I briefly wrote Blackberry apps circa 2010 (yes, I knew RIM was dying a quick death). The development process was insane: any module from the framework that you incorporated into your app had to be digitally signed by RIM servers every time you tried to compile your app and deploy it to a device, even if you had only made a one-line change to the code. On good days, this would make the compilation take 5-10 minutes; on bad days it would be upwards of an hour or never happen at all. Some wags had even set up a special website that would tell you whether the RIM servers were down or not (long gone now, of course). I got in the habit of making a large number of code changes before attempting to run and test stuff, which is obviously not the ideal way to do things but it certainly teaches you to be careful. It also make me think long and hard before including a new module into my code. As one example, for my GUI I needed to use trigonometry functions which were naturally (lol) part of one of the cryptography modules which took an especially long time to get signed. I ended up writing my own sin() function in Java just to avoid the hit of including that module.
The great part of this was that I always had a ready-made excuse whenever I felt like taking a long lunch or going shopping or going home early. “Sorry boss, the signing server is down” and I made damn sure they never knew about isthesigningserverdown.com. It also helped that it was Blackberry circa 2010 and it didn’t make a shit bit of difference whether I got the app done or not.
I briefly wrote Blackberry apps circa 2010 (yes, I knew RIM was dying a quick death). The development process was insane: any module from the framework that you incorporated into your app had to be digitally signed by RIM servers every time you tried to compile your app and deploy it to a device, even if you had only made a one-line change to the code. On good days, this would make the compilation take 5-10 minutes; on bad days it would be upwards of an hour or never happen at all. Some wags had even set up a special website that would tell you whether the RIM servers were down or not (long gone now, of course). I got in the habit of making a large number of code changes before attempting to run and test stuff, which is obviously not the ideal way to do things but it certainly teaches you to be careful. It also make me think long and hard before including a new module into my code. As one example, for my GUI I needed to use trigonometry functions which were naturally (lol) part of one of the cryptography modules which took an especially long time to get signed. I ended up writing my own
sin()function in Java just to avoid the hit of including that module.The great part of this was that I always had a ready-made excuse whenever I felt like taking a long lunch or going shopping or going home early. “Sorry boss, the signing server is down” and I made damn sure they never knew about isthesigningserverdown.com. It also helped that it was Blackberry circa 2010 and it didn’t make a shit bit of difference whether I got the app done or not.