Noise from the Basement

Chris and I are late to the party, bidding our fond farewells to Stuart McLean.  But it wouldn’t be right to not pay our respects to the person who motivated us through many a chore.

Long before Saturday Morning Productions or Goal Buddy were even conceived, we were spending our Saturday mornings building a cold storage room under the stairs in our then-new house.  We can honestly say it is the opening riff of the theme music and the sound of the storyteller’s voice that encouraged us to get sawing and painting.  We even emailed him back then to let him know the impact he had on our routine.  Years later, during jam-making and harvest seasons, we have his show to thank for the completed room.

The results of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2017 are live.  Some surprising highlights for me:

• Most developers surveyed are white male web developers.  Just kidding, this was not surprising at all.
• More than 50% of developers’ parents had a university degree of some type.  I wonder what the parent’s education level is like for other occupations?
•  SQL is the 2nd most popular programming language.  Surprising to me because I don’t think of SQL as a programming language. Not sure why.  Maybe because you don’t run a SQL application but an application that uses SQL.  Guess I have to change my thinking.
• Most dreaded language is VB6 which is what I started my professional career with.  Not sure why people dislike it so much.  Maybe it has more to do with the fact most VB6 projects are old and it’s hard to get a VB6 development environment setup.
• The most dreaded platform is Sharepoint, which is something I’ve never liked and actively avoid.  Glad it’s not just me.
• Visual Studio is a very popular IDE but the second most popular was Notepad++.  I assume that everyone has Notepad++ installed on their workstation.  Unless you are a sysadmin then you like Vim.  Don’t forget to quit Vim it’s Esc-q or Esc-wq if you want to save and quit.
• Most developers outside of the United States are underpaid when you translate their salary to USD.  I wonder if this is because of the currently strong US dollar and if the difference wouldn’t have been so high 5 years ago.
• Git won the version control war over Mercurial despite me personally liking Mercurial better.  Surprisingly Subversion is used more than Mercurial.

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Update: My last blog post was about my unsuccessful attempt at the APREP, which is the physical assessment part of the Edmonton Police Service’s hiring process. I passed on my second attempt, which was on February 13! It went so much better the second time, and not just because I didn’t wipe out (although not wiping out did help).

Here’s what was really different: my attitude. The first time I attempted the APREP, I was thinking about all the people I was afraid to let down. Ultimately, I was afraid of letting myself down, and not just all the people who were supporting me. It was the worst possible attitude I could have approached the situation with, because if you tell yourself “don’t screw up” then chances are, you are going to screw up.

I’m currently working on a notification plugin for Xamarin Forms and wanted to setup some unit tests.  The problem is my code accesses the device-specific notification systems in iOS and Android.  This means I can’t just run my unit tests on Windows.  Instead I need to run the unit tests in a iOS or Android environment.  In my case this means an emulator.

How to do that?  Use the NUnit 3 Xamarin Runners.  It was not clear how to correctly create the test projects but the way that worked for me was this.

A couple of weeks ago, we at Saturday Morning Productions learned that Stuart Maclean, of CBC’s The Vinyl Cafe, passed away of melanoma. It was a loss felt keenly by all of us (Liv, Ada and Chris). When I (Liv) started working at Saturday MP, I was happy to discover that I wasn’t the only Vinyl Cafe listener on the team. Stuart’s Dave and Morley stories cracked me up on a regular basis, and some of the musicians he had as guests over the years had become regulars on my playlists (especially Owen Pallett and Harmony Trowbridge).