Imagine you have an internet provider. You probably do. This provider sometimes performs scheduled maintenance, resulting in your internet temporarily disconnecting. Now imagine there’s no way of getting notified about future maintenance windows, unless you check their outages page every day. Annoying, but we can do something about that with…

I happen to be an aviation nerd and flight tracking services enable aviation nerds to learn a lot about any aircraft flying over. Where it’s going, where it’s coming from, why it’s flying over my house at 6AM after I went to bed only 4 hours ago. Important stuff. In…

There comes a time in a software engineer’s career when they start asking the dreaded question. Do I continue writing code as an ‘individual contributor’ or should I start the gradual descent into management? Here is my tale of exploring the ‘dark side’ and eventually coming back. Take it for…

Introductory articles are all the same: here’s the new shiny (used as a noun), it’s really cool, please use it. Admittedly, this post is about my new library called Kapsule, but I want to first discuss the state of dependency injection in Kotlin and hence explain what drove me to…

Because Kotlin has an abundance of features and it isn’t too opinionated, oftentimes you find yourself wondering which is a better way to achieve the same result. Is there any difference in readability, performance or extendability? This happens with even the most basic things like for-loops. Integer Ranges Let’s say you want…

When writing libraries in Java, it’s not uncommon to create an abstract class with some basic functionality that the user would extend. But how do you ensure that the overridden methods call through to super? You might have seen this in the Android source: for example, if you try to…

Almost two years have passed since I started droning on about how awesome Kotlin is and how much better it makes Android development. Back then, however, I made a point of not recommending it for production use. I wanted to play around with it first and wait for a more…

Unless your mobile app is completely self contained, it’s likely to be using a server component in some shape or form. And when front-end features depend on their back-end implementations, the app teams are left waiting for their server counterparts, wasting time and money. Prototyping can be used to mitigate…

Everyone uses libraries. They are your optional way to save time on writing boilerplate code. But when to use them is a debatable question. The unspoken rule is: keep writing custom code until you get the feeling that something is so common that there must be a standard way of…