Mastodon

A few months ago I joined the nascent social network called Mastodon and specifically an instance for Android Devs called androiddev.social. You can find me here: @mez@androiddev.social.

Happy Boxing Day

Today is Boxing Day! The day after Christmas. Usually a lazy day so why not write a blog post about what I have been doing this year.

Store This

Hello and Happy New Year! What did you get up to for New Year’s? Lockdown you say? Well let’s blow all that away and get reading shall we? This post is about an Android library from Dropbox called Store (Store 4 to be precise). It facilitates the repository pattern, has been rebuilt from the ground up using Kotlin Coroutines, and is a great way to accelerate your app to becoming reactive. I’ve been using it for about a year in production during their alpha phase and now that it has recently gone stable I want to share a post of how we use it.

Izzy Wizzy Lets Get Bezier

This week I’ve been focussed on improving the biometric setup journey for the app that I work on. I’ve taken the opportunity to add a little bit of fun / delight into the setup process and learn more about Animated Vector Drawables in Android.

This post aims to recap what I learned when working with Animated Vector Drawables (AVDs).

How I Like To Test

I have enjoyed testing as much as I have enjoyed developing. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Just as it is immensely satisfying when you watch something you have built run, or be used, by a user it is also immensely satisfying to watch those little green ticks appear in your test reports. Here’s how I like to test with a focus on Android.

Welcome Back

I’m back! With a slight redesign of the blog. Can you tell?

Kotcha

Well it has been a long time between posts but I promise it is for a good reason. I have been busy learning. Learning Kotlin. Kotlin is a replacement for Java and has gained massive popularity on the Android platform. It is compatible with Java down to the bytecode level meaning you can have a mixed project - some Java some Kotlin. Whilst this sounds like it would be a great way to slowly migrate a large project this comes with some gotchas.