Ash Davies

Google Developer Expert for Android and Kotlin, failed blogger, enthusiastic public speaker, maker (and breaker) of shiny things at Snapp Mobile. Kotlin aficionado, Multiplatform manipulator, prolific facilitator of cute cat photographs, spends more time travelling than working (he/him).
Droidcon London: Refactoring and Test Fakes

Refactoring and Test Fakes: Crafting Resilient Code with Confidence

Crafting resilient code is one of the most important things we do as software developers, but it’s much easier said than done! Building with confidence requires an appropriate test harness and automated safeguards to ensure your software is robust. In most real world scenarios, we don’t have the luxury of working with a green field project, so it can be difficult to apply best practices whilst maintaining legacy code. How then can we refactor, and effectively utilise test fakes appropriately?...

Droidcon Lisbon: This Year in Android

What a Long Strange Trip it's Been: This Year In Android

The Android community is a fast evolving society of excellent people who passionately involve themselves in their ecosystem. This means the progress of developments can be fast, blazingly fast! Inspired by other content creators and newsletters that keep us informed about the most recent events, I decided to document news, events, and releases every week for a year. Starting from the end of Droidcon Berlin, the world’s best Android developer conference....

Droidcon Lisbon: Beyond the Mockery

Beyond the Mockery: Why We Should Embrace Testing Without Mocking Frameworks

In software development, mocking is a popular technique used to simulate dependencies and test behaviour without relying on external systems. However, as with any technique, there are pros and cons to using mocks. In this talk, I’ll discuss why using mocks may not be the best approach and why we should instead use fakes or in-memory implementations of well-defined interfaces. We will explore the drawbacks of mocks, including how they can lead to brittle tests, slow down development, and make it difficult to refactor code....

Droidcon NYC: Beyond the Mockery

Beyond the Mockery: Why We Should Embrace Testing Without Mocking Frameworks

In software development, mocking is a popular technique used to simulate dependencies and test behaviour without relying on external systems. However, as with any technique, there are pros and cons to using mocks. In this talk, I’ll discuss why using mocks may not be the best approach and why we should instead use fakes or in-memory implementations of well-defined interfaces. We will explore the drawbacks of mocks, including how they can lead to brittle tests, slow down development, and make it difficult to refactor code....

Droidcon Berlin: This Year in Android

What a Long Strange Trip it's Been: This Year In Android

The Android community is a fast evolving society of excellent people who passionately involve themselves in their ecosystem. This means the progress of developments can be fast, blazingly fast! Inspired by other content creators and newsletters that keep us informed about the most recent events, I decided to document news, events, and releases every week for a year. Starting from the end of Droidcon Berlin, the world’s best Android developer conference....

Droidcon Berlin: Beyond the Mockery

Beyond the Mockery: Why We Should Embrace Testing Without Mocking Frameworks

In software development, mocking is a popular technique used to simulate dependencies and test behaviour without relying on external systems. However, as with any technique, there are pros and cons to using mocks. In this talk, I’ll discuss why using mocks may not be the best approach and why we should instead use fakes or in-memory implementations of well-defined interfaces. We will explore the drawbacks of mocks, including how they can lead to brittle tests, slow down development, and make it difficult to refactor code....

Kotlin User Group Berlin: Everything is an API

Everything is an API

When creating a new app module, or modularising an existing one, it becomes easy to forget who might be consuming it. It becomes easy to forget that every decision you make will affect how it is used, or in the worst case, abused. We’re told that code should document itself, but how do these design decisions reflect in the understanding of intended use? Just because we might not be exposing a module as a public or open-sourced library, doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from making good decisions towards an effective and sensible API....

Android Makers by droidcon: This Year in Android

What a Long Strange Trip it's Been: This Year In Android

The Android community is a fast evolving society of excellent people who passionately involve themselves in their ecosystem. This means the progress of developments can be fast, blazingly fast! Inspired by other content creators and newsletters that keep us informed about the most recent events, I decided to document news, events, and releases every week for a year. Starting from the end of Droidcon Berlin, the world’s best Android developer conference....

DevFest Berlin: Hype Driven Development

Hype Driven Development: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Failures

Ever wondered what it would take to combine all the experimental features of a language you love (Spoilers… It’s Kotlin!) into one big bundle? I’m a lover of new and shiny stuff, so let me share with you my experience of using everything shiny, and new, in my pet project, to show you how to not do all the things you might want to do with yours! JetBrains Compose for Desktop, Unstable Coroutines APIs, version catalogues, Gradle composite builds, multiplatform navigation support, multiplatform paging, GraphQl, Firebase Cloud Functions, Molecule, Mosaic, what could go wrong?...

Berlindroid: Demystifying Molecule

Demystifying Molecule: Running Your Own Compositions for Fun and Profit

Molecule is a library for turning Composables into Flows. But how does that happen? And why would you want to do such a thing? And why not? In this talk, Ash and Bill will dive a bit into how Molecule does what it does, and help you understand where, when, and how you should use it.