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. By taking the stance that every piece of code we write is an API we can build more versatile and scalable applications. ...

Legacy code can be quite the challenge to manage, often resulting from untested scenarios, quick fixes, or less than successful initiatives. With few developers wanting to deal with it, it can end up with little remaining knowledge of its inner workings. We can take many learnings from Michael Feathers book on “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”, but we can also use Kotlin migration as an effective tool to leverage the management, reduction, and removal of legacy code in our applications. ...

Fragments have often been the controversial, and to some, the stuff of nightmares, with the inconsistency of lifecycle events, complex UI interaction, and unexpected behaviours making many Android developers suspicious of their usage. But with the development and recent stable publication of the navigation library, it may be the right time to give them a chance. Giving Fragments a second chance is not something I’d ever thought I’d be saying, but it’s a fantastic opportunity to find a solution to sharing data across a single screen. ...

Dagger has become one of the most widely used libraries in Android development, and is often one of the first to be thought of when bootstrapping a new project, but there are still many nuances and caveats that often get overlooked! Many questions arose after the adoption of Kotlin on how to continue following best practices from Java, so whether you’re using dagger-android or vanilla Dagger, I’ll go through some tips and tricks to make sure you’re using Dagger to its best capacity. ...

Legacy code can be quite the challenge to manage, often resulting from untested scenarios, quick fixes, or less than successful initiatives. With few developers wanting to deal with it, it can end up with little remaining knowledge of its inner workings. We can take many learnings from Michael Feathers book on “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”, but we can also use Kotlin migration as an effective tool to leverage the management, reduction, and removal of legacy code in our applications. ...

Dagger has become one of the most widely used libraries in Android development, and is often one of the first to be thought of when bootstrapping a new project, but there are still many nuances and caveats that often get overlooked! Many questions arose after the adoption of Kotlin on how to continue following best practices from Java, so whether you’re using dagger-android or vanilla Dagger, I’ll go through some tips and tricks to make sure you’re using Dagger to its best capacity. ...

The Android Paging Library makes it easy to integrate complex paging behaviour, gradually loading small chunks of data at a time to help reduce usage of network bandwidth and system resources. The library allows you to implement this behaviour using compositional components in a decoupled architecture making your code more reliable, scalable, and testable. Furthermore, you’ll be able to use familiar components such as LiveData or RxJava to interface with your existing architecture. ...

Fragments have often been the controversial, and to some, the stuff of nightmares, with the inconsistency of lifecycle events, complex UI interaction, and unexpected behaviours making many Android developers suspicious of their usage. But with the development and recent stable publication of the navigation library, it may be the right time to give them a chance. Giving Fragments a second chance is not something I’d ever thought I’d be saying, but it’s a fantastic opportunity to find a solution to sharing data across a single screen. ...

Kotlin has taken the Android world by storm, and is quickly becoming the most popular language of choice. With Coroutines now stable, does it make sense to replace your RxJava implementations for Coroutines? Despite the hype, it may not make sense to jump on the bandwagon just yet. RxJava has already proven its stability and usefulness, and a comparison between the two frameworks shows that they are simply better suited for different purposes. ...

Legacy code can be quite the challenge to manage, often resulting from untested scenarios, quick fixes, or less than successful initiatives. With few developers wanting to deal with it, it can end up with little remaining knowledge of it’s inner workings. We can take many learnings from Michael Feathers book on “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”, but we can also use Kotlin migration as an effective tool to leverage the management, reduction, and removal of legacy code in our applications. ...