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Learning French

I have decided to learn French. I do not have a specific purpose for doing that. Like many other technological inventions, that are made and then end users come up with uses for them, so is my French course. I will find a use for it. Technological inventions could also be made with a specific purpose in mind but turn out to be used in a completely different way. The inventor of the screwdriver did not know that she was making a tin can opener. I will log my struggles in learning French on a separate page and invite any help anyone could offer me.

A prototype is a mannequin?

Anyone who has developed software for someone else will easily agree that instructions are never clear – and if they are clear, they are never adequate. That “someone else” is a customer, and as in business – “the customer is always right”. As developers, though, we must find how to play back what we understood the customer to be saying. The one way to parrot back is using the prototype. This is one way by which stakeholders could tell if they were understood while it gives them a chance to clarify their instructions. XCode and Android Studio are wired to create a type of app without updating the boilerplate code. It makes it easy to drop controls on it and create a mannequin – I mean a prototype. It is possible to create some navigation, and menu bars without much code. The mannequin will show how it will all fit together.

ScrollView and StackView

I said a StackView is much like a Home Depot packing box in a previous post. You place your controls in the StackView much like you place items in a packing box. The only thing you state regarding positioning is where the StackView sits. A ScrollView is much like a floater thing in a swimming pool. We define the size of the pool and tell the float how much it can move around the pool.

I think I am right.

Isn’t XCode’s StackView much like a Home Depot packing box?

Autolayout in XCode can quickly come across as something difficult to understand. To a new learner, one may wonder how to use the StackView to manage the placement of controls on a screen. The problem is that we must tell a StackView where to sit and give some direction on the controls inside it on where to stay, what direction to face, how far they are to be away from one another etc. To ease the explanation, I think this view is very much like a storage box that then gets stacked away (stacked?) in a storage room. If we store tools in a storage box, those hammers and spanners do not have to know where they are in the store. They just need to know that they are in the storage box. We only must decide where the storage box gets placed, in which case we just set two dimensions (essentially). How far the package will be from the wall on the side, and how far it will be from the wall in the front. That’s it. The box is stored; hence the spanners and hammers stay put. Right?

Who likes computers?

I'm not too fond of computers. I don’t.

Being an IT professional, this might surprise many. I believe computers are nothing more than work tools that are supposed to enhance our productivity. We should be able to make computers work for us and not the other way around. This is not always the case. We have heard of having been more glued and tethered to technology, such that we were freer when there was less technology. This should not be the case. Technology is intended to add to our freedom and create greater flexibility.

That said, I like what computers do and what they can do. I love to explore technology and what it is capable of doing not only to support the business but our very lives. During the COVID-19-mandated lockdown, with people working remotely and school classes running online, we appear to need computers for our very lives. We cannot live and work without them.

My liking for what computers can do, and not a love for computers, has led me to develop a deep interest in telling computers what to do. And since computers run on software, I found myself becoming a software developer. My journey as a software developer has been guided by my interpretation of what information systems are – a science that guides the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information. Computers can fall well on that food chain as they guide how we get information in whatever format it is, store it in database systems, retrieve and display it, and guide the use of it to promote life and business.

I started in telecommunications in Kenya in the early ’90s working on Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) maintaining switches. At the turn of the century, I took up a job as a cellular network switching engineer where I was, and still am, fascinated by how cell phone networks carry voice and data.

Coming to college in America I did my undergraduate in Computer Information Systems and a masters degree in Management Information Systems. That led me to the pursuit of a PhD in Information Systems and Technology at Claremont Graduate University. While working on these degrees I have held software development jobs with an emphasis on database development.