StoicallyTyped Newsletter

By Matt McKenna

"It does not matter how slow you go as long as you do not stop."

#19・ Sep 6, 2021

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Hello and welcome back to another issue!

I took last week off as I was focusing on relaxing before I started my new job! Week one has passed and my excitement has only grown. I have learned so much in just a week!

There’s some really cool stuff that went on in the last two weeks. Let’s check it out!

👾 Fun Stuff

🟣 Madona hosted a Twitter Space this week…

to kick off the Android Dev Hangout! It was a great discussion and so many amazing people showed up and discussed hiring, mentorship, opensource and more!

During the space I extended an offer to help people get time during the week to get involved in the open source community. I’ll put that tweet below and extend the offer to you as well!

Be sure to follow Madona and join us for more Spaces in the future!

Matt M 💭

@himattm

We talked a lot about working in open source and how to use it to get involved in the community.

Reach out if you need help talking to/convincing your manager to give you 10% time (half a day) to do so! https://t.co/s1KZH0PnLn

2:14 PM - 3 Sep 2021

When the deadline hits:

Volkan Özçelik 🦄

@linkibol

True story. https://t.co/LyWPI4wHA7

2:42 AM - 30 Aug 2021

Here’s a pro-tip from Enrique López-Mañas

Enrique López-Mañas

@eenriquelopez

When to set value or use postValue on LiveData. https://t.co/E6Q9mpzkES

8:36 AM - 26 Aug 2021

📚 TL;DRs

Use the Wear OS emulator pairing assistant

It’s now easier to pair an android emulator with a Wear OS emulator!

There’s a step by step guide in this doc. Hopefully these improvements mean official Wear updates are coming soon! I’m really looking forwards to using Compose in Wear apps.

developer.android.com

Do more with your widget in Android 12!

In his previous post, Murat Yener goes over visual changes, transitions, and the new widget picker improvements. This post, part two, is about:

The ability to reconfigure widgets in place.
New and improved Widget APIs.

Widgets getting some love and attention is so nice to see! Compose for Widgets is coming soon too!

medium.com

Introduction to Accessibility on Android

The Android team has put together a playlist of videos to go over how to build android apps to better cater to those with accessibility needs.

This first video introduces some of the many reason why accessible design helps everyone!

I’ll be included the following videos in future issues. Also the intro sequence is INCREDIBLE! You definitely need to check it out.

www.youtube.com

Alpha AWS SDK for Kotlin

AWS has released an alpha build of an SDK to support calling into AWS services leverage idiomatic Kotlin!

This article is a quick guide to get you started.

Also check out the project on Github!

aws.amazon.com

🛠 For Your Toolkit

You already have this one! Today learn about some of the great things you can do with the Android Studio Debugger! It might even be better than Log.d or println! 😜

IntelliJ IDEA. Debugger Advanced (2021)

Not your usual toolkit item today, but this video from JetBrains is amazing! It takes a deep dive into the Debugger showing of some advanced usages. I highly recommend trying out these features.

Did you know you can group breakpoints into named folders??

👩🏾‍💻 Android Practice Question

In Kotlin, how does a Sequence differ from an Iterable Collection?

Can you think of any scenarios where a Sequence would perform better than an Iterable?

Send a link to a gist with your answer by replying to this email or the Tweet of this issue. Have your answer included in next weeks issue!

⭐️ Answer to Last Week's Question

What purpose do these annotations have?

@JvmStatic
@JvmOverloads
@JvmField

These annotations help make Kotlin interoperable with Java.

@JvmStatic: [Docs] Use this annotation to tell the compiler that this function needs to be static or in the case of a property generate a static getter and setter.

@JvmOverloads: [Docs] If you have a function with default values this annotation tells the compiler to generate each overloaded version of this function.

@JvmField: [Docs] This annotation tells the compiler not to generate getters and setters for a property and expose it as a field. See more about it’s use here.

💭 Stoicism x Tech

“It does not matter how slow you go as long as you do not stop.” –Confucius

The best way to improve at something is consistency. Even just a 1% improvement every day compounds massively. At the rate of 1% your skill in something will double every 72 days. In a bit over 2 months your skill in something could be twice from when you started.

The world of tech is ever changing. New ideas and paradigms show up all the time. Never feel like things are moving too fast for you. If you want to learn something and can commit to improving even just 1% in a day, you will soon look back and see how much you can do.

👋 Want to Contribute!?

Did I miss something great this week? Have a career question you want answered by the community? Send them to me on Twitter or reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you and chat!

If you enjoyed this issue consider sending it to someone you think might enjoy it.

Remember to stay hydrated and have a great week!

- Matt ✌️

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Matt McKenna @himattm

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