Annyce Davis

Helping you write beautiful code

How To Deprecate an Internal Mobile Application

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Seven years ago, Zola Electric welcomed its first Android application into the world. It was designed to support our sales and service staff as they went throughout Tanzania introducing solar energy to folks. It served us well.

Since then we’ve grown as a company and our needs have expanded as well. This led us to focus on developing a new Android application which met the following requirements:

  • Resilient to unstable network conditions
  • Worked seamlessly offline
  • Used the latest Android best practices
  • Incorporated User Experience principles
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Bash Scripting for Flutter Tests and Code Coverage Reports

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Do you have a development task that is mostly a series of commands? Do you have to perform that task on a regular basis? If so, a script might be just what you need. Over the years I’ve wanted to learn bash scripting several times. Yet there’s always something else that takes priority and my desire to script takes a back seat. Not any more!

I finally decided to start learning how to write bash scripts and I want to share it with you in case you’d like to do the same. At the bottom of this post, I’ve listed several resources that I’m using to help me on this journey. If you’re an Android developer, you can use Gradle to handle many automated tasks. If you want to learn about Gradle on Android or how to create a Gradle plugin, check out my course here.

On to the script. It does the following:

  • Runs the unit and widget tests for a Flutter application
  • Generates a code coverage report
  • Removes the unwanted files from the coverage output
  • Converts the coverage data to HTML
  • Opens the HTML page in your browser

I’m going to break down what each section of the script does so that you can start having fun creating your own scripts! (This post assumes you are already familiar with programming and related concepts.)

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Talk: Talk to Me Right!

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Software development is challenging because as a technical team, we have to figure out what to do, do it, and then make sure we’ve done it right. And each step requires effective communication. In this talk, we’ll look at various tools and techniques that can help propel your career by making you a more effective technical communicator.

Learn what forms of communication are the most important to automate and which require a personal touch in your team’s daily activities. We’ll also discuss how you can best structure meetings to achieve your team’s goals. Finally, we’ll review some common challenges to effective communication and how you can navigate them successfully.

Our coworkers aren’t all robots yet. Effective communication will continue to play a major role in the success of our teams. So let’s do it right!

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Frustration-Free Code Reviews

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#wocintechchat

Hopefully, code reviews are already a part of your software development process. They should be a collaborative, non-judgemental tool for improving code quality and decreasing knowledge silos. Yet instead, they often serve as a source of frustration and fear. But why?

Well, if this was a play we’d have the following parts:

  • The code
  • The Author
  • The Author’s Ego
  • The Reviewer
  • The Reviewer’s Ego

As you can imagine bringing this cast of characters together can be a challenge! Especially since we want to do so in a way that results in high-quality software. Thus we need a plan, just like any good play has a well-written script.

Let’s look at the following areas and how they contribute to a frustration-free code review:

  • Goals
  • Pull Requests
  • CI Integration
  • Giving Comments
  • Responding to Comments

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