Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Life with a Mac a few weeks in

At my new job my development machine is a Mac. Having been a heavy windows user for the last bunch of years but using a Mac on occasion to do some iOS development the change has been pretty easy.

Initial setup took some time as did learning initial command line options. Really everything else is pretty much just like on a PC. You run Eclipse, Sublime Editor, Chrome, Outlook, Finder, Terminal window, Evernote, a music player and various file viewers for images and PDF files. 

Once configured you just have to learn the proper shortcut keys to pull of frequent operations and off you go. This is a MacBook pro and I have a large second monitor. Everything is really fast.

I have been working on parsing XML and JSON files from security firms. Lots and lots of parsing of large files - will not HUGE but big as in 55+meg in size. I tried a number of JSON parsers and finally settled on Jackson as I needed to do streaming parsing and needed the ability to build simple JSON constructs on the fly as one provider uses JSON for request and response while the other two use standard HTTPS: requests with ?name=value params for requests and XML for responses.

Each API has its own set of oddities. Right now I have everything we need parsing and am using pagination to keep the response sizes to something reasonable. Next step will be hooking it all into the production code. Always good to iron out the bugs with simple test applications first.

At this point I really don't even think about being on a Mac. Sure the frame decorations are a bit different than in Windows but Eclipse looks and operates like Eclipse. Chrome is Chrome and sucked over all my settings, bookmarks and extensions. 

If I need a program I can generally find it but there are a lot less free options than on the Windows. Most things cost something or there is one or two free versions. Most programs have already made a number of decisions for you. Unzip something? Put it right where you unzipped it from. Don't ask where you want to put it. Download something? Yep, already gonna do it to the one directory I have chosen. Not a huge deal. I move things around expo facto but there is a lot more hand holding.

I have been kind of surprised at home much time I have spent in Terminal. Using Mac Ports to install software, dealing with CURL and Python etc. Some of this is for testing the API and some has been to get around Finder limitations. Of course I do the same when in Windows. Not that a normal schmuck would do this, as a developer I tend to need to do odd things.

There has been a lot of learning. I have never used CURL, xml_grep or JSON streaming parsing before. I had limited exposure to Python and Tree based JSON parsing. None of the sample code I have gotten for the APIs has been written in Java meaning I must learn CURL, Python etc. to know enough to convert to our target language. I love to learn so it has been a lot of fun for me. Gives you an appreciation for the other languages and utilities.

Working with vendors keeps you on your toes too. Good to have 3 going at same time otherwise you are waiting on one to respond while you have nothing to do which is never good. Keep me busy. Also allows you to spot differences and similarities in the APIs making some coding go faster. If this was split between 3 people that knowledge would not be shared as easily. I have shared many classes between the projects.

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