Maximilian Alexander

Magician

[mbalex99]

On point (at Medium Rare Music)

[mbalex99]

Only use repetition when your audience barely is aware of your existence

[mbalex99]

Talking to an Angel in the East Coast vs. West Coast

East Coast

Me: “Hey, I thought about making a new phone from scratch."

John: “What do you mean?"

Me: “I mean like, completely a new phone from the ground up. Not iOS or Android. It’s got a completely new programming language, it diffs binaries and is built primarily to distribute extreme performance beautiful apps."

Me: “It’s absolutely ridiculous that I have to go through the Apple Review process for 9 days to get a critical bug fix approved"

Me: “Android sucks as well"

John: “This is a massive undertaking, I what’s wrong with the current system?"

Me: “I have a mobile app, it took me 6 months to build on iOS, 3 weeks on Android, and 3 days on Web. Mobile is getting more and more important but these frameworks completely just FIGHT me. I think I’m an expert developer and designer but imagine if had the freedom to build it with the flexibility of the web.”

John: “Unless you have tremendous funding and expertise I can’t see how this can be pulled off to beat Apple. I’m perfectly happy with the apps. "

Me: “Apple cares about computers but they don’t care about developers, Google has android but they don’t care about android like they do with Search. So I’m aiming primarily for the tech community"

John: “What are the margins on this thing?"

Me: “I don’t know man, this is a hackathon lol"

John: “Ah okay, I thought this is a plan"

Me: “No I’ll have a prototype!!!!"

John: “When can you show me?"

Me: “When are you in SF? I missed you when I was in Boston"

John: “Sorry I was so busy. I can show a plan to a few of my colleagues but they want to see some market numbers"

Me: “OH MY FUCKING god John, it’s a prototype, I don’t have a plan. The market numbers are on every blog and news outlet"

John: “No like demand and supply"

Silicon Valley

Me: “Hey, I thought about making a new phone from scratch." — Explanation Truncated ---

Sam: “Oh I see, that’s a pretty big project. Do you know much about the space."

Me: “Hardware? Marginally. Software: only on the programming side."

Sam: “So you’re going to find co-founders for this?"

Me: “I’m hosting a hackathon for designers to hack up a beautiful operating system user interface and some industrial designers to come up with a comfortable concept phone. By makers fare I’ll at least have a phone mold"

Sam: “That’s some fucking initiative. Let’s meet up this week, I have some introductions that I can make for you."

Me: “Monday???"

Sam: “So this isn’t really my field just so you know, I can help you find the right people."

Me: “I’ll forward you my blender files. My buddy and I hacked on it all weekend"

Sam: “Just be careful and focus. If this takes momentum, you got to drop all your shit. You have to be all in"

[mbalex99]

It is your right

Your poor mother nature spent every day of her waking moment trying to make you better. She got you a big brain with tremendous potential.

And what do you do? Complain that all these things in your way preventing you from doing something.

You have a brain, find a way around the problem.

Make sure your obituary isn't filled pointless filler text.

[mbalex99]

The look I give when a person tells me I need big data immediately at my early stage company.

[mbalex99]

I don't think the watch is for me at the moment. I will keep an open mind. I recently got glasses and things consistently "touching you" is a hard thing to adjust to unless they are necessary. The phone complimented the pocket. Like the wallet, it was an easier adjustment.

[mbalex99]

This is why mobile development needs to be disrupted. It is so unfathomably long and tedious to pass around data between Activities that you need THIS much code to pull it off. It's kind of rediculous.

[mbalex99]

This is probably one of my favorite essays by Paul Graham

[mbalex99]

Another successful barbecue

[mbalex99]

[mbalex99]

Using angular with jade is a beautiful thing

[mbalex99]

Beautiful california

[mbalex99]

New Version of Epoque

Epoque is a little messy right now. We need to come up with a way to segment the worlds.

[mbalex99]

Retrospect on Collegiate Education and Entrepreneurism

If I felt alive again, then why did my heart die in the first place? The entrepreneurs that I met in San Francisco were of all shapes and sizes but all male. Many of them were college dropouts but a good amount were only high school graduates. All of them, brilliant and inspiring. In Boston, educational “degreed” esteem is extremely important. Stating that you went to school at MIT or Harvard, is pure validation. It’s enough to get the ball rolling for job placement and obtaining investments. Although California has some excellent school, the validation of college seems to be absent. I met a Romanian Russian who moved to San Francisco by running away from home to start a company. The code that he was writing could run circles around many of the people that I had worked with. He and many others proved to me that a collegiate education was not necessary for exceptional skill in technology. 

So what does this say about myself? I’d like to think that I’m a ferociously fast learner and can catch up to most people just given the amount of interest in a skill or trade. However, had I been wasting my own time by going to college? I think so. College never made me smarter. I met some of the best people ever. I gained many great lifelong friends who I feel closer than family. However, it didn’t enhance my skills as an engineer. My initial interests in astronomy and biology took a hard hit by the regimented curriculum of my undergraduate course load. These classes were absent of interest. They were borg-like preaches to pass an already calculated grade curve of exams. I had gone through 3 full years of college absorbing nothing more than this information: that I was all a waste of time for a cost of $56,000 a year. Society is great at civil engineering: I thank it for the clean water readily available and the fact that I have hot water to shower in. However, it can equally trick you into pouring your money and time into something that ultimately has very little value.

Entrepreneurial activities has shaped our future. It is exactly the same sort of chaos and randomness that promotes evolution in biology and accretion in astrophysics. Educational validation has never shown any sort of weight in the collection of successful companies. So why do we teach entrepreneurship in class? Unlike corporate accounting, preaching to your classes’ head to create the illusion that they will be ripe for success is rather disingenuous. The tremendous failure rate that startups encounter, we can see that if there’s some sort of a magical formula to creating the next “Facebook” or “Google” surely no one has found it. Meeting successful entrepreneurs, they all seem to have life line close calls. The founders of AirBnB resorted to selling cereal to make ends meet. Bullet burns to fiscal starvation, the uglies and the scars never seem to get mentioned in the “startup” classes in brand name universities. These are certainly the hardships of diving into the wilderness and giving things a try. Massaging and caressing a whiteboard might be as odd as counting your hunting fortunes from constellations, for things rarely workout according to plan.

Startup are cancer. Cancer is nothing more than a generic term for a genetic mutation gone awry that ultimately harms health. However, like evolution we really do depend on this mutation. The misfit of carefully built genes are rebels. Like all rebels, misfits often die out. But the mother of probability might really be the answer to success. One in a million mutations earn the word “evolution”. Thus evolution is really the source of innovation that creates more advanced wings, fins, and brains and ultimately dictate the survival of the species. This seems to be the only formula that science has taught us about creating more efficient and complex structures. For the thousands of startups out there, it doesn’t matter that many of them are aiming at somewhat silly. Probability has never discounted silly things. Just look at the turtle. One sliver in a massive haystack will prove to be a needle that brings us into the future. Thus, survival may be the ultimate lesson to learn in the world of startups. Survival embraces the concept and ideology that it cannot be taught in clean whiteboard. It is a mixture of several concepts that is learned in realtime and can only be minimally anticipated. Survival also embraces difficulties, courage, loss, hardships, love, and belief. In a way, it appropriately describes entrepreneurship than “entrepreneurship”. 

Exalt. Tremble. Survive. 

[mbalex99]

Specifying different configuration values for Android

So you have an Android Application that talks to your backend servers. There's a good chance that you have different environments with different urls:

Your production API URL might be mybackend.com

Your dev API URL might be dev.mybackend.com

Your local API URL might be localhost:8080

Well how we build and run our Android to supply our code with these url endpoints?

I'm using Android Studio (Beta) 0.8.6 for the screenshots but it might not matter.

Your build.gradle file in your app folder (not at the project root)

Add the following lines. These are called productFlavors.

https://gist.github.com/mbalex99/dfd2627b00de56696596

Your build.gradle file should look something similar to this

https://gist.github.com/mbalex99/4581045b98aacb9eea84

You'll probably be prompted to sync your gradle file which will build everything because Android Studio detected your changes

On the the side of Android Studio you should see a toggle for a menu called "Build Variants". The Build Variants contain all the combinations of your build types (debug or release) mixed with your product flavors. Select the drop down menu of the specific setting that you want to build or run with. 

Now during runtime, you should be able to retrieve the string of your package name. Here's a general gist of how to deal with the packageName during runtime. I won't be very opinionated on how you structure it but this should give you a general outline.

https://gist.github.com/mbalex99/d64dc290f26aa47870b7

Some takeaways:

Note: 10.0.0.2 is how the android emulator recognizes localhost. If your local testing api is on localhost:8080. You'll need to tell the emulator 10.0.0.2.

Consider using SharedPreferences to store your values or using a Singleton

[mbalex99]

Yoooooooo #throwback #momanddad #oldie

[mbalex99]

I think I"m feeling this version of Epoque's Logo a lot more!