ERASMUS IN DUBLIN - MY EXPENSE BREAK DOWN

Hi and welcome back everybody !

This post is not strictly related  to any of the computer science fields treated on this blog.

I've been asked by several people of much it cost to live where I've been living in the latest four years and if it is affordable for a student.

I think the best way for giving an answer to everybody is to share my expense breakdown and personal experience on this post.

Yes, I live in Dublin, Ireland!

ACCOMODATION

This is definitely going to be your biggest expense (alcohol addicted are excluded here!).

Accomodation in Dublin is very very expensive comparing with other countries.

As you may know, a personal room in a shared apartment in Barcelona or Athens costs between 200 - and 350. Dublin is much more expensive than that and aligned with British price (It would be more or less the same price in London.)

If you want to live on Campus, the accomodation will cost you between 3000 and 3500 euro for the semester. Notice that the semester is only 3 months long here (from half September to half December);

Yes, if you are good in Math you understand that you are paying around 1000 euro a month or more. If you think this is crazy, fair enough; However there a two big advantages about living on Campus. The first one is that you are going to have a memorable experience. Living in UCD it has been the best experience of my life. 

To give you an idea I was living in Roebuck hall, this residence:

Your room will look something like this:

And your living room:

The second big advantage is that all the bills are included, which means heating, electricity, Internet and security. 

A full fee breakdown can be found here.

Otherwise, if on campus accomodation is to expensive for you, you might want to share the apartment with other students. In that case the cost for a single room in a shared apartment would be between 350 and 500 Euro(depends from the area). You will have to add all the other bills to this number. 

Electricity, heating and Internet can cost you around 150 per month but it really depends from the number of tenants sharing the apartment. Let's say that in average, accomodation will cost you around 500 if you are lucky.

Regarding the transport topic things are a little bit subjective here. It really depends if you need to be in college every day or not! In the first case you will not need to pay for the bus every day but you are probably going to need a good budget for your weekends out, and viceversa !

TRANSPORT

Another bad news here. Transport is very expensive in Dublin. Your needs will be slightly different if you live on campus or if you do not as I said above:

1. Living on campus: In this case you will need the bus only for going and coming back from town. Two 5 non consecutive days ticket could be enough for one month. Each of those will cost you 20 euro, so it is 40 euro total per month. But wait a second ! How do you go back during the night. Taxi is the only answer. Consider 40 euro of taxy a month, at least, thus 80 euro in total.
2. Living in town: In that case you will not need the taxi when you go out at night but you need at least three 5 non consecutive days ticket so 60 euro.

A complete breakdown for bus fees can be found here.

A good taxy fare estimator can be found here. 

FOOD AND BEVERAGE

Good news now. Food at big chain like Tesco and Lidl is not very expensive. You can also shop on-line and get a 20 euro discount if it is your first time. Check this link if you are interested.

If you do not eat the same amount that I eat (which is really a lot) you should be able to take your grocery home with 50 euro a week so let's say 250 a month !

On the other side, beverage is very expensive. If you drink in temple bar area, a pint can cost you 7 euro. I know, it is crazy. Avoid these very touristic places and drink in less commercial pub if you go out mainly for drinking. Fifty euro a week should really be enough so let's say 250 per month again. 

SAVER VERSUS SPENDTHRIFT

Ok, we are all different in spending money. Let's take two different profiles, a saver and a spendthrift, and let's do some math; For a SAVER first:

• ACCOMODATION AND BILLS : 500 EURO
• TRANSPORT: 60 EURO
• FOOD AND BEVERAGE : 400 EURO

For a total of 860 EURO.

For a SPENDTHRIFT:

• ACCOMODATION AND BILLS : 1000 EURO
• TRANSPORT: 100 EURO
• FOOD AND BEVERAGE: 500 EURO

For a total of 1600 EURO

Please, take in consideration that these expense are only for your primary needs.

Dublin is expensive by nature but it can be even more if you do not pay attention.

Hope this helps.

Luca

WEB DEVELOPMENT - LIVE EDIT YOUR HTML, CSS AND JAVASCRIPT CODE WITH INTELLIJ IDEA

In latest post:

Edit your css and javascript code in google dev tools and persist the changes in your favourite IDE

I have shown you a new feature of Google Web Tools that makes you edit some of the components of your web application directly in your browser and persist the changes in your IDE. 

This is a brilliant feature for web developers that want to become faster, but there are two main limitations:

• DOM changes in the "Inspect Elements" panel are not persisted. Only style changes on the Elements panel are persisted. You will need to modify it form the "Source" panel.
• Only styles defined in an external CSS file can be changed. Changes to element.style or to inline styles are not persisted back to disk. If you have inline styles, they can be changed on the Sources panel again.

This limitations can't be obviously be addressed by a web browser because the code you are seeing in the elements panel could be totally different from your source html page. You can generate html code and DOM object at runtime using scripting languages, so any tentative to reflect changes from the elements panel to your source code, would lead to mistakes. 

Also, as you may know, all the changes you make in the "Source" panel, are not live changes, which means that you will not see the their effects directly on the page you are visualizing in your browser; You will first have to save the page and then reload it in your browser. This process is time consuming especially if you have many elements you want to edit and you want a visual fast feedback.

Today, I am going to show you how to overcome this problem using an extension and a plugin for Intellij Idea.

If you are working on web application an you want to see the changes you make to your html/css/JavaScript being reflected live on the your application pages in the browser, you can install this awesome plugin:

LiveEdit - for IntelliJ web editors

Prerequisites

1. The LiveEdit plugin is enabled if you are using Intellij WebStorm. In case you are using Intellij Idea like I am doing, you can install the plugin from the plugins menu and enable it. 

Once you downloaded it, you can enable the extension from the edit menu.

2. You will need to install The JetBrains Chrome Extension is installed in your Chrome browser if not already installed.

The extension is installed when you first initiate a debugging session and follow the dedicated link provided by WebStorm. For details, see Using JetBrains Chrome Extension and How to install Chrome extension.

Live debug session

Live editing is supported only in debug mode, but with the latest version of the Chrome extension you won't even need to create a debug configuration in your IDE and run it. Just right click on a web page an select inspect with Idea:

Once you have done that you can start edit the source HTML directly in your IDE and the changes will be reflected in the real time in your browser. You won't even notice the delay. For instance:

You can also edit css or javascript. The changes will still be live in your page in your browser:

I think this is kind of awesome, do you ?

Stay live !

Luca

WEB DEVELOPMENT - EDIT YOUR CSS AND HTML PAGES IN YOUR BROWSER AND PERSIST THE CHANGES DIRECTLY IN YOUR IDE IS NOW POSSIBLE WITH GOOGLE DEV TOOLS

Hi, and welcome back.

I am sure many of you at least once tried to edit directly in your browser, a css or an html page of a web application deployed in an application server like Tomcat, and persist these changes back in your favourite IDE, with no luck.

This article describe how to edit a css or an html page in your browser and see the changes you made reflected in your source code, using a google dev tools new features called workspace.

The biggest limitations are that:

• DOM changes in the "Inspect Elements" panel are not persisted. Only style changes on the Elements panel are persisted. You will need to modify it form the "Source" tab.
• Only styles defined in an external CSS file can be changed. Changes to element.style or to inline styles are not persisted back to disk. If you have inline styles, they can be changed on the Sources panel again.

Here is the link to the guide: Dev tools workspaces.

In the next articles I will show you how to overcome the limitations of this solution!

These features are live in Chrome 28.

STAY WEB!

LUCA

ORACLE CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL, JAVA SE 7 PROGRAMMER (OCAJP7) - AKA 1Z0-804

Hi everybody how is going?

As I announced before, the first topic we are going to discuss, regards the Oracle Professional Certification.

Why? Because I just got certificated few days ago, and I want to share my personal experience with you !

All the work I've done is still very fresh in my mind so I would touch as much more topics is possible for providing a complete view of the certification and a study plan as well, but in the meantime I'll try to be as much synthetic as I can, so that nobody will have to spend a week to read this post.

WHY TO GET A JAVA CERTIFICATION

So this should be the first question in everybody mind. Why would I make a big effort for getting a piece of paper? I asked this question myself when I got the first certification, the OCAJA7 - AKA 1z0-803, which is indispensable for getting JAVA professional certified. The answer is the following points:

1. Nowadays there many computer science graduates around. While is true that the market is still growing, it is also true that I'm noticing that in many job offers, the Java Certifications are a big advantage over the other candidates;
2. You actually have to study a lot of things that I'm sure you didn't know before! I have asked some of the most simple questions that are included in the certification, to some experienced developers. They did not give the right answer in most cases! It can be strange but in this exam, a lot of hidden spots that JAVA has, are supposed to be understood;
3. It's a way to practice you programming ability and understand your weak points;
4. At the end of the day, It's funny and enjoyable to prepare the exam.

  

THE CERTIFICATION PATH

Before you start thinking to take any Java certification you may want to have an understanding of the "big" picture below:

As you can see, the Oracle Java certification stack is just huge, but you may not be interested in all these exams. However one thing is certain: for getting any high level certification the OCPJP7 is a prerequisite. If you don't own this certification you can't access to the "speciality" level neither to the "advanced". But there is still something to consider. For becoming an Oracle Certified Professional Programmer, the OCPJP7 itself is not enough. You have to get also the Oracle Certified Associate (OCAJP7) before your certification will be full approved by Oracle. The image below is totally self-explanatory:

  

To be  more specific, you don't need to follow any order for these two certifications. You can think even to take the 1z0-804 before and the 1z0-803 after. When you'll have both done you will finally be an ORACLE CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMMER. If you get only one of them, it will be formally "not recognized".

EXAMS TOPICS and GENERAL INFORMATION

The list of topic is fully available here. In short you will have to deal with:

• Java Class Design 
• Advanced Class Design
• Object-Oriented Design Principles
• Generics and Collections
• String Processing 
• Exceptions and Assertions
• Java I/O Fundamentals 
• Java File I/O (NIO.2)    
• Building Database Applications with JDBC
• Threads 
• Concurrency 
• Localization

Fortunately the price for the exam has been lowered to 245 US dollars.
The number of question is 90.
The passing score is 65% (59 correct answers)
And the time available is 150 minutes.

 STUDY MATERIAL

This certification is quite new so there is not a huge amount of material out there.

For the previous certification, the OCPJP JAVA SE 6, many people used this book, which was excellent:

Thus, when the new certification was released, everybody was waiting for the new version of this book, related to the JAVA7 version. But for some very strange reasons, the new version of this book won't be available until the 29 of December 2014. I have no clue what is the story here.

Some people are still using the old book for preparing the new exam. Bert Bates, author of the book, wrote on coderanch:

" If you're studying for the OCA, our book (K&B 6), should give you pretty good coverage. If you study the following chapters from K&B 6 you should be in pretty good shape for the OCA:

chaps: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5
chap 6 - the String and StringBuilder sections
chap 7 - the hashCode() and equals() sections, and only the ArrayList class.
chap 10

The chapters (and sections) listed above ARE NOT a perfect overview of everything you might encounter on the real exam, but I'd say they represent a 95% overlap. We'll be nailing down that last 5% over the next several weeks."

However an other book was published in the early in 2013. You can find it here: 

This is a quite comprehensive book, that touches all the topics listed before, but to be totally honest, it contains many errors. Probably the authors have written it rushing a little bit, because there was a big lack of available material around. Myself and several other people, contributed to the correction of this book. You can find an errata list here. You'll notice my name there as well.

Given the lack of material available, I would strongly suggest to everybody who wants to try this exam, to buy this book !

If you don't want to spend extra money, don't worry. You can still use the Java tutorial provided by Oracle.

It also true that this tutorial won't be enough in my opinion for passing the exam. You definitely need to go through the Java Doc and do a lot of practice by yourself if you want to use it as unique resource.    

MOCK EXAMS

Some people think that using mock tests is like cheating. I personally don't agree. You're going to try to take an exam that cost about 250 dollars. You do not want to fail, do you ? 

Mock exams can be used in three ways:

• Try some exams before you even start your preparation; In this case you will be able to understand the topic more deeply.
• Prepare yourself quickly, going trough all the exam topics and after try some mock exams. You will probably fail but you will be able to understand your weak points. Some people have different weak points based on their personal studying or working experience.
• Prepare yourself deeply going trough all the material I've shown you and do the mock exam only for having an idea about how the questions will be, the timing, and getting familiar with the typology of exam.

  
I've tried only Enthuware mock exams and I have to say that they are brilliant. Off course there were some small mistakes that you can easily report using the botton "review" on the software that will be provided, but the errors get usually fixed in few days and a new version of the question bank is released.

The software looks like this:

    
And it can be downloaded on the Enthuware web site for ten dollars. I think it's definitely worth!

You can find some mock questions also directly on the Oracle web site.

Other mock exams vendor are:

•  http://www.epractizelabs.com/certification/sun/javase7ocp.html
•  http://www.techfaq360.com/scjp7IIsuccesskit.jsp

  
But I've never personally tried them so i wouldn't be able to writ each chapter e a fair review.

OTHER USEFUL RESOURCES

CodeRanch.com has a forum that treats all the Java Oracle certifications. You can find the section regarding this certification here.

 

HOW TO PREPARE THE EXAM

When I decided to prepare the exam I did not have to worry much about bureaucratic things, like registrations, voucher, locate a certification center and etc. because I had already done the Java Associate Exam. So I focused only on the preparation of the exam.

This was my detailed plan:

• Read each chapter of the book I've shown above. I planned to study a chapter every three days. It could take less time, but it's very important that when you go trough the book, you write down the programs in your own IDE and you try them. If  you don't  understand something, you definitely want to take a look to the official Java documentation or tutorial.
• I did all the objective wise questions present on the Enthuware software, but I had a bad news, I badly failed in most on them. 
• I went back to all the chapters were I was failing and I spent a couple of days for each of them.
• I've taken the objective wise questions again for those chapters and I was still failing on three topics: Thread, concurrency and collection.
• I took a full mock exam for understanding how much this three topic would impact on the overall score. I scored only 58%.
• I went back to those three objective and I started reading the Java tutorial on-line. 
• I  took a mock exam and I scored 62%. I took note of my weak points. The software has some nice statistics and graph thanks to which you can understand where you have to improve.
• I went to study those objectives from the Java doc directly.
• I took one more exam and I scored 66%.
• I read all the notes I've taken and all the syntheses available on the book and on the page I ve suggested you above.
• I took the forth mock exam scoring 69%.
• I took the last mock exam scoring 72%.

Remember the most important thing to do, is to read and take note of all your error after every mock test you take. This is the best way to improve where the book and the on-line resources are lacking.

HOW TO BOOK THE EXAM

The exam is run in Pearson Vue center. For booking the exam, you have to connect to www.pearsonvue.com.

First thing to do is to register.  Then you will be 't need to bring anything asked to choose the exam you want to take and locate a test center. Once you're done, you will have to pay and you will receive and email with the confirmation of the booking. You won't need to bring anything with you. Everything is already automatically set. Follow the instruction in the e-mail and go to the center choose half hour before the exam. You will need to provide to two form of identifications and compile a module with personal information. Also a photo of you will be taken. If you pass the exam the photo will appear on your Oracle profile on-line!

BEFORE THE EXAM

The day before the exam or the day of the exam itself, if you have to take it in the afternoon, it's a very good idea to go trough this Ocpjp 7 Quick Reference Card. 

This cards are done by the same author of the book I've shown you above, and do not contain error.

Print them and read them at least a couple of time. 

They can really help you to get some correct answers. 

Once you arrive to the center, you may want to  go to the toilette. You will be given a paperbook and a pen for taking your personal note.

AFTER THE EXAM

After the exam you want knoe anything about the exam. Don't worry you will get an email from oracle very soon. If you succeed you will be able to login on Oracle certView.

You will see a screen like this:

Sorry for the photo, I was tired and sick.

     

THE CERTIFICATION

If you passed the exam, you will receive a beautiful certificate at your delivery address, like this:

And you will receive also a professional card like this:

STAY CERTIFICATED !

LUCA
 

YOUR SOFT ENGINEER IS ON-AIR

Hello everybody, how is going ? I'm very glad to announce the born of this blog. I have thought a lot of time about making this editorial space, and finally I decided to invest some of my time and my knowledge for all the guys out there passionate in software like me!

So first of all, why "http://www.yoursoftengineer.blogspot.ie/"   ? The name comes from the fact that we are going to mostly speaking about software development, techniques, processes, programming certifications, frameworks and many other cool things. I will often bring in also a "testing perspective", because I'm really passionate about this ring of the chain as well.

Now, Let me speak a little bit about me.
I'm a 26 Italian guy living in Ireland, specifically in the center of Dublin.
I graduated in informatics and I've taken a master in computer science at University College of Dublin. I'm now working full time for a big Irish company as a software engineer.





I have just done the exams for the Java programmer associate and professional developer, so these will be the first two topics I'm going to speak about. If you're planning to take this certifications as well, you will find a lot of useful advices and resources on these pages!

STAY TUNED!

LUCA