Annyce Davis

Helping you write beautiful code

Talk: First Do No Harm

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Developing Android applications is a powerful way to connect people with the information they need the most. Apps are for living your life: daily commutes, traveling abroad, communicating with family, and much more! This places the responsibility of engineering top-notch software squarely in the laps of us developers. Unlike doctors, we were not required to take an oath or pledge when becoming Android Developers. However, we can still learn much from the principles behind the phrase, “First, do no harm.” In this talk, we will discuss over a dozen tools that are at your disposal as a developer which can enable you to provide high quality applications to your users. Thus allowing you to first, do no harm!

This talk covers:

  • Resources for Study
  • Preventative Techniques
  • Diagnostic Tools

 

Resources for Study:

Resources for Prevention:

Resources for Diagnosis:

Realm Migrations Supercharged with Dagger

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My current tech obsessions are: Realm, Dagger and Unit Testing. Therefore, I’m always looking for opportunities to improve my code in some way that involves one or more of the above. That being said, I realized that the recommended way of handling migrations in Realm could be improved significantly by means of Dagger 2.

We’re going to be refactoring the following Migration class:


With only two version updates, we already have a decent sized method to deal with. What’s more if you didn’t start out by creating tests for your migrations, once this method gets much longer you probably never will. But all is not lost, Dagger’s Multibinding Support is coming to the rescue. Let’s take a look!Continue Reading

Conference Speaking One Year Later: Every Single Thing I’ve Learned

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I started speaking at Technical Conferences a year ago and I’ve learned so many things since then. Things about the process of putting on a conference, choosing speakers, writing talks, crafting slides, interacting with the audience, and more.

I’ve never had a fear of public speaking per se; yet I just felt like I didn’t know “enough” to get up in front of dozens of people and share what “little” I did know. A few wonderful women in the Android Community helped me come to my senses and realize that I did have “something to say”. Not only that, what I wanted to share was valid, entertaining and useful. 

 
If you’re interested in becoming a Conference Speaker, I hope that you find at least one thing in this post that can help you on your journey.
 

I’ve broken my learnings into four main sections:

  • The Talk
  • Speaking
  • The People
  • Traveling

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Background Work with Android Job and Dagger

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Background work on Android can be challenging when you have to support a wide range of API levels. Specifically you can use Alarm Manager, Job Scheduler or GCM Network Manager depending on your minimum API level and if the device has Play Services. To help abstract away which implementation you’re using to perform background work, the good folks at Evernote have open-sourced, Android Job.


Android Job works by first allowing you to define how you want your jobs to be created, by means of the Job Creator class. Then you can schedule requests using the Job Manager and have the confidence that they will be run when the requirements are met. In the image below you can see a representation of the various components involved with using Android Job in your application. Each Job is identified by a tag; this is just a simple String that is used to differentiate the various jobs in your application.


Let’s take a look at each piece!

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