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Welcome and thank you for choosing Canada

That is the beginning of one of the letters accompanying my brand new Canadian Permanent Resident Card.

However, reaching the point where Canada thanks you for your interest in moving over there has been a long and convoluted process that started about two years and three months ago. This is the full story.

Points

Getting a Canadian Permanent residency is, on paper, simple. Candidates submit an application, the application is assessed and if the candidate’s application has enough points, the candidate receives an invitation to apply for Permanent Residency. When the invitation is received, candidates will need to submit all the paperwork required (which varies depending on the scheme). CIC reviews the required paperwork, and if everything is okay, they issue a Confirmation of Permanent Residency. That COPR is what grants entry to Canada.

At the end of October, 2016, I landed in Vancouver with all the paperwork necessary to be granted a temporary work permit on arrival. That paperwork was, in a nutshell, a job offer backed by a LMIA.

A LMIA (Labour Market Impact Assessment) is a document that shows that a Canadian employer has tried their best to hire a Canadian citizen / Permanent Resident, but because couldn’t find any suitable candidate, and therefore, they need to recruit a foreigner.

So, I landed in Vancouver, with my LMIA and my job offer, and as expected, I was issued with a Temporary Work Permit for two years. The work permit only allowed me to work at my current employer (the one that applied for the LMIA), and could be extended every two years.

The good thing about a LMIA was that, at the time of my landing, it granted enough points to be issued an invitation to apply for PR. Have in mind, that due to my age and the fact that I don’t have a college degree, I needed those points to be invited to apply for PR.

Everything changed two weeks after my arrival. Suddenly, the regulations changed, and the LMIA stopped being worth to 650 points, to just be worth 50, not enough to grant me an invitation to apply for PR.

Plan B

Suddenly, instead of being able to apply for PR in a matter of one or two months, I found myself without any prospects of getting a PR.

After consulting with a couple of immigration lawyers, and having a couple of chats with my management, we came up with an alternative plan.

The Government of British Columbia provides a Provincial Nomination program. Basically, the program is a way to facilitate recruitment of foreign workers in high-demand jobs (aka tech). The way it facilitates that is by having attached an invitation to apply for PR.

However, in order to apply for a Provincial Nomination, the temporary foreign worker (moi) needs to work in BC for at least a year.

So, the plan B was: remain employed for a year, apply for a Provincial Nomination, register into Express Entry via the Canadian Experience Class, and get invited to apply for PR.

The Provincial Nomination

The Provincial Nomination requires some paperwork from the employer (basically, they have to explain why the contribution of the foreign worker is important to the economy of the province) and requires some other paperwork (basically, proving two years of work experience in a similar position).

The processing time of a Provincial Nomination is about 2-3 months. However, it is safe to expect that, for jobs in tech, that tine would be much shorter.

And indeed it was short. My Provincial Nomination was approved in 10 hours!

Canadian Experience Class

With the Provincial Nomination granted, it was time to move on to the next step: registering for Express Entry.

In my case, the lawyers suggested registering for the Canadian Experience Class program, partly because that simplified the paperwork necessary to be granted the PR.

We had to provide the following:

  • certificates proving work experience in similar positions.
  • certificates proving at least one year of work experience in Canada
  • certificates proving the required language level (IELTS)
  • police certificates from every country where the candidate has lived for more than 6 months.
  • certificate of Provincial Nomination

Invitation to apply

Once the invitation to apply was issued by CIC, it was time to submit all the paperwork, and sit and wait for CIC to review it. This happened by the end of January 2018.

CIC commits to review the applications for permanent residency in less than six months. In our case, we got approved by the end of April.

COPR

Once we got the COPR, the next step was validating it. In our case, we did what is called “flag polling”, which is basically leaving Canada and entering again, so that the final interview with an immigration officer happens when re-entering Canada.

That happened on May 24th, and that is when we actually became Permanent Residents.

Permanent Resident Card

But that is not all. There is one final step: the Permanent Resident Card. The card is supposed to be mailed to your Canadian address when you arrive in Canada. But this is where things got a bit messy.

During the landing interview, the border officer will ask for a Canadian address. That’s where the PR card will be mailed. The processing time for the PR cards is about two months.

The PR card is important because it is necessary to present it when boarding a flight to Canada.

Have in mind that the cards are send in envelopes marked as “do not forward” so it is important to notify CIC of any changes of address while the cards are being processed, and setting up an email forwarding with Canada Post, as we learnt the hard way, is not enough to grant that the cards will be received.

Because the cards did not arrive after six weeks past the two months of expected processing time, we had to submit a solemn declaration to request a new set of cards. In this case the processing time was just a couple of weeks (even though CIC mentions it’s three months)

Here we are

“Welcome and thank you for choosing Canada”.

To be honest, I can’t think of a more Canadian way to start that letter. And you are most welcome. 

Posted on by sexysoftwareengineer

A day in Seoul

When people ask me “what do you like the most about living in Hong Kong?” I always reply the same: the geographical location. Every destination in Asia is within reach of a 5 hours long flight.

So, this weekend, after 11 years of living in Hong Kong, this weekend we finally crossed Seoul off the Travel List.

We spent only one full day in the city, and we only visited Gyeongbokgung, the Royal Palace, and the Bukchon Hanok Village 

Being the mid-autumn festival, there was plenty of people dressing traditional, which made for some good photos.

Selfie time!
The Royal Palace. Every  country has its own Versaille.
Royal Palace Gardens

There were a couple of things that caught our attention. First, the gas masks in the metro stations:

And, as expected, the ubiquitous wi-fi. Like in this metro car:

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🤔

In today’s episode of I don’t understand the economics of global trade, I present you a box of the most British tea ever.

So far so good.

Now let’s take a look at how this box of the most British tea ever made it’s way to Hong Kong (which, by the way, happened to be a British colony not that long ago)

So, the box of the most British tea ever was imported from Britain to the US, and then from the US to Hong Kong.

As I said: 🤔

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Stuff I’ve read between August 5th and 12th 2018

As a follow up to the “I’m out of Twitter” post, I am starting a weekly recap of what I’ve read.

Stuff from the internets

There’s a limit to the amount of knowledge a single person can cram into their head in a lifetime

When knowledge is the limiting factor

Sunshine, sensuality, and a dash of danger… the ‘warm south’ has fascinated writers and artists for hundreds of years. But why are the Brits so obsessed?

From EM Forster to Mamma Mia! Why we can’t resist the Mediterranean

… You have created all these classes and complexity to replace only one line of code, which is unlikely to be changed.

Dependency Injection smells

We’re not used to thinking about the tech industry in terms of labor […] But tech, like any industry, is composed of workers and owners. The labor of the former generates profits for the latter

Can Silicon Valley workers rein in big tech from within?

From vaccines to climate change to genocide, a new age of denialism is upon us

Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth

Books

Finished
Greeks Bearing Gifts

Started
The Male Factor

Posted on by sexysoftwareengineer · 3 Comments

So long, twitter.

I am aware that nobody really cares about it, but I just deleted all my tweets.

Actually, there is one person that cares: me. And that’s precisely why I have deleted them.

I have had an on/off relationship with twitter for a long time. I am not sure when I signed on to the service for the first time, but I still lived in Madrid, so that would be at least 11 years ago. In these 11 years I think I have deleted and reactivated my account at least twice.

This time it is different though.

This summer I have jumped into the iOS beta track extremely early, and on all my devices, including my phone.

One of the new features of iOS 12 is something called “Screen Time”, which provides a very interesting view of the way you use your devices.

I had never realised how much time I have been wasting on twitter every day until I saw the charts in front of me. It was more that two hours per day!

So I decided to set a time limit for my twitter client (1 minute a day) and to remove the app from my home screen burying it in a folder.

It’s been a week since I did that, and this morning I noticed that I wouldn’t have even needed to set a time limit. I have not launched the app in more than a week!

That has given me an opportunity to realise that:

  1. I am a bit more clam. I am perfectly aware that the world has turned into a place where racism and plain old fascism are rampant, enabled and promoted by some governments and most of the media, but I don’t need to be constantly reminded of it, for hours, every day.
  2. Twitter is guilty of that spread as well. They keep justifying giving a voice to those spreading hate speech. I don’t want to be a part of that.
  3. I read books again. I have the privilege of deciding my own work hours, so I have the privilege of being able to set aside some time, every day, where I have nothing to do. Now I can spend that time reading.
  4. I haven’t written anything in this blog in ages. I miss writing, even if there is nobody reading.

Twitter and flickr were the only two social platforms, that I’ve ever participated in, actively. I still miss flickr, I don’t think I’ll miss twitter.

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TIL: Swift 4 and protocol composition.

One of the things I like most about Swift is that almost every day I learn something new, more often than not, something new that makes me write more readable and cleaner code.

Today I realised that protocol composition, which I kind of knew could be used to compose a SuperClass and a Protocol, can help remove some downcasts at runtime, and substitute those downcasts by the compiler yelling at you when writing the code.

Let’s take this code. As usual, it is difficult for me to come up with a relevant example that illustrates what I want, but is also simple enough to be understood without too much context.

Notice how I have to check, at runtime, that the parameter I pass to deliverPresentation implements the Presentable protocol.

If we rewrite the Presenter to be like this, we can make the compiler enforce that whatever we pass to deliverPresentation as a parameter also implements Presentable, so we can avoid the downcast.

A real life example? From this:

To this:

 

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Why code comments and documentation are better than being an arrogant jerk who keeps other developers out

For months, I have been playing around, in my head, with the idea of a post about documentation, and how it just should be one of the things that every software engineer does regularly.

I have written a few drafts, I have listed arguments both for and against writing documentation, I have debated and tried to debunk some of the usual arguments against it, and in the end, it all comes to the following:

Writing some documentation is better than being an arrogant jerk who keeps others out.

Period.

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Building boundaries with third party libraries

The joys of jet lag. Here I am, at 2:43 am, trying to finalize a post that I started writing a couple days ago, while flying over the Pacific Ocean.

This is about dependencies, those third party libraries that often provide out of the box solutions to complex problems we need to solve.

Importing a third party library will save time and effort. Just add a line to a pod or Carthage file, and boom! We have saved days, weeks or months of development.

There are multiple benefits in relying on a third party library. Popular libraries are often well tested, and contain the knowledge of many developers about a given problem. Third party libraries save development time. Third party libraries avoid reinventing the wheel.

But third party libraries are code that you have not written, code that you don’t actually own, but that you somehow have to start maintaining as soon as you import it into your codebase.

Let’s take an example. Loading images, asynchronously, without blocking the main thread, in a table or collection view cell is a complex problem. We need to cancel image downloads when cells are not visible anymore, we might need to handle cell reusability, and ideally we should cache images. None of those problems are trivial to solve, and might require time and finesse to get right.

On he other hand, we could just import a third party library, like, for example, Kingfisher.

All we’d need to do would be adding a line to a pod / carthage file.

But…

We have created a subtle problem here: our cell’s code depends on Kingfisher. We need to call a specific method in that library, passing a set of specific parameters, in the way that library expects.

That be not be a problem if we only have one cell. But things start getting dangerous as soon as we have more than one cell.

Let’s say there are 10 different cells that present images in our codebase. Kingfisher is so convenient that we will repeat the same code in the 10 of them.

What would happen if, for some reason, Kingfisher stops being maintained? Or a new version of Swift breaks source compatibility again, and this library does no get updated? Or a new library comes by, that is twice as efficient as Kingfisher.

Then we would have a bit of a problem. Our code is strongly coupled with the specific api of a very specific library, and updating our code to use a different library might require getting into shotgun surgery mode.

Shotgun surgery.

How do we switch? Well, we could just do a search and replace, or search all the calls to Kingfisher and update them to use the new, hottest library.

But that is not very efficient, obviously.

So how do we avoid the problem?

Building boundaries

The same way that we have tools and mechanism to decouple some parts of our code from some other parts of our code, we have tools and mechanisms to decouple or code from third party libraries.

And the best tool for decoupling things is, as usual, a layer of indirection.

In this case, we could add a layer of indirection by encapsulating the call to the third party library in an extension to UIImageView. This extension would be code under our control, and will contain a single point of dependency with the third party library.

Our cells will load images by calling a method that belongs in our side of the codebase, not in the library’s side of it.

Now if we want, for whatever reason, to switch to a third party library, all we have to do is modify the implementation of our extension. Import a different library, update the presentImage method to that third party library’s API, and we are good to go.

Final words

Introducing seams between our code and third party libraries decouples our code from external dependencies. That way, we are free to modify those dependencies without having a big impact in our codebase.

PS

Kingfisher is a great library that solves a complex problem in an elegant way. I strongly recommend considering it.