Boot camps have been awesome for my business niche: fixing Android apps that other developers have failed at and abandoned. If more boot-camp graduates come on the job market, it will be even easier for me to demonstrate the value of my services.
The time is right to capitalize on Android's big weak spots (OS fragmentation, disorganized app infrastructure, indifferent branding) but I don't see Tizen looming large yet. Samsung is doing a great job selling phones to consumers, but it's not in a great position to buy up the whole Google Play collection one piece at a time, and it doesn't seem to be trying to get developers and advertisers interested in Tizen at the moment.
If their long-term plan is to fly close to Android and then swap it out for something completely different, I'd be very excited. As a longtime smartphone user and current Android developer, I've been through the transition from one proprietary platform to another... BlackBerry, iOS, Android... I'm weary of dismissing a dozen app update notifications from my tray every day, and I'm tired of "apps" in general. I don't want to jump to another copycat of the same old junky, cluttered world. If Samsung is prepared to offer a fresh way of seamlessly being in the physical and digital worlds without having to navigate through a bunch of noisy, crappy apps (possibly without even the candybar form factor), I will be right there, wallet open. But as the author points out, it looks like the current iteration is just to load up a bunch of crapware onto a plastic toy, and users have to buy into the whole infrastructure if they want access to their favorite brand. No thanks.
I sincerely hope that I've never been a pity/diversity hire. I want to be evaluated on my qualifications as a well-rounded developer and compensated appropriately for my work.
Maybe we have worked in different environments than nerdess. I've had quite a few jobs (at software companies in the US) where most of my colleagues are calm, mature, and act like professionals without regard to gender. I've also encountered the occasional colleague (a bit more often in startup/freelance culture) who acts like females are a new and unfamiliar technology, and doesn't know how to relate in appropriate ways. But I've never felt particularly "powerful" in my workplace, until I started doing most of my work from my home office.
The video playback app was on Android devices, so it used the regular Android Java APIs. Still, the chatroom approach that gkoberger describes would work for any platform, as long as each player can play, pause, and seek, and have a separate thread that emits and receives events in the chatroom.
http://popcornjs.org/ appears to be a library for controlling HTML5 video, if that might work for you.
Well done! I worked on an Android/Node app a few months ago that also uses socket.io to do the same thing (synchronize video playback among a set of users). I was impressed at how well the Node server performed as the number of users grew, especially compared to a blocking TCP socket implementation.