Latest News from Yakov Fain

User Experience Professional Is Needed Badly

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:12:02 EDT

What would you think if a person visited your training registration page shown below and asked you the following question, “Yakov, when the early bird price for your JavaScript training expires?” A not so savvy Web person could’ve reacted like this, “Helloooo, can’t you read? Sales end on May 29, 2012 ”. But being in [...]

Is HTML5 Web 3.0?

Tue, 08 May 2012 06:00:00 EDT

About six years ago I wrote a blog titled “I have no idea what Web 2.0 means“. That blog had link to a video where IT leaders were helplessly trying to explain what Web 2.0 means. One guy said something like this, “Everyone wants to do it, and you can’t find enough people to do [...]

A Masterpiece from Mozilla’s Documentation

Wed, 02 May 2012 05:00:00 EDT

While preparing the courseware for my upcoming JavaScript workshop I ran into the following definition in the Mozilla’s online documentation: “callee is a property of the arguments object. It can be used to refer to the currently executing function inside the function body of that function.” Love it! I’ll never be out of work, as [...]

Generating Ext JS and Java CRUD Applications with CDB

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:00:00 EDT

Clear Data Builder for Ext JS (CDBExt) is an open source tool that automatically builds Ext JS/Java EE CRUD applications given one or more annotated Java interfaces. The generated JavaScript and Java code enforce best Ext JS and Java EE practices and is deployed on the development version of the Tomcat ready to run. A [...]

What not to Bring to an IT Conference

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:30:09 EDT

In May, I’m flying to Kiev, Ukraine to participate in a Java conference there and this won’t be the only conference I’ll be going to this year. For software developers the ability to attend a major professional conference is a valuable perk given by their employers. OK, all expenses are approved and your air flight [...]

Google Must Hire Usability Experts

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:39:54 EDT

Teacher: “Mary, what do you think should happen in a Web browser when the user presses Ctrl-T?” Mary: “It should open a new tab with either a blank page or your home page. Some browsers show most recently visited sites. In any case, it should be easily configured”. Teacher: “Good girl! When I was as [...]

I Feel Bad

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:17:08 EDT

Yesterday, I made a trip to Manhattan on some family matters. While walking by the the Seaport in the lower Manhattan, I noticed a group of asian guys doing back massage to the tourists right on the street. I’m sure you saw these special chairs where you kinda sitting on your knees while they work [...]

Identifying Design Patterns in Resumes

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:06:32 EDT

Just got an email from a person who calls himself a Senior Java Developer. Two out of five pages were devoted to describing his skills. Below is an extract from the Skills section: Java 2 (J2EE, J2SE) rich operational experience JDBC 2.0. rich operational experience EJB considerable operational experience SQL rich operational experience JSP rich operational [...]

What the Title “Senior Developer” Really Means

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:00:00 EDT

When I post a job opening for a Senior Java Developer, people send me resumes, and their titles match my post title. But the meaning of the word “senior” varies depending on the geography. Here in the USA a 22-24y.o. person graduates from college and starts as an intern or a junior programmer working his [...]

How to Make Your Chrome Browser Work Faster

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 05:00:00 EDT

Any Web browser has local cache, and everyone knows that its goal is to minimize the number of network requests by caching locally some resources like images or even the program code. The google.com home page opens blazing fast? Sure, because the browser loads it from your disk cache, not from the network. host=yakovfain.com&blog=16177610&post=7282&subd=yakovfain&ref=&feed=1" width="1" height="1" />

What Project Managers Can Learn From Airport Security

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:05:35 EDT

On average, I pass the airport security four times a month either on business or as a tourist. Over the years I became a living proof that Pavlov’s finding about conditioned reflexes were correct. When I see an airport, I start pulling off my belt, taking off my shoes, and my hands are unzipping my [...]

A Life Saving Egg Hack

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 09:19:10 EDT

Sometimes I eat chicken eggs in the morning. I boil two eggs for six minutes. My wife is not too happy with the fact that I’m doing this in an old-fashioned way. Yes, I simply bring the water to the boiling point and then put there as many eggs as I want. But my wife [...]

The Java Courseware

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:15:00 EDT

If you are planning to do build a career as a software developer, you have to be prepared to get trained and re-trained every couple of years. But how? If you’re lucky, your employer will send you to classes, otherwise you have to spend substantial amount of time self-studying. Back in the nineties I was hungry for the courseware. Going through these thick manuals on hot technologies was the shortest way to master them. Beside software developers, university professors and contract instructors are also looking for the courseware that would help them to teach the class without major surprises and failures in front of the students. No matter who you are, I’d like to offer you some extra materials that’ll help you in learning or teaching programming in Java and Java EE.

Social Networks Are Getting High

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:30:00 EDT

Not that I don’t like social networks, but I see no use for them in my personal life. I use Twitter for business reasons mainly, like advertising my upcoming training “JavaScript for Java Developers“, which doesn’t prevent me from posting a photo of two salmon heads that I was about to use for fish soup. [...]

Germany Opens Borders for Programmers

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:35:00 EDT

Have you read today’s German version of Financial Times? I did. Not that I can read German, but you don’t have to – just copy/paste the text of this article to Google Translate’s left box. It’s smart enough to recognize that it’s in German. Pick your language in the “To:” dropdown and enjoy the news. [...]

Design Patterns Were Not Born Equal

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Design patterns were not born equal. Some of them are boring, while others are special. Do you remember your feelings after learning what the Data Transfer Object is? Don’t remember? Of course – cause you didn’t have any special feelings about it other than “It’s easy”. What do you say about Singleton? Yeah, this is [...]

Be Careful With Europcar

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:57:19 EDT

During the last fifteen years I’ve being spending at least one week a year vacationing in France. Love this country for their culture, traditions, gourmet food, great wine, great skiing, and friendly people. Once in a while I rent a car and drive there visiting all these nice little villages and chateaux. In January, I [...]

Backs

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:47:44 EDT

People take pictures of people. Saying “Cheese” or “Sex” immediately puts an artificial smile on the other person’s face. Taking photos of people from the front is so 19-th Century. You gotta be a professional photographer to make a realistic portrait. Last summer, while walking to my workplace in Manhattan, I started to pay attention [...]

Thoughts While Watching Apple’s New iPad Presentation

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 07:15:02 EST

I like Apple products. Our family of four owns nine of their devices. I’ll always respect Steve Jobs for being a visionary and improving our taste. And I’ve enjoyed his keynotes a lot. Yesterday, I was watching Tim Cook’s presentation of the new iPad. I saw a gray-haired fit man in black moving on stage [...]

Hiring Teams of Offshore Software Developers

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

Over the last five years one of my responsibilities was interviewing and hiring software developers and many of them were physically located overseas. In this post I’d like to share with you my thoughts (and get your feedback) on one of the aspects for offshore hiring: pros and cons of hiring individuals vs. teams.

Creating a Snapshot of the World with Google

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 06:15:00 EST

Google performs serious processing of their log files to create their picture of the world, and they have a lot of more brain and computer power than I do. But hey, don’t you want to play a statistician too? It’s better than killing time with Sudoku or Bud Light, isn’t it?

Will HTML Force You to Lie?

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:06:54 EST

OK, our company, Farata Systems has created this nice application using Adobe AIR, and our customers are happy. It’s not a simple CRUD though. We’ve implemented some cool stuff replacing tons of paper forms with PDF documents processing. PDF documents are being scanned, the OCR software processes them to automatically figure out what type of [...]

Learning English with Google

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:58:19 EST

English is my second language, but the last 20 years I live in the USA and my English is fluent. I almost never have to refer to a dictionary. But blogging and book writing forces me to look for help once in a while – readers (a.k.a. angry birds) are quick to point fingers if [...]

Reading Another Funny Document by Adobe

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:20:00 EST

Today Adobe released another document that brought tears into my eyes. Why they think that people are dumb? Why not just say, “We couldn’t figure out how to monetize Flex and we’re getting rid of the ballast”? Adobe is a public company, and, beside developers they have investors and their stock went more than 10% up since last (infamous) November. They’ve chosen investors over developers. This is understandable, but why keep lying to developers? Today’s doc contains lots of words, but the most important section is this: Adobe runtime support of Flex Flash Player 11.2 and Adobe AIR 3.2, which are anticipated to ship in the first quarter of 2012, will be tested with applications built using Adobe Flex 4.6. Adobe will test future releases of Flash Player and AIR against the Adobe Flex 4.6 SDK and maintain backwards compatibility for five years.

Starting blogging on JavaScript and Ext JS

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:25:10 EST

Our company, Farata Systems, started publishing a series of technical blogs on JavaScript and Ext JS framework at http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/. Since Farata Systems is not affiliated with Sencha, these materials will highlight both good and bad things (if any). Trust me on that. I’ve started writing my blog on comparing JavaScript with more traditional (read O-O, [...]

Java: Passing by Reference With a Twist

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:37:09 EST

Currently I’m teaching a Java class online, and Vitaly O., one of my students, ran into an interesting situation. He sent me the program below, which, to his surprise, printed 1. public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { Integer t = new Integer(0); t=1; test(t); System.out.println(t); } public static void test(Integer t) [...]

Enterprise Development: Flex or HTML5?

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

There are many ways of creating Web applications and creating them for the enterprises is not the same as developing a Web site for a pizzeria in your neighborhood. During the last five years we’ve been using mainly Adobe Flex for development of the front end of Web applications. Flex applications work in a well known and predictable run-time environment called Flash Player. The code is compiled and you have convenient tools for development.

Immersing into JavaScript Frameworks

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:40:00 EST

During the last month my colleagues and I were immersing into the world of modern JavaScript frameworks. We didn’t start from scratch though. My business partners spent the first 5 years of this century porting PowerBuilder, a used-to-be-popular client server tool, to a JavaScript framework. That product was called XMLSP and you can still find its 5-year old version online. The word AJAX was not even invented back then. In 2006, a killer UI framework Adobe Flex 2 was released and we started using it. It was clearly better than any AJAX offering, and I was not shy in publishing blogs and articles explaining its superiority to any AJAX solution available at the time. Flex remains a great solution for developing UI for the enterprise Web applications, and our company,Farata Systems, is committed to support any client who decides to hire us for any Flex/AIR Web/Desktop/Mobile project. But the world of software and hardware is hugely different in 2012 comparing to 2006. And we are stepping into the same JavaScript river once again.

Technology pushes customer service down the drain

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:23:31 EST

Five years ago, when you called your credit card company or any other customer service you had a choice: either punch in your selections in the automated menu or hit the O-button to get to a live operator. Back then everyone hated those annoying automated menus. Little did they know what was going to happen [...]

The Future of the Flex Framework in Enterprise IT

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:55:08 EST

Disclaimer. Everything posted on this blog is my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of my employer. Part 1. Emotions. Three days ago I’ve received the following email from an enterprise architect of one of our former clients (we’ve conducted two Flex training classes there): “Adobe has been in the news lately [...]

A Bad Guy Inside my Notebook

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:27:17 EST

This week I’m in Seattle, WA teaching Adobe Flex at the client site. Everyone in the classroom was given a password to the local Wi-Fi router. Everyone but one person successfully connected to the Internet. This unlucky guy was me. In fact, my notebook was connected to the router, but that was as far as [...]

Adobe: Another one bites the dust

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 06:55:14 EST

A well known Adobe evangelist is forced to say good bye to his employer. He was notified about being fired while vacationing in Mexico. Should he be a pregnant woman, Adobe wouldn’t be allowed by law to fire him remotely… Duane posted a blog about this important event in his life. First, I wish all [...]

QuckTest to see if you Suck as UI Software Developer

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:51:44 EST

While filling out any computerized form, the most annoying thing is to see a validation error like “Don’t enter spaces and dashes” after entering a phone number. This is the indication that the form was created by rookie developers, tested by careless QA engineers, and the project was managed by an incompetent manager. Just now [...]

The Rumors of Flash Player’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 07:02:00 EST

This morning ZD Net published an article stating the Adobe will cease development of Flash Player on Mobile in favor of packaging mobile applications in Adobe AIR. The Flash Player haters quickly picked up this news and to draw attention to their blogs/tabloids started to cash on Steve Job’s name starting that he won the battle with Adobe since Steve was the one who didn’t let Flash Player on iOS. As of now, I don’t know if these rumors are valid, but even if they are, this ain’t breaking news. Let me explain why in three simple sentences.

Buying Your First MacBook

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 09:57:16 EST

Last week, a person asked me for an advice about buying a new laptop. The most important thing when giving any advices is not just recommend what’s good for you, but rather put yourself in the shoes of the advisee and understand his/her computer usage patterns. Here’s the quick profile of this person, let’s call [...]

The Proper Workplace of a Software Developer

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:11:12 EDT

Yesterday, I was visiting my business partner Anatole. For many years he works from home – he’s not a big fan of a corporate environment. Beside being a top notch software developer, he’s always trying to optimize his workplace. I took a picture of his desk and thought you’d be interested to see it. The [...]

mailto: an elegant solution with limitations

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:03:57 EDT

On my current project (Flex and Java) the client wants to email certain data to certain recipients. If the mail content and recipients wouldn’t require manual processing, I’d written a Java server side program that would retrieve the data and sent it to a predefined list of recipients. This is not the case though. The [...]

I Hate This Triangle

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:52:49 EDT

Microsoft Word 2011 is the program that crashes the most on my Macbook. To be fair to this edition, I need to say that MS Word 2008 was no better in this department. I got used to it and save my documents every minute or so. I understand that it’s not easy to develop application [...]

Adobe, I don’t want to update my Acrobat Reader!

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 22:11:04 EDT

During the last two years, every week or so, a little icon starts jumping up and down on the screen of my MacBook. This is Adobe reader asks me if I’d like to update my Acrobat Reader. Since I’m a polite person, during the first six months I was clicking OK. Please do. Sure, update [...]

Adobe MAX 2011 Was Good Despite The Keynotes

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:30:00 EDT

Just came back from LA, where I spent three days at MAX – the main Adobe conference. Four people from our company were there and all liked it. I went there to see if the company is still strong, has a clear road map that, hopefully, matches my understanding of where IT population is moving.

This is a new home for my blog

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:59:18 EDT

My old blog http://yakovfain.javadevelopersjournal.com/ will shut down soon. This is my personal blog’s new home.

Pandora Radio, Blacks, and Whites

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:58:00 EDT

Presently I work for a client that has an open floor setup, which means that lots of noises and conversations are happening at any given moment. But I prefer listening to the music while developing software, and the Internet radio Pandora really helps. I've created several radio stations, and based on my mood, I listen to a hard rock, jazz, blues or other genre.

Since there is no free lunch, Pandora used to insert audio commercials between the songs. No problems here. I understand. This morning, I noticed that Pandora got a facelift, and it seems that the main reason was to free some screen real estate for visual advertisement. Now it's getting annoying.

All of a sudden, my browser's window became fool of women. This is no good. I'm working here, guys.There are people around me. They pay me well for developing software. And what do they see? Are we paying Yakov for having fun staring at all these women?

But things got even more interesting. I noticed that all these beautiful ladies were black. This got me thinking why would Pandora assume that I'm specifically interesting in black women? The title on the top of the screen read something like "Find local black women in your area." This is when having analytical thinking helps. At the time, I was listening to the radio station that was playing reggae music. Got it?

After a while, I switched to another radio station that was playing Joane Osborne and the likes. Guess what? The browser's window got filled with the faces of white women.

I suspect that Pandora is trying to be smart in showing context-sensitive ads targeting the proper audience.Do they assume that people listening to reggae are most likely into black women and fans of Joanne Osborne are whites?

So far it's just my assumption, and would require a lot more hours spent listening to various types of music. I like women. I really do. There are gorgeous white, black and latino women (the rumor has it that J. Lo is available again). My question is, what kind of radio station should I create to see all of them at once and not in a into-your-face manner? If I won't find the answer, I'm going to have to shell out 36 bucks for a year of ad-free Pandora.

Oops...It's getting even more interesting...Here comes a large banner offering me "High Quality Generic Viagra". Guys, I may lose this contract with my client, and won't have money to buy high quality blue pills from your sponsors.

Pandora Radio, Blacks, and Whites

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:32:00 EDT

Presently, I work for a client that has an open floor setup, which means that there are lots of noises and conversations are happening at any given moment. But I prefer listening to the music while developing software, The Internet radio Pandora really helps. I've created several radio stations, and based on my mood, I listen to a hard rock, jazz, blues or other genre.

All of a sudden, my browser's window became fool of women. This is no good. I'm working guys.There are people around me. They pay me well for developing software. And what do they see? Are we paying Yakov for having fun staring at women?

But things got even more interesting. I noticed that all these beautiful ladies were black. This got me thinking why would Pandora assume that I'm specifically interesting in black women? The title on the top of the screen read something like "Find local black women in your area." This is when having analitycal thinking helps. At the time, I was listening to the radio station that was playing reggae music. Got it?

After a while, I switched to another radio station that was playing Joane Osborn and the likes. Guess what? The browser's window got filled with the faces of white women.

I suspect that Pandora is trying to be smart and showing context-sensitive ads targeting the proper audience.Do they assume that people listening to reggae are most likely into black women and fans of Joanne Osborne are whites?

So far it's just my assumption, and would require a lot more hours spent listening to various types of music. I like women. I really do. There are gorgeous white, black and latino women. My question is, what kind of radio station should I create to see all of them at once and not in a into-your-face manner? If I won't find the answer, I'm going to have to shell out 36 bucks for a year of ads free Pandora.

Pandora Radio, Blacks, and Whites

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:00:07 EDT

Presently I work for a client that has an open floor setup, which means that lots of noises and conversations are happening at any given moment. But I prefer listening to the music while developing software, and the Internet radio Pandora really helps. I’ve created several radio stations, and based on my mood, I listen [...]

The Axe Soup, Cake Mixes, and Frameworks

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:30:00 EDT

I always get excited when I see another person questioning the use of frameworks that ask you to either replace one language with another or write additional code as a life support to sustain the framework’s functioning. This time my kudos to Christin Gorman, who did a great job explaining why using the Hibernate framework over SQL is a bad choice. Watch this video , where Christin uses the Cake Mix metaphor to deliver her message loud and clear. In the past I was using a different metaphors. One was about the goat and rabbi. The other one is about the Axe Soup a.k.a. Stone Soup. I remember this story about a soldier returning back from war. He was very hungry, and, when reached some village, he asked a women living there to give him some food. She rejected. Then he asked for a pot of water so he could cook a soup form his axe. She became curious and agreed. After placing the axe in a boiling water he asked if she had just one small potato to add some flavor to the Axe Soup. She gave the potato. Than he asked the woman about a small onion, and on and on and on. When the soup was ready, he removed the axe from the pot and fed himself with a tasteful soup.

The Axe Soup, Cake Mixes, and Frameworks

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:02:03 EDT

A Good Reason to Fire a Programmer

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:21:00 EDT

During the last 12 hours I had to fill out a registration form on one Web site and purchase a bus ticket one another. Both user experiences (UX) made me really sad. The reason’s the same: software developers don’t give a shit about their profession. They simply don’t care.

UX #1.

The site registration form had a half dozen fields to fill out, which I did. After pressing the Submit button, just one thing has happened: the border in the box where I entered the user ID became red. That’s it. No error messages. I had a feeling that, for some reason, they didn’t like the value I’ve selected for my user id. Was it too difficult to show a short message explaining what did I do wrong? Maybe their software developers don’t know how to display the validation error text? Not the case.

After changing the id and pressing the button Submit again, the following text was displayed on top of the window: ”One or more entered values are wrong.” This time the red border was surrounding the box where I entered the phone number. Is it hard to show the format you expect? I’m not even asking you to use a pre-formatted field… OK, I guessed the required format. But I had a feeling that this unknown software developer just spat into my face and is giggling behind the monitor’s glass.

These phone entry field are poorly programmed in every other form I fill out. Have you seen the validation message like “Please remove all dashes and spaces from the phone number”? Any programmer who wrote anything just a little bit more complex than “Hello World” should know how to programmatically remove all unwanted characters from the string. Or maybe they don’t?

The next job interview I’ll start with writing the following phone number on the piece of paper:

1 800 555-1212

Then I’ll ask this candidate with the resume having the word Senior all over it to write the code removing anything but digits from this text. If he’s not done within 5 minutes, the interview’s over.

UX #2.

This morning I was purchasing online a bus ticket to go from Manhattan to New Jersey (a one hour ride). The address section had a text area where I’ve entered my address and below was a dropdown titled Country and populated with a hundred or so entries. Why in the world it starts with Afghanistan? Is this particular bus route popular among the Afghan citizen? Is this even safe to ride on this bus? What did the developer and his incompetent boss were thinking about? They were thinking about anything but the people who would be using this Web site. Does it require MS in Computer Science to add United States at the top of the list of countries? They don't care.

It’s really sad. Random people are developing software. On the UI side they get away with such quality because people are too forgiving and don’t know any better. On the server side they survive because the hardware became very inexpensive. Instead of writing efficient code, they throw more CPU or scale horizontally by adding more commodity Linux boxes. Waiting to see how these so-called programmers will survive in the mobile space where both memory and CPU are not scalable, at least now.

I know that UI developers working in our company read this blog. Guys, if you’ll deploy an application in QA with the UI showing such disrespect to the users, you are fired. Nothing personal, but this would indicate a serious issue with your attitude toward your profession. You don’t belong here.

A Good Reason to Fire a Programmer

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:00:00 EDT

During the last 12 hours I had to fill out a registration form on one Web site and purchase a bus ticket one another. Both user experiences (UX) made me really sad. The reason “s the same: software developers don “t give a shit about their profession. They simply don “t care. UX #1. The [...]

Java, Soviet Union, and Job Interviews

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:00:00 EDT

Back in the seventies, I’d been taking entry exams to the Kiev Politechnic Institute (KPI). I lived in the Ukraine, which was a part of the Soviet Union. At that time people of Jewish descent had a really hard time getting into most of the colleges and universities. Typically, there were four entry exams for the engineering majors: the verbal math, the written math, the verbal physics, and essay. There were no such things as multiple choice tests – we had to solve problems. Being a Jewish boy myself, I was raised knowing that getting into college would be extremely difficult for me, and I had to be much better prepared than regular Ukrainian and Russian kids. I was strong in math (can’t say this about the physics though).

Java, Soviet Union, and Job Interviews

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:00:00 EDT

Back in the seventies, I “d been taking entry exams to the Kiev Politechnic Institute (KPI). I lived in Ukraine, which was a part of the Soviet Union. At that time people of the Jewish decent had really hard time in getting into most of the colleges and universities. Typically, there were four entry exams [...]