I teach Android, Kotlin, and Compose bootcamps.

Instructor

I taught gifted Junior High School and High School students Java.

I was an Android programmer across a large range of Android applications, supporting consumer phones and Square&#x27;s custom devices running forks of AOSP. I was highly valued, and so was asked to lead many projects and products.When Kotlin became an officially supported Android development language, I switched from Java to Kotlin, so have a lot of experience with both.A small sampling of projects at Square:* In 2017, I joined the Terminal Android team at Square, the team responsible for developing and maintaining features for the sorts of customers that generally hand enter in amounts for purchases on the Android Square Point of Sale. * Based on my success, 6 months after joining, I was asked to become the sole Android engineer for the Business Banking team to enable the team to launch the Square Card, a custom business debit card linked to a Square merchant’s balance. I earned a patent (SQ-1069-US1) along the way. * Based on my success, I was asked to take a new position on the SDX team, the team responsible for developing the (then, only) custom version of Square’s Point of Sale and other related applications that run on Square’s customs hardware, Terminal and Register. * After about a year, a Square reorg led me to joining the Appointments team. I designed and effectively wholly implemented the Appointments Point of Sale for Register, as well as serving as the key figure in coordinating all teams across Product, UX, Marketing, QA, hardware acquisition, Android Platform, Analytics, and Engineering Management. * Finally, at my urging, a new team was founded to help make development on Square&#x27;s custom hardware mor in line with development for third-party devices. I was chosen as a founding and lead member of that group and greatly renovated the architecture and documentation for developing on these custom devices.I left Square in 2022 to spend time with my daughter before she went to college.

Staff Software Engineer

Most of my time at Yahoo! was spent as a lead client engineer rebuilding (with a team) Yahoo! Messenger for Android from scratch. This is when I learned Android development (using Java). I was responsible for some part of about every aspect of the mobile application, from UI to lower level architecture.I also worked with some Node.js, Javascript, HTML 5, etc., for Yahoo! mail support and other projects.

Principal Software Engineer

Worked on Xobni’s generic out of box/on-boarding application. It was a flexible, rich web client backed by Node.js. It was used by several web and native mobile clients to walk users through our login, signup, and third-party OAuth flows.I was one of the lead developers for a Chrome/Firefox/Safari extension that integrates Xobni functionality with GMail. This was a single-page HTML5/Javascript application that used Xobni&#x27;s cloud API to fetch rich contact data to display as the user interacted with email messages in GMail.As a pet project, I built a CardDAV server for Xobni contacts in Node.js (on top of jsDAV). This allowed the iPhone and OSX Address Book, for example, to sync locally a user&#x27;s Xobni contacts without a special Xobni client.As a pet project, I built an LDAP adapter for Xobni contacts in Node.js (on top of ldapjs). This allowed the iPhone and other LDAP clients to perform LDAP directory searches against a user&#x27;s Xobni contacts.C#/.NET programming for the world&#x27;s leading Outlook plugin, focusing particularly on the .NET/COM bridge, Win32 API hooks (e.g. subclassing Windows messages), and COM Addin support. I was also one of two engineers to refactor the plugin to support x64.

Software Engineer

Senior Flex 3/ActionScript 3.0 developer for zOMG!I added many game features, but was particularly focused on optimization and efficiency issues (e.g. finding and fixing reasons for low frame rates and excessive garbage collection).I helped spearhead the project to retroactively add Flex to the game, and architected a new UI framework based on Flex modules. I also implemented several new and improved UI elements.I wrote the MMO&#x27;s wrapper around AOL’s ActionScript AIM API (wimas3), implementing chat over AIM for the game.Gaia had no build process for its front-end applications when I joined, so I created a continuous integration system, back-porting several projects to use it, including zOMG!

Senior developer for a Flex 3/ActionScript 3.0 implementation of Y! Messenger for the WebI was one of the key architects and implementers of Yahoo!’s web messenger product, built using ActionScript 3.0 and the Flex 3 framework. I also designed and built a continuous build system for the project. This product was spun off into JetBlue’s instant messenger solution on its planes in flight.The product was also spun off into myM, a web messenger product that integrated messages, wall posts, vitality information, etc. from Facebook, MySpace, and AIM. myM was released in beta internally and to some test groups with much acclaim, but Yahoo! shelved the product in early 2007 before releasing it to the general public.

Senior Software Engineer

Served as technical lead for a team of five regular (and sometimes as many as ten) developers refactoring the QuickBooks code base to remove the limits on the number of elements in a QuickBooks list (these are feature-level lists, such as the Customer List, Vendor List, Item List, etc.). Essentially, this involved changing a fundamental data type used in a very large codebase. Because the list subsystem and this data type permeated the codebase, the project had tremendous impact on the product and required changes to almost every major piece of functionality in QuickBooks (approximately 200,000 lines of code were changed across more than 20 modules); it also posed particular problems for serialization code and external (e.g. API) clients. The challenges in the project included rooting out what portions of the codebase (often old and undocumented) would be affected, figuring out how to change them, and helping to manage and coordinate a very large set of changes.Critical to the success of the project was my development of an instrumentation class to cause compilation errors in many places where we missed changing one of these fundamental data types.

Lead architect and programmer for many solutions that integrated FactSet’s data with Microsoft Office (Active Publishing Workstation (APW) and the FactSet-Excel Link), using C++, COM, ActiveX, Win32, DDE, Excel&#x27;s binary file format, and VBA.APW was FactSet’s publishing solution, allowing users to populate and update Office documents with FactSet financial data; the FactSet-Excel Link allowed clients to integrate FactSet data into their spreadsheets in a myriad of ways, including the exporting server-based reports to Excel (using XML and HTML), providing custom worksheet functions to retrieve FactSet data, real-time updates in Excel cells (using DDE), and merging requested FactSet data into Excel files on disk by manipulating the Excel file format (BIFF).Helped spearhead FactSet’s transition from multibyte to Unicode in its PC applications. Wrote the code to enable all the Office integration products and features to support Unicode.Rearchitected FactSet&#x27;s Excel spreadsheet updating functionality (called Data Downloading), replacing a difficult to maintain and to enhance algorithm involving file format manipulation with an algorithm based on OLE automation of Excel and HTML/XML/CSS. The process involved touching a great deal of low-level code and modifying FactSet&#x27;s proprietary protocols for transmitting data.Rearchitected FactSet&#x27;s mechanism for exporting online reports to Excel, replacing a DDE-based mechanism with an XML/HTML/clipboard based one. Based on my architecture and leadership, FactSet is now able to export reports to PowerPoint presentations and to Word documents.Implemented linking of Excel cells populated with FactSet data to online documents from which the data was pulled, architecting a solution that uses a custom URL protocol and COM.Taught myself C++, COM, MFC, and the Windows API after not having programmed in C for 10 years.

Lead Software Engineer

I'm an expert, with 9 years experience working at top-level Android development teams at Square and Yahoo! I also teach an Android bootcamp for Big Nerd Ranch.

I am a Kotlin expert, having used it for 6 years as a professional Android developer. I teach a Kotlin bootcamp for Big Nerd Ranch. I also have helped students using Kotlin on the server.

I used Java as my primary Android programming language until it was supplanted by Kotlin. I've taught Java to gifted Junior High School and High School students and have prepared a student for AP Computer Science with Java. I wrote some nice tutorials on intro topics for beginners: https://dev.to/mbrubin56/good-habits-for-new-java-programmers-1n2

I taught propositional and predicate logic for years to gifted Junior High School and High School students. I have a Ph. D. in Philosophy, and my dissertation was in the Philosophy of Logic. You can find my dissertation at https://www.dropbox.com/s/visxmr94xpdz427/mark%20rubin%20dissertation.pdf?dl=0

I earned a Ph. D. in Philosophy from UCLA in 1998. You can find my dissertation at https://www.dropbox.com/s/visxmr94xpdz427/mark%20rubin%20dissertation.pdf?dl=0

Personal details

Mark R.

Summary

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