Android

How to fix common Android API deprecations

August 19, 2022 by Annyce Davis Leave a Comment

Each year there’s a new version of the Android SDK released. Along with the myriad of new features come deprecations. When something is deprecated, although it’s still available, it’s best to migrate to the recommended new API. With that being said here are some common deprecations I encountered in my company’s Android codebase and how to fix them.

Deprecated Menu APIs on Fragments

The Fragment APIs for providing a menu to your activity’s ActionBar have been deprecated as they tightly couple your fragment to your activity and are not testable in isolation. The new MenuHost and MenuProvider APIs provide a testable, lifecycle-aware equivalent API surface that fragments should use instead.

What engineering leaders need to know from this year’s Google I/O

May 13, 2022 by Annyce Davis Leave a Comment

I didn’t intentionally aim to create a rhyming title, but there you have it. Each year, I look forward to Google I/O like a kid going back to school. This year was no exception. I watched as many videos as I could that were related to App Quality, Firebase Crashlytics, and Jetpack Compose. Here’s what I think engineering leaders should know.

Key takeaways

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning dominate. Hiring these engineers will remain unbelievably competitive
App quality matters and will impact your success on Google Play
Large screens aren’t going away any time soon. Designers will need to adapt
User data privacy changes are coming fast and furious
Jetpack Compose: learn it or get left behind

Talk: The Real MVP

May 2, 2022 by Annyce Davis Leave a Comment

You have an idea for a new app. You’ve secured buy-in from the business. What’s next? The MVP. But what does it take to ship a new app these days? What are the challenges you’ll inevitably face? How should you approach the architecture? What are the technical decisions you’ll need to make?

You’ll learn the answers to those questions and more in this talk. We’ll discuss how to conduct initial user research, the development process, and how to work with Marketing to promote your MVP.

Join me on the journey from idea to users’ hands.

Resources:

Recordings

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Improved caching with Kotlin flows and the reduce function

March 17, 2022 by Annyce Davis 3 Comments

I’ve been on a caching crusade. I’m working to reduce the load on our database by focusing on various caching solutions. In an ideal world, data that is “static” will be heavily cached; minimal database interaction required. However, that’s not the world I’m living in. Each request to our GraphQL API leads directly to a database hit. Ugh!

Apollo GraphQL offers a few caching solutions to help with this endeavor. We decided to go with the responseCachePlugin. This plugin stores cacheable data in a datastore of your choice, for us that was Redis. The key thing to keep in mind is that the data must be cacheable. Which leads us to “the problem.”