banjo.nu ramblings

New adventures ahead!

Almost to the day ten years after joining Softhouse I’m moving on to a new adventure: in August I’m starting as a Producer / Technical Project Manager at Mobiento.

It’s a bit emotional to leave Softhouse. In June 2001 I started my Master Thesis project at Softhouse in Malmö. 6 months later I joined the small team of about 25 consultants as a Softhouse employee. Now 10 years later, Softhouse has grown to more than 100 employees in 4 offices, where I was part of starting up the Stockholm office in 2007 as a partner. Leaving Softhouse, I will remember all the good times, the very first assignment in Malmö, the startup time in Stockholm (we didn’t even have an office), and all the excellent and funny people I’ve been working with, and so much more. It’s been great times, but as much as I’m looking back, I’m even more looking forward.

Joining Mobiento means working with world class mobile experiences. We’re truly in the middle of a mobile revolution, and to be able to work in the forefront of mobile solutions is really exciting. For me, delivering user experience has always been the primary focus, which I will now dive into even further at Mobiento. Leaving coding behind is a big step for me, and I’m looking forward to focusing only on project management using agile methodologies. I will probably still be coding on my spare time though.

Right now, there’s a series of radical changes in my life at the same time, and this is part one. Stay tuned for more!

Details on Dropshop synchronization implementation

This wednesday I gave a talk at Softhouse about how I solved the synchrozation in Dropshop. In short, I deployed a RESTful web service on Google App Engine using Jersey which implemented a protocol used by Evernote for a really simple way to synchronize shared data between any number of clients. This might be the subject for a more comprehensive post, but in the mean time you can look through my presentation below.

How to solve DatastoreNeedIndexException on Google App Engine

I’m writing an iPhone application that synchs content to a server. Right now I’m in the final stages of testing the server, which is written in Java and running on Google App Engine.

However, In a certain workflow, my application returned a 500
error with the following entry in the logs:

Uncaught exception from servlet com.google.appengine.api.datastore.DatastoreNeedIndexException: no matching index found

According to the docs 

[…] every query you run automatically gets indexed when necessary. If you thoroughly test your application before uploading it to your website, all of the indexes your application will need will be included in your application’s datastore-indexes.xml […] You may manually add indexes if you find a query that was not covered by your development testing.

I have nearly a hundred unit test cases covering most of the logic in my application, and I double checked that it indeed was covering this case too. To be extra sure, I went on and wrote a new test case, simulating the exact case of the workflow generating the error. But still, the entry in the datastore-indexes.xml was missing.

Not until I ran the application locally for the live workflow, the needed entry was included in the XML file. After re-deploying the application to Google App Engine, the problem was solved.

So, if you don’t want to edit your index files manually, remember that the local unit test cases will not get your indexes automatically configured!

Default section header font in UITableView

When coding a UIActivityIndicator next to the title in a UITableView section header, I needed to recreate the default style of the section header. This code helped me, but I created a custom view class, so I can re-use the view in several table views in my app.