Continuing with the series of developer interviews, today we bring you the interview with Jorge Barroso (co-founder and Android expert at Karumi) and Pedro Gómez (senior mobile developer at Karumi). Their professional paths crossed while they were on the development team at Tuenti, and from there they established Karumi, a development studio focused on mobile apps. In the first part of the interview, as usual, we make an initial approach to computer science. In this case, we talk about the degree and highlight the fact that the degree does not just teach programming. In the second part, we delve into their time at Tuenti and now at Karumi. The case of Tuenti is interesting, as they already had an enviable company culture and team organization even back then. Also noteworthy is the work they do at Karumi, and their perseverance; they have been going for 3 years!
Interview Breakdown
1:30 Computer Science Degree
- I pursued a computer science degree because as a child I wanted to make video games.
- University is not the real world, but it’s a world you have to go through.
- People talk about the computer science degree as if it were just programming, but there are many other things (networks, operating systems, hardware…).
- You can be a great programmer even if you don’t have a degree.
- The university has to be academic and generic.
7:42 Side-projects
- When I joined Tuenti, I came in as an associate. In that phase, you need to study and publish a lot.
9:50 Google Developer Expert
- It's a recognition that Google gives to those who contribute to the community.
- Last year, Jorge gave 52 talks.
- Google supports you technically (access to betas, talking to engineers) and financially (traveling to conferences).
12:30 Tuenti
- Only 1-2% of candidates passed the selection process.
- We reached over 100 people in the technology area.
- There was only one Android team, and it was divided by vertical product lines. We could count the engineers by multiplying by 8 the number of Product Managers.
- When I joined, Android did not exist at Tuenti. Two years later, we had surpassed Web in daily users.
- There were 2 right decisions made: dividing teams into verticals, and breaking the technology teams apart.
- There were people who were experts in Android, for example, but could also handle the iOS code. This encouraged autonomy.
- I remember the CEO of Tuenti calling users to ask for their password. In the end, we discovered the bug with the database encoding.
30:45 Karumi
- We are 5 developers and 1 business person.
- All 5 developers have passed through Tuenti (Tuenti Mafia).
- I was tired of working on the same product. There came a time when I didn’t know how to set up a project from scratch.
- We wanted to create products, but all the ideas we came up with seemed terrible.
- We are not going to compete on price; we are going to compete on quality.
- We do training, consulting, integrate with development teams, and create our own products and open source work.
- We started doing open source and in a year we made it into the top 100 globally in Java.
43:10 FlowUp
- It’s a mobile application monitoring tool in production
FlowUp Dashboard - It's an SDK that initializes in 1 line and provides you with a ton of data ().
- With this tool, we were able to analyze the performance of the Twitter application and see which Activity had a lower frame rate.
- It's an application that is good for analyzing what.
- The main competitor is NewRelic, but they are very focused on analyzing requests. We are focused on broader aspects.
49:00 Type Classes
- Question from Juanma Serrano: When will Type Classes be available in Object-Oriented Programming?
- Kotlin isn’t functional, nor is it close, but it's much better than Java.
- It doesn’t make sense to develop an Android application in Scala due to compilation times and the small community of developers.
- Support for Type Classes in Object-Oriented Programming will not come to Android with either Java8 or Kotlin. The problem is that the language needs to support Higher Order Kinds.