A note on giving back

Recently, there has been a spate of tweets about developers admitting their weaknesses. A bunch of people I know even made into the Moment created by @ThePracticalDev. And then there's this tweet:

Hi, I’m aurynn, and even though I’ve been coding for 15 years, as a woman in tech anything less than a display of perfection is a risk https://t.co/DMYMPTQh1R

— your pocket friend (@aurynn) February 26, 2017

Go ahead and read that whole thread. It's important.

Over the last months I have talked to a lot of women in tech, and one thing I realised is that I am not alone.

I'm not the only one worried about making a mistake.
I'm not the only one who preface everything she says with "You all know this already, but...".
I'm not the only one who double-, triple-, quadruple-checks every. single. thing before saying anything.
I'm not the only one who constantly worries about being seen as stupid when she asks a question.
I'm not the only one afraid to write something for fear of being called a know-it-all.

I am not alone.

There are people who will feed on your fears. I made a post about a new discovery three days ago. And true enough, I got replies like this:

Uhmmm... Okay... I'm sorry for making you see something you already know. I'll be more careful next time.

But then a few hours ago, someone left this comment in one of my posts:

And this, my friends, is why despite all our fears, we should never stop sharing.

:facepalm:

I just spent an hour debugging an issue that should have been a non-issue at all.

A thing about working on a huge product like Domain with such a small team is that there are some bits that tend to get left behind. Lately I have been playing with a bunch of libraries to find out how the modern ones do image pan and zoom. This is important for us because those crazy expensive houses have pretty high-res photos.

Look at this!

Click to embiggen

One of the libraries I was looking at was Subsampling Scale Image View. I have heard good things about it, but was too lazy to figure it out. Today will be the day, I said. Today I will stop being lazy and figure it out.

After about an hour of furious Googling, I ended up finding a bunch of code that I managed to cobble together that theoretically should work. Maybe at this point I should mention that images and graphics are not my strong suit. There's too much stuff going on and my I can't wrap my head around it.

Anyway, I need to get the Bitmap from a file downloaded by Glide. Someone on the internet said this should work:

BitmapFactory.Options opts = new BitmapFactory.Options();
opts.inJustDecodeBounds = true;
Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeFile(downloadedFile.getAbsolutePath(), opts);

I fired up my app and nothing is loading. All the pages in the whole of my image gallery are empty. Maybe I'm using the library wrong? Maybe this is not how I should apply BitmapRegionDecoder? Maybe it's not actually downloading the file?

I ended putting breakpoints all over the place:

And it's still not working. It's not crashing.. so at least I got that going for me.

I was getting frustrated, so I was like, "What does BitmapFactory.decodeFile and the options do anyway??" I looked for the JavaDoc.

inJustDecodeBounds

boolean inJustDecodeBounds

If set to true, the decoder will return null (no bitmap), but the out... fields will still be set, allowing the caller to query the bitmap without having to allocate the memory for its pixels.

Ah. FML.

What have we learned today? Read the docs, kids.