David S. Read

I presented at the inagural Tech Valley Mobile Developers Network (TVMDN) meeting on Wednesday, February 1, 2012. My topic was, "Getting Started with Android Development," which provided an introduction to Android programming. During this session I introduced the Android API, focusing on the creation of an interactive application. The XML configuration files and Java code that make up a typical Android program were described and explored. The session touched on UI layout options, widget interactions, lifecycle events, internationalization and application packaging.

My goal was to demonstrate in realtime the creation of a basic application as part of the 45 minute presentation. Linked here are the presentation slides (PDF) and the demonstration source coode (ZIP).

Joe Raiti, CIO of Blue Slate Solutions and I co-authored a report for InformationWeek entitled, State of Database Technology. The report took survey data from over 700 IT professionals with database responsibilities and assessed the current strategies and challenges associated with database products. We also explored near-term and longer-term trends that IT leaders should be considering as they plan the future of their enterprise data management infrastructures.

A subset of the report was used as the basis for the cover article of the January 16, 2012 issue of InformationWeek.

All truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

… well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you – if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers – the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.
-Fred Brooks (from No Silver Bullet found in The Mythical Man Month)

Computers are nitpicky, precise, literal, unimaginative and disinterested in your project’s success!
-David Read