By Yakov Fain 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... May. 8, 2012 04:12 PM EDT Reads: 252 |
By Yakov Fain  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 ... May. 2, 2012 05:00 AM EDT Reads: 332 |
By Yakov Fain 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 a... Apr. 18, 2012 10:30 AM EDT Reads: 355 |
By Yakov Fain 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 configured̶... Apr. 17, 2012 12:39 PM EDT Reads: 226 |
By Yakov Fain 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 kne... Apr. 16, 2012 08:17 PM EDT Reads: 133 |
By Yakov Fain 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 o... Apr. 16, 2012 02:06 PM EDT Reads: 366 |
By Yakov Fain  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, ... Apr. 11, 2012 05:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,438 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Apr. 10, 2012 10:05 AM EDT Reads: 366 |
By Yakov Fain 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 [...] Apr. 7, 2012 09:19 AM EDT Reads: 278 |
By Yakov Fain  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... Mar. 28, 2012 07:35 PM EDT Reads: 619 |
By Yakov Fain 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 vi... Mar. 26, 2012 11:57 AM EDT Reads: 165 |
By Yakov Fain 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. Las... Mar. 18, 2012 04:47 PM EDT Reads: 231 |
By Yakov Fain 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 bla... Mar. 9, 2012 07:15 AM EST Reads: 536 |
By Yakov Fain  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... Mar. 6, 2012 07:00 AM EST Reads: 1,441 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Feb. 22, 2012 10:06 AM EST Reads: 576 |
By Yakov Fain 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 [..... Feb. 21, 2012 06:58 PM EST Reads: 400 |
By Yakov Fain  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 th... Feb. 15, 2012 11:20 PM EST Reads: 1,153 |
By Yakov Fain 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. ... Feb. 15, 2012 10:25 AM EST Reads: 648 |
By Yakov Fain 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)... Feb. 13, 2012 12:37 PM EST Reads: 740 |
By Yakov Fain  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 fram... Jan. 10, 2012 10:40 AM EST Reads: 3,487 |
By Yakov Fain 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 wh... Jan. 4, 2012 12:23 PM EST Reads: 268 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Dec. 14, 2011 08:55 PM EST Reads: 1,041 |
By Yakov Fain 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 ... Nov. 30, 2011 09:27 AM EST Reads: 372 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Nov. 25, 2011 06:55 AM EST Reads: 2,159 |
By Yakov Fain 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, an... Nov. 18, 2011 11:51 AM EST Reads: 258 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Nov. 7, 2011 09:57 AM EST Reads: 455 |
By Yakov Fain 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 though... Nov. 3, 2011 10:11 AM EDT Reads: 335 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Oct. 21, 2011 10:03 AM EDT Reads: 368 |
By Yakov Fain 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 ... Oct. 19, 2011 05:52 PM EDT Reads: 250 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Oct. 14, 2011 10:11 PM EDT Reads: 490 |
By Yakov Fain  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 populati... Oct. 12, 2011 08:30 AM EDT Reads: 2,502 |
By Yakov Fain My old blog http://yakovfain.javadevelopersjournal.com/ will shut down soon. This is my personal blog’s new home. Oct. 8, 2011 04:59 PM EDT Reads: 181 |
By Yakov Fain 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 ra... Sep. 22, 2011 04:58 PM EDT Reads: 199 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Sep. 22, 2011 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 160 |
By Yakov Fain  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 explai... Sep. 15, 2011 02:30 PM EDT Reads: 2,909 |
By Yakov Fain 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 explai... Sep. 14, 2011 02:02 PM EDT Reads: 137 |
By Yakov Fain 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 ... Sep. 9, 2011 11:21 AM EDT Reads: 256 |
By Yakov Fain 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 “... Sep. 8, 2011 08:00 PM EDT Reads: 127 |
By Yakov Fain 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, t... Aug. 30, 2011 08:00 PM EDT Reads: 133 |
By Yakov Fain Java 7 has this new feature - now you can add the keyword final to the catch clause. This feature is pretty confusing. I tried to find bits and pieces that would make me wanna write the final qualifier in front of the exception's type. This blog didn't help much. I... Aug. 30, 2011 03:46 PM EDT Reads: 294 |
Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of 
