MenisMas' Blog

Recently I met the people and movement behind LinkyBrains and I have to say I feel very identified with what they say. After first weeks with LinkyBrains in my head some crazy or "LinkyBrainy" things have come to my mind and I would like to write down the first one (I hope not the last one).

I am a lover and a very active promoter of knowledge sharing both professionally and personally, I believe people sharing the knowledge contribute to continuous improve the world we live, it is a simple way to get more than one brain building solutions.

As part of my job I constantly think and apply exercises to get my team and myself sharing the knowledge, and we are getting good results in some the exercises we apply and not so good in others. If we would like to move the knowledge sharing to the next level, a possible a potential way would be sharing the knowledge between companies.

There are several ways this can be done, meetups run by different individuals working in different companies help to share the technologies used and how to apply them, but that's not really enough. If we could find a way where developers can work in a different office and see how others apply a technology to develop a solution. And it is not just technologies, it is about how to be organized, how other teams communicate, and so on.

Of course, there are some security and risks companies in the same sector sharing sensible information but it could be run by companies working in different sectors. I think it is time to remove all the barriers have been there such lot of years where software development companies don't talk and don't want to know about others.

I wrote this article in a plane while traveling to UK, it took me few minutes to write the essential idea although I’ve been thinking on it for few weeks before I wrote done the lines below. I have to say when I read them again to publish in the blog the look like a draft but I want to publish them now and decorate the text in the future. In other words, take the lines below as notes for a draft but describing the essential.

​It was several years ago first time I read about cross training concept, I was back to practice running after few years stopped and no sport practicing in my life. I understood in that moment, some professional dedicated to sports practice other sport or sports as part of their training to improve their metrics.

I've been practicing in the people working with me and myself the concept in Software Development, and it is a fact Developers Cross Training improves developers skills. As the most basic example, if a developer understands how internally web server (IIS, JBoss, Tomcat, Apache or any other web server solution) will identify faster any bug or problem in their code as well as make better decisions to develop a feature in the current software.

Another good example I've seen in he last few years is closer to communications, a developer could be working for a period more closer to the customer, like being part of es features being presented to a customer, it will help developers to deliver a software closer to customer expectations.
I know this has been told in many places and it is part of popular methodologies, but until you don't practice for a period of time you don't see how good is the idea and how good result could be.

Here is where team rotations is a good tool to apply developers cross training concept, a developer could rotate to be a product owner assistant for a period of time or a product owner could rotate to a customer service role. It is not just the benefit to improve people skills as Cross Training improves in people what day by day work don't, and also, it helps developers and others to know and discover what they really watt for their professional careers.

Recently, I came across with a request in the library Android Maps Utils which requested a fix for a problem when the markers have exact the same location. As this is a library I used recently and I was reading the code when I was integrating in an Android App, I just decided to implement the feature and here you can find the experience. All the details regarding the changes can be found in this pull request.

In case you want to include this functionality in your app, until the pull request is not accepted you would need to generate the library file including the pull request and then include it in your project through Gradle. After that, you can include to your map as shown in the code below:

mClusterManager = new ClusterManager<>(this, getMap()); 

getMap().setOnMarkerClickListener(mClusterManager);
getMap().setOnCameraMoveListener(mClusterManager);

mClusterManager.cluster();

The default implementation will distribute the markers with the same location around the real lat/long value following a circle when the user tap on the marker containing all the markers in the same location. To distribute the markers, the zoom level shown has to be the maximum zoom level, and once the user makes a zoom out all the markers distributed will be relocated to the original cluster.

Of course, this could be implemented in many ways and with different approaches, this is just an example of a way to get the feature implemented, I just wanted to get fun implementing and sharing with the world. It is important to mention a change needed in the ClusterItem interface could produce a backward compatibility problem as a copy has been added.

/**  * Produces a copy of the same object but setting the given location.
 *
 * @return The new object copied.
 */
ClusterItem copy(double lat, double lng);

As you can see in the first code block, cluster manager needs to be set up to listen camera moves actions on the map, if you also need to listen to the same events in your app or code just do as the code below:

mMap.setOnCameraMoveListener(new GoogleMap.OnCameraMoveListener() {
        @Override
        public void onCameraMove() {
            mClusterManager.onCameraMove(); 

            // your onCameraMove code
        }
});

 You can place your code also before call mClusterManager.onCameraMove(); or even call mClusterManager.onCameraMove(); only when you need to distribute the markers of the cluster, it will depend in your app needs.

As mentioned, the default distributor for a cluster with all the markers in the same location distributes them in a circle, and it can be replaced just calling to mClusterManager setClusterItemsDistributor(mYourDistributorImplementation);. In case you need to implement your own distributor you need to implement the interface ClusterItemDistributor.

/**  * It distributes the items in a cluster.
 */
public interface ClusterItemsDistributor {

    /**
     * Proceed with the distribution of the items in a cluster.
     */
    void distribute(Cluster cluster);

    /**
     * Proceed to collect the items back to their previous state.
     */
    void collect();
}

Just take into account distribute(Cluster cluster); needs to distribute all the items in the cluster and collect(); needs to get the markers to their original state and cluster, see DefaultClusterItemsDistributor as an example.

Please, if you use this feature or you implement your own distributor let me know, or if you have any feedback or question I will be more than happy to listen and improve what I've done, helping others and getting help from others is the way to learn something new every day.

I want to begin this article mentioning it is a suggestion made by a teammate 1 or 2 months ago, a teammate who moving to do his dream and do what he likes and enjoys, this is a bitter-sweet feeling although I am always happy when people find their dreams and passions, anyway this is a different history.