By Nate Ebel, Android Developer
The Mobile Engineering team here at Premise has made a concerted effort to improve developer efficiency over the past year.
One of the biggest areas of tech investment has been into understanding and reducing the Gradle build times of our Android project. We worked with engineers from Gradle to help us optimize and monitor our build using tools such as Gradle Enterprise and gradle-profiler. The results from this work have been terrific. We are seeing decreases in both local and CI build times of 50–80% from when we first started our work.
Now that we…
By Nate Ebel, Android Developer
As Kotlin continuously evolves and adds new features, development teams can’t always keep up. Sometimes, it’s worth revisiting previously written code to explore whether or not it would benefit from new features and syntax — or maybe even be replaced by something from the Standard Library.
Our Android team at Premise recently had such an opportunity when we refactored some previously written helper functions to make use of the Kotlin Contract APIs that were added in Kotlin’s 1.3 release.
The Problem With Our Existing Functions
The following snippet represents a few examples of the kinds of helper functions we had hanging…
Kotlin vs Java? Which language is best for Android development in 2021?
New Android developers want to know which language they should learn for building modern Android applications. Development teams want to be sure that Kotlin will not have a negative impact on their app’s performance, their ability to hire qualified engineers, or on their overall developer productivity.
To help inform your decisions, we’ve curated a list of some of the most frequently asked questions regarding Kotlin vs Java for Android development.
The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Kotlin vs Java for Android Development
Which is better for Android development — Java or Kotlin?
Kotlin is the preferred language for Android development in 2021. Both Java and Kotlin can be used to…
Unsurprisingly, when discussing take-home assignments for coding interviews, much of the focus is put on code. Can you code? Are you using “best practices?” What tools are you using?. There’s lots of code-related things that people think about, or even stress about.
Unfortunately, non-coding tips for coding interview assignments don’t get talked about nearly as much. And, in my experience, there are a lot of non-coding things we can do to put our best foot forward and impress a hiring committee with our take-home assignment.
Telling Your Story
What are these non-coding tips? …
Are your Android Gradle builds ever slower than you expect? Sometimes even painfully slow?
I think most Android devs have felt this at one point or another, and many engineers spend countless hours optimizing Gradle builds to improve the productivity of mobile dev teams.
Unfortunately, sometimes, even a well-optimized Gradle build can be slow. Even really slow at times.
This was the case for our team recently.
We’ve invested a lot of time and effort into getting our Gradle builds under control; making them faster and more efficient across the team. …
GitHub recently announced GitHub CLI; a first-party command line tool for interfacing with GitHub from the command line.
With GitHub CLI, developers can check the status of GitHub issues and pull requests, search for a specific issue or PR, create/fork a repo, or create new issues and pull requests right from the command line.
In this post, we’ll walk through some common daily developer workflows. As we do, we’ll focus in on how we might manage our issues and pull requests using GitHub CLI.
What Is GitHub CLI?
So we’re all on the same page, we’ll start with…
Several times, over this past week, I found myself coming across release announcements for Android libraries that I’ve been interested in. In particular, I was pleased to see releases for WorkManager, Navigation, and MDC-Android:
Honestly, I personally find even this short list of 4 releases to be plenty to try and keep track of. It wasn’t until I sat down to write this article that I released that in this past week, there were nearly 20 library releases coming from Google alone.
That’s a lot of information to follow and process.
As these updates kept popping up throughout the week…
You are reading the first installment of this new series dedicated to exploring the latest tools, tips and trends in the world of Android development; helping you stay up to date and to grow in your career.
Each issue will aim to highlight new libraries, tools, tutorials and discussions around the world of Android development. I hope each issue will also bring with it interesting discussion, and a place for Android developers to connect with one another and find mentorship and community.
What did you think of KotlinConf?
It’s been a couple of weeks since KotlinConf, and, if you’re like me, there’s still quite a bit…
Originally published at https://goobar.dev
Let’s say you have multiple tasks that you have running on a schedule; could be things like UI tests, unit tests, or checking dependencies
While it’s great to have these on an automated schedule, you may sometimes want to run these in an ad hoc fashion to gather quick feedback. Or, maybe you have some task that you want to automate, but not frequently enough to put on a specific schedule.
Currently, the GitHub Actions UI doesn’t allow the manual execution of workflows.
However, we can make use of a repository_dispatch event sent using the GitHub…
Originally published at https://goobar.io on December 8, 2019.
In a previous post, I talked about how you can manually trigger a GitHub Actions workflow from the command line using curl.
In this post, we’re going to quickly walk through how to trigger the same events using Postman.
Refresher on manually triggering GitHub Actions workflows
Let’s quickly refresh our memories. A GitHub Actions workflow can be manually triggered by sending a repository_dispatch event. Our GitHub Actions workflows can then be configured to run in response to those webhook events.
To manually trigger a repository_dispatch event, we need to interact with the following GitHub api endpoint:
POST /repos/:owner/:repo/dispatches
