Annyce Davis

Davis Technology Consulting

Fragmented Podcast Chat

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I was recently a guest on one of my favorite podcasts, Fragmented. It’s a podcast that focuses on tips and tricks for improving the Android Development experience. 

We talked all about Gradle, the build system that is used for running, testing, and packaging Android applications. I wanted to share some of the highlights.

Highlights


[02:31]: Kaushik attempts to discover if my time at The Washington Post was as exciting as the Spotlight movie.

[04:35]: Talking about my new work at Off Grid Electric.

[06:50]: We starting digging into some of the benefits of the Gradle build system.

[09:15]: We discuss build flavors and how they allow you to have different variations of your application.

[10:20]: Donn asks a question many have wondered: Why do we have some many .gradle files when we start a new Android application?

[12:22]: We discuss how the settings.gradle file is used.

[13:35]: How does the Gradle plugin structure benefit Android developers.

[16:40]: Donn introduces us to Gradle tasks. Then we talk about how they’re connected to plugins.

[24:10]: We do a quick overview of Creating a Custom Gradle Plugin. 

[31:00]: We start talking about improving the Gradle build times. 
Then as an extra bonus, Chiu-Ki Chan, fellow Android GDE, made an awesome Sketchnote of the entire episode.



Joining In on Twitter Chats

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A great way to connect with others in the tech community is by means of joining in on a Twitter Chat. So what’s a Twitter chat? 

“A tweet chat is a live Twitter event, usually moderated and focused around a general topic. To filter all the chatter on Twitter into a single conversation a hashtag is used. A set time is also established so that the moderator, guest or host is available to engage in the conversation.” — Forbes


Ok, so here’s the Twitter Chat basics: 

  1. Find out the start day and time (i.e. every Wednesday at 9pm EST)
  2. Use the chat’s hashtag in all tweets (i.e. #CodeNewbie)
  3. I use Tweetdeck to follow the conversation (just create a column with the desired hashtag)
  4. Wait for the Moderator to announce the question (i.e. Q1: What did you learn this week? #CodeNewbie)
  5. Respond with “A” and then the answer number (i.e. A1: I learned about JUnit Rules #CodeNewbie)
  6. Interact with other’s tweets that you find interesting (favorite, retweet, respond, etc.) 
TweetDeck


Some of the benefits: 

  • Meet people who are interested in a similar topic
  • Expand your network of tech professionals
  • Help encourage others who are just getting started
  • Learn new strategies for dealing with the unique challenges in the tech sector
  • And do it all from the comfort of your own computer 😉


Another benefit of participating in a Twitter chat is that often times the chat is captured via Storify and you can continue to have others engaging with you and your tweets long after the chat has ended.

What’s your favorite Twitter chat? Please share in the comments!

Talk: Gradle Plugin Goodness

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If you find yourself copying and pasting code from your application’s build.gradle file every time you start a new project, then it’s time you learn about creating Gradle plugins. In this presentation you will learn what it takes to create a custom Gradle plugin for use in your Android/Java applications. 

It covers: Plugin Structure, Key Plugin Components, Testing, and Publishing

Materials

 
If you would like to learn more about creating high quality Android applications, I encourage you to check out my video course.

Testing Tricks #4 – Improving Readability

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Readability is one of the key components to creating high quality unit and integration tests. Yet, we may hinder the readability of our tests by bogging them down with needless information. Let’s take a look at an example.

Example


Here we have a simple test that is desiring to make sure the URL we used to create the Video object matches the result of calling the playCurrentVideo method in the VideoPlaybackService class. We have created a helper method that allows us to pass in the variables for the Video object creation. However, in most cases we don’t need to have all of the parameters set. In fact, the duration and displayDate have no impact on the current method under test. So we’ve added additional, needless information to the test that makes it more difficult to understand what’s going on.

Solution


We can fix this issue by updating the Video class to adhere more closely to the Builder Pattern so that the additional setting of fields is not needed. Here is the current setter used for the video’s URL.


We can update it to pass back the Video object (this) instead of just being void. Let’s see how this will help to make the test more readable and understandable.

With Builder Pattern


The end result is something much more readable and maintainable. Happy testing!

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