Victor Smith's Blog

What I did today:

• I worked on a very difficult bug with our LoginActivity. The bug would only show up when we used the beta subdomain requests. I looked and looked through the log files to try and find some correlation, but to no avail. I’m still going to work on it though. I’m going to ask Douglas about it, he’s an expert with this kind of stuff.

Highlights:

• I volunteered at the FamilySearch Discovery Center again! This time,  my boss came in to experience it. Originally, we had our 1:1 meeting, but since I was in the Discovery Center, he decided to come down and have me walk him through it instead.

What I did today:

• I did bugs and more bugs. Small ones. Nothing big. Cosmetic changes, etc.
• I talked with Alan about some concerns he had about one of the fixes I did for a bug. But it turns out he hadn’t built the project with my fix in it, oops. But we also talked about some good methods of checking the cache when the user is offline.

Highlights:

• I saw my uncle at the crosswalk today. What a coincidence!

What I did today:

• I got back from a short vacation.
• I worked on deep linking. That means it allows for the app to handle familysearch.org URLs and direct the user to our app into a specific part of the app depending on the URL.

Highlights:

• We had an “All Hands” meeting. Everyone here in SLC gathered to watch a presentation and the higher management talk to us.

What I did today:

• Today was great! I got to do a story by myself. The story was to remove an entire module from the code. It needed to be removed because there was an equivalent module in the Android support library. So I had to go in and change all the instances of this particular thing, “Floating label layout” to the one in the Android support library. Then I had to update the Gradle files and do all the necessary git stuff to get it ready to be merged into master. Now, I just have to wait until Douglas merges his branch into master, then I can merge. I branched off of his branch.
• I also worked on a reported crash. It was a simple NPE, but there seems to be an overall pattern flaw, so we have to go in and change all that too.

Highlights:

• Nothing much other than what I mentioned above…

What I did today:

• I worked on bugs again. For a good portion of the morning, I was trying to figure out what I thought would be a simple bug: the color was off on a progress spinner. But when I got into the code, I couldn’t see how it was being changed to that color. After some digging, I found out that the app’s theme was being ignored at that particular place. And so after talking with the team lead, Mark, I found that the reason why the theme was being ignored was because it was referencing the wrong Context. So after switching to the correct context, it worked!
• I read more on Kotlin on the train ride to work. It seems like an awesome language to learn. I hope to be able to try it out with a demo app or API or something.

Highlights:

• Today was my first day volunteering at the “Family History Discovery Center”. It’s mandatory for interns (so I was voluntold :P) but I had fun teaching people about family history stuff and cool things to learn. I do this every Friday from now on.

What I did today:

• I worked on bugs, bugs, and bugs. Actually, I only worked on two bugs. But still, one of them was pretty tricky to figure out, but I finally got it. It came down to the PersonManager class not handling the case of new objects to be put in the cache until after, or something like that. I just used the same code as what was in a similar method, just adapted it to fit.
• I tried to convince Alan, my mentor, to allow me to take on an Engineering story all by myself, but because there were higher priorities of tasks that needed to be done, I ended up scrubbing bugs. But hopefully I’ll be able to take on that story next week…maybe. I’m gone from next Wednesday to Friday, so we’ll see.

Highlights:

• I talked to Alan Smoot today about my plans for fall and mentioned that Brian had suggested to me that I should talk to Alan about extending my internship. I talked to him about that, and he said that there is a possibility to have me take a “Student Engineer” position for the rest of the year! I was pretty excited about that. But he said it’s not final, but he’ll see what he can do.

What I did today:

• I implemented a new developer experiment setting for WAF (Web Application Firewall). What that is, I don’t know. I asked my coworkers and even they didn’t know what it was. But basically, this setting allowed us to request using www.familysearch.org, instead of plain ole familysearch.org. Why that was important, I have no idea.
• I tried to figure out if we could remove a certain library for a floating label layout for textviews. I ran into a bunch of problems though. That was in part because one other coworker, Douglas, was working on removing the Custom font stuff throughout the entire app. So, I’m just going to wait until he’s finished up to do it.

Highlights:

• The trains were pretty messed up today coming to work. There needed to be some construction work done on the rails, so they had us wait for 30mins at this one intersection. It was awful.

What I did today:

• I worked on a bug that was actually quite challenging to figure out, even for my coworkers. It had to do with Fragments and Events and if/when the fragment was receiving and handling the event. The bug was basically that the fragment wasn’t handling the event, but we expected it to. We figured out that as long as we retained the instance state for the fragment, then it would work like we would expect. Thanks Mark for figuring that out!
• Did a simple story task Brian asked me to do. It was a bug of the app crashing after requesting the tasks for an empty pedigree. Because there were no ancestors/descendants to pull from, the  API was returning null, but we had assumed that it would return an empty list instead of null.

Highlights:

• I had my 1:1 with Alan Smoot, my manager (1:1s are every Thursdays to talk about stuff with your manager one on one). It was nice to be able to talk to someone about my life and how I was doing. I just feel like I need to ask him more questions on work things though. I can’t waste my time here.

What I did today:

• I finally worked on my first story! Even though it was only a part of a story, still, it was story work! I deleted a setting in the settings activity. It was an option to include the History List in the Ancestors with Tasks.
• I fixed a bug that I submitted a few days ago. The bug was where upon rotating the device at a particular time, it would generate too many  icons in the action bar. It was surprisingly hard to debug. It would only happen under circumstances, but the problem was, we didn’t know the circumstances! But after fiddling around with it for a few days, Douglas (our other teammate down in Orem) found how to reliably reproduce it! After that, it was a piece of cake. All I needed to do was modify an else statement into an else-if checking to see if the menu was already inflated or not.

Highlights:

• Nothing much more than what I explained above. Aww… 🙁

What I did today:

• I scrubbed bugs.
• I had a hard time tracking one down. The bug was that the cache wasn’t being expired when it needed so it was showing stale data for the Activity’s title even though the user had just changed it.

Highlights:

• I had tamales today. They were AWESOME.