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Will the Real Jeff Brandon Please Stand Up

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Will the Real Jeff Brandon Please Stand Up Digital Presence This picture I took one time on vacation, is part of mine: It is featured here so this post doesn’t spoil itself with its own featured image. Establishing narrative context I have a Google alert set for my name. I don’t really know why, other than vanity. I am not particularly notable, people don’t write about me, and I have a pretty low public profile. Is it a bit narcissistic? You bet. I’m not delusional. As unlikely as it may be for me to rise to some level of notoriety, if something like that were to happen, I think it would be interesting to watch it unfold in pseudo-real time. As fate would have it, I am blessed with what many would call “two first names.” I am in good company, with the likes of Bob Ross, Tony Scott, and Missy Elliot, each of us with a double helping of “given-name.” It certainly makes for an above average false positivity rate when it comes to string-matching based alerts li

Story Time: How I became a mentor and why I wish I had started sooner

Jeff Codes Things Tl;Dr: This blog has nary a theme at the time of this post but if you only want CS stuff here is the link. Beginning My mentoring journey has started many times, in many phases of my adult life. Most recently, it started when a friend convinced me to sign up for a rewards credit card. Before that, it started when a co-worker put together a non-profit to teach high school students how to code and (thankfully for me) asked for help. Going back further, it began when I was a TA in grad school; helping people understand threat surfaces, stack discipline, and adversarial models. The time before that, and the earliest I think I could reasonably call myself a mentor, was when I took a job tutoring student athletes while I was in undergrad. Each experience was rewarding, and each time my mentoring stopped with what seemed like a logical conclusion. Graduation put an end to the first two. Then moving away from Boston, where the non-profit was based, m

Adventures in Dagger2 for Android

Adventures in Dagger2 for Android Adventures in Dagger2 for Android Introduction I’ve spent the last eight or so months working as an Android application developer and in that time I’ve managed to pickup a few handy tricks, none quite so helpful as Dagger2 . The purpose of this blog post is to document and share what I know about using the staple dependency injection library, and why it is useful. Before we get started, there are tons of great tutorials out there already and I will formally recommend That Missing Guide: How to use Dagger2 by Gabor Varadi and the official users guide maintained by Google . I first heard about Dagger when I was starting at a new job and, as so often is the case , I inherited an existing code base. The first question I had when I learned about Dagger: why ? Why Inject when I can build Lets consider a toy example to represent a party dip: public void entryPoint ( ) { ArrayList < String > ingredientList = new Arr