Annyce Davis

Helping you write beautiful code

How to Create a GraphQL API in Kotlin

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There are several freely available datasets online. One platform I came across was Kaggle. It supports analytics competitions based on user-mined datasets. After a bit of digging, I uncovered a CSV file of user reported UFO Sightings. This turned out to be interesting data. For instance, which countries had the most reported UFO sightings? Is there a particular day of the week where sightings occur the most? I had so many questions! My first step however, was to expose the data as a GraphQL API.Continue Reading

[NEW COURSE]: “Intermediate Kotlin for Android Developers”

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My second course with LinkedIn Learning is now available, “Intermediate Kotlin for Android Developers”! As an avid fan of the Kotlin programming language, I had lots of fun putting this course together. I hope you enjoy watching and learning!

Course Description:

Kotlin is now officially supported by Google as an Android development language. If you’re an Intermediate Developer interested in learning more about Kotlin, this course can help you get acquainted with this concise, fun language by learning about its efficiencies and power in Android development! The course starts with a general overview of what Kotlin has to offer, and how to leverage the Kotlin Android Extensions plugin. It also explains how to work with Anko, and provides an overview of some of the library’s main artifacts: commons, layouts, and coroutines. To wrap up, the course covers how to work with collections.

Topics Included:

  • What Kotlin has to Offer
  • Working with Lambdas
  • Common Android Extension functions
  • Kotlin Android Extensions overview
  • Making use of the Anko library
  • Working with Coroutines
  • Nullability and Collections

For more great video content, check out my course page!

Talk: RxJava in Baby Steps

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Reactive Programming with RxJava has widely been adopted by both backend services and Android applications alike. Yet, the steep learning curve leaves many developers hesitant about adding it to their own Software tool belt. I was one such developer. Over the past two years, I’ve watched countless videos, read numerous blog posts and attended several conference talks on the subject. Yet, I often left each experience feeling only slightly more knowledgeable, but not quite empowered to start using RxJava in my apps. That’s not going to happen in this talk!

We cover the bare minimum concepts you need to grok, in order to start using RxJava today. In particular, we focus on:

  • The 3 O’s: Observable, Observer and Operator
  • The most common Operators: map(), flatMap(), and filter()
  • Understanding those Marble Diagrams

Reactive Programming is not going away any time soon. It’s a powerful way to create asynchronous, event-based applications. It allows developers the ability to craft applications that can easily combine multiple network calls, gracefully handle failures, all while providing a snappy user experience. I want everyone to feel comfortable with the basic concepts of RxJava. Today can be your first step…

 

Resources for Learning More:

@JvmSuppressWildcards My Biggest Annoyance with Kotlin

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Over the past few months my team has been steadily moving our code over to Kotlin. It’s been a joy to get to work with such a succinct, yet expressive language. However, I have spent needless hours attempting to debug issues in my application that were all solved with the addition of this one thing: @JvmSuppressWildcards.

Me debugging these issues

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