shows how doodling actually helps you pay attention!

If you really enjoy doodling, I strongly recommend Doodler’s Anonymous, pretty much the definitive blog on doodling. Their post on Netflix Envelope Doodles is just amazing and on my permanent list on links for when I need some creative inspiration.

Netflix Envelope Doodles“This movie sucked.” – is my favorite. I’ll draw something up and add to this fun collection. I like Jovino’s robot too. Reminds me of a killer cyborg version of a British postbox! 😀 I wonder what would happen if an envelope was to be intentionally placed where a phone-doodler could find it and absentmindedly cover it up with subconscious doodles…

via Doodlersanonymous

Pity the doodle.com domain is owned by a web app that has nothing to do with doodling in the artistic sense (but still a fantastic app that I use quite often). Would love to see Quasimondo’s ScribberToo app there 🙂

This week’s design themed Android Alliance Philly meetup was a lot of fun. Here are my slides from my talk on Android UI design patterns:

Thanks everyone for coming 🙂

[Update] Other design resources:

• Smashing Magazine: Designing for Android

Another month, another Todo list app tried and given up on. The latest candidate is The Hit List, a beautifully designed Mac application. However, it lacks any online component and as I move between different machines, the lack of being able to add/remove items from some web interface finally got to me. Pretty sad, since I really liked the interface.

I have now lost track of the number of Todo lists I have tried. I liked different ones for different reasons. For example:

• GMail tasks: is awesome because its right there within GMail where I go multiple times a day
• Remember the milk: I love the simple natural language way you can add tasks
• The Hit List: Really polished UI
• Epic Win: Completely useless as a todo list app but really fun to use 😉
• Teux Deux: Elegant design, iPhone app is a plus (well not anymore since I moved to Android)

While todo lists like the ones mentioned above are cited frequently, I feel enterprise project management and issue tracking solutions are little more than glorified todo lists are they? Working at Comcast. I have gone through quite a few of them, like Trac, RedMine or Rally.

So why isn’t there an OPML like exportable format for todo lists? I jump between todo list apps much more frequently than my feed readers and from what I read, so do most people.

Since most todo lists seem to always work with the same data an exportable/importable specification to define them would reduce the friction of trying out a particular tool a lot. Moreover, an agreed to format would also allow interoperability. For example, at work while we are all mandated to use the same “enterprise app” to manage the work, its conceivable that you could work with the same server while choosing different clients.

I imagine a spec like this to define todo lists:

This is of course completely not thought through completely, so I am sure there could be other items that would need to be represented, but hey, its a first stab.

For extra points if we could define an RSS-like spec for tasks that would be even better. That way clients could subscribe to tasks from services like mentioned above. If you are developing a better UI for task management, you could just build the UI part and leave the data management to some other service.

In case you haven’t heard already, this Wednesday (April 28th), the Philadelphia Adobe User Groups will be holding a joint event celebrating the release of the Flex 4 framework and Flash Builder 4 at the Wharton’s Jon M. Huntsman Hall, Room G65. We’ll have Terry Ryan, Flash Platform Evangelist for Adobe speaking at the occasion and there will be food and a bunch of giveaways. The event is jointly being organized by the Philadelphia Flex, Flash, ColdFusion, Photoshop and Illustrator User Groups so its a great opportunity to connect with other groups and group managers as well.

The event is free of course but you will need to register here. And if you are into Flex development, make sure you are on the PhFlex mailing list as well.

Hope to see you there!