So: What is best? A native app or a hybrid app? And if you build a hybrid app, what’s the best framework to use? As with most interesting questions, it turns out that the answer is “it depends”. I often get questions like “isn’t Xamarin (or Cordova) better than build a native app”. Weeeell, it’s not as simple as that. Here’s a few ideas that I’ve found myself repeating lately:

(Looks like I’m back in the conference organization game again! After a few years of lots of travel and then a few years of lots of family responsibilities, this year I co-funded the Mobile Era conference. It looks like it will be a blast!) If your experience is anything like mine, most of the interesting projects around you are having a larger mobile component this year than last year. I think this trend will continue.

At JavaZone this year, I gave the talk “Computer Vision for mobile Java developers”. Here, I live code finding conference badges in a picture. The coding is iterative and interactive and I use it to illustrate Haar cascades, Canny edge detection, Otsu thresholding, contour detection, erosion and dilation and contour analysis. In my experience, developing a good algorithm with OpenCV is about setting up yourself for feedback. I read an example image, add one and one processing step to it and display the results as I work.

Er det noen som sammenligner omfang og kostnad på IT prosjekter i Norge? Jeg tror man kunne få noen interessante innsikter dersom man gjorde dette riktig. (Jeg må unnskylde at teksten i denne blogposten blir litt vag - jeg ønsker å si så lite som mulig om de aktuelle prosjektene for å unngå å eksponere andre) Akkurat når jeg var involvert i et tilbudsarbeid for et prosjekt, var jeg samtidig involert i den endelige godkjenningen av et annet prosjekt.

Man kan lese fra moderne tanker på IT-utvikling at prosjekter er en avleggs arbeidsform. For de som har erfaring med utviklingsaktiviteter innen offentlig og privat sektor kan dette virke som en rar påstand. De aller fleste ser behovet for å unngå store prosjekter, men er prosjektet som arbeidsform virkelig avleggs? Det spør naturligvis på hva man mener: I alle de årene jeg har jobbet med IT-utvikling er det en ting som er sikkert.

As programmers, we have long learned that Duplication is the Ultimate Sin of programming. Even considering to duplicate something is almost unthinkable. But removing duplication introduces dependencies. If you and I use the reuse the same piece of code instead of duplicating it, changes I make may affect you. This effect can anything from beneficial (I fixed a bug you also needed fixing) to benign (I added a new feature that you’re not using) to detrimental (I want it to work in a way that’s no good for you).

I was humbled and encouraged to learn that I was nominated for Nordic Startup Awards category of Developer Hero for my contributions to the developer community. You can vote for me or one of the other great candidates here. For the last ten years, I have felt that the main pain points of the software development world could be fixed by empowering and inspiring those who do the work. From my perspective, I have focused on the developers.

I have an amazing time machine that lets me think better about projects. This is part 3 in a series of blog posts exploring the use of a time machine. In order to get a handle on how to build a feature for your next iteration, take a trip with your time machine to the future to watch how the feature will be demonstrated. It’s often hard for developers to focus on exactly what tasks needs to be performed in order to build a new feature.

I have an amazing time machine that lets me think better about projects. This is part 2 in a series of blog posts exploring the use of a time machine. This is a trick that I learned from my User Experience (UX) friends. In many projects, the project members have a great feeling about the possibilities of the product they are building, even if they quite know if they will get there or if the road ahead will be bumpy.

I have an amazing time machine that lets me think better about projects. This is part 1 in a series of blog posts exploring the use of a time machine. Let’s say that you have a project that has been running for a couple of months. Looking back at your issue tracker and other artifacts, you notice that it’s hard to see what has been done and especially how much time remains.