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It’s a common age-old adage, the ongoing war between Software Engineer and QA Engineer, the eternal struggle between the bright-eyed, and those tasked with enforcing practical reality. I mean not to demonise either party here, this is exactly the picture that can be seen if both are performing their roles adequately. It is very important to understand, at least from a Software Engineering perspective, that QA Engineers, not out to make your life difficult, and often will be happy to help you work out the kinks… mostly....

Preface Last year, there was a hot topic on Twitter about how relevant RxJava was with modern Android development, which garnered a pretty interesting debate with some convincing arguments from both sides. The claim was that given the popularity of modern frameworks, RxJava is too bloated and should be removed. The debate was even given a catchy title, which prompted a panel discussion at Droidcon Berlin last year, with Hasan, Ivan, x, and myself....

Much of our responsibility as software engineers is based upon problem-solving, we are required to use our knowledge of available tools, and our experience, to find the most appropriate solution to a given problem. That’s what I’d like to focus on here, on finding the most appropriate solution. More often than not, the solution to a problem can be quite simple and doesn’t require over-engineering, which is perhaps where the age-old KISS and YAGNI principles come from....

Android Data Binding is a support library that allows us to bind UI components to data sources declaratively rather than programmatically, it’s potentially really powerful and complex, but used effectively it can really cut down on presentation boilerplate. We started off with Data Binding beta in 2015 when Google announced it after Google IO as a support library that can be used right back down to Android 2.1 which is API version 7, to write declarative layouts and minimise the glue code required to use your application logic in layouts....