You Want To Write A Library? Now What?

You’ve built a nice little app and want to share some of its functionality. Great. You extract some code into a reusable library.

Now what?

Working within an SDK can be really fun and rewarding. It’s almost like working in an app. It is typically much faster to compile and if you’re following the Unix philosophy of “doing one thing and doing it well” it is typically easier and faster to reason about too. However, you don’t get that for free by simply extracting a module from your app. Here are some tips I have learned about the differences between working in an app versus working on an SDK.

Staff Musings

I’ve been a Staff Engineer at JET (Just Eat Takeaway) for about two years now. These are some musings about my experience.

Testing Creating A Draft Using Github Actions

How useful this will be… I don’t know. But I now have a way to create a draft blog post from my mobile using GitHub Actions. Here’s how.

Building Platforms

I’m currently a Staff Engineer in my organisation and sit within what we call the Platform pillar. Sort of obviously, we build the platforms that the rest of the business use to make the monies. This is how I like to think about platforms and what it means to be a good platform.

Welcome Back

After a weeks out…. ok a few months…. oh heck who am I kidding there are time stamps all over this blog. After a few years away I am back!

I want to start blogging more but let’s see how it goes. Here’s some of the things I want to blog about.

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.