I have been working as an independent consultant for a few years now.
Sometimes I talk to others who are considering going the same route. I now have a more or less standard list of advice that I send to them. I’m turning it into this blog post, so I can simply point here next time.
Continue reading “Programmer Friday: How to work for yourself”
When you build software, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the wrong details or to get ahead of yourself.
Programmers sometimes optimize code prematurely. Or we apply unnecessary patterns, structures and frameworks. This makes our work more complex than it needs to be.
Newer programmers seem to fall into this trap more, but experienced people also get things mixed up occasionally. I certainly do. So: one thing at a time. Continue reading “Programmer Friday: Make it work, make it right, make it fast”
Sometimes you, the Android developer, will work with designers who have the time and knowledge to think of everything. They create complete, detailed designs for every screen and interaction. They cover both web, iOS and Android. They regularly use both Android and iOS themselves. They understand the strengths and conventions of each platform.
These projects are delightful. Unfortunately, all projects are not like this.
Continue reading “Android Friday: Help your designer bridge the app gap”
I am not the most experienced teacher in my circle, but I have taught some technical classes, courses and workshops in my day — some of them for pay.
Here are some principles and techniques which have worked for me.
Continue reading “Programmer Friday: How to teach a programming course”
How do you determine how much time you need to build a piece of software?
We sometimes need to know roughly how long something will take before we start working on it. This is basic product management. “This new feature will take more than four months to add to our product? Maybe we have better things to do with our time, then.” The viability of a new project, product or feature is (in part) derived from the initially estimated cost of building it.
I’ve settled on the following approach for doing estimates: Continue reading “Programmer Friday: Estimating 101”
Opening screens from other screens in Android apps is straight forward: create an Intent object, stuff some parameters into it, use it to launch the other Activity, and dig out the passed parameters at the other end.
Unfortunately, if you blindly follow Googles standard examples of how to do this, you will end up sprinkling potential bugs around your codebase. Let’s look at how to tighten it up a bit.
Continue reading “Android Friday: Let Activities encapsulate their creation”
Your company is developing an Android app. Along the way you want to distribute test builds of the app. The designer needs to do user testing out in the field, the backend developer wants to end-to-end-test the whole system from the app… oh and by the way: the CEO wants to check in periodically as well.
If you were building a web-app it would be easy: just email a link to everyone. Distribution happens every time they reload their browser. However, with native apps you need to periodically push out new versions of the app to their phones.
Continue reading “Android Friday: How should you distribute test builds of your app?”
I am available for consulting/contracting again in Q1 2018: get in touch!
EDIT: I am booked again, until Q3 2018. However: feel free to contact me if you want to discuss future possibilities!
