After reading a recent post by Sam Edwards detailing how he wraps mock objects for tests, I had a good discussion with him and others about the alternative: simply making Fake implementations.

How my experience as a freelancer changed my perspective on hiring and employment.

Properly scoping objects in Android apps to avoid memory leaks and avoid repeating work can be challenging. Let’s take a look at some ways that this could be done in the past, and also an approach that is clean and simple, but isn’t tied to the Android framework.

Some data communicated between view models and views shouldn’t be restored. Here’s a look at a simple way to deliver these transient events, avoiding complexity and common bugs.

This article looks at an approach to encapsulate view state, allowing us to move more logic into our more easily testable ViewModel classes, and simply our views.

Using a build cache can speed up builds a great deal. Here’s a look at how to enable a build cache in Google Cloud Build.

Many CI services use an incrementing build number to identify builds. Google Cloud Build, however, uses a randomly assigned unique identifier, as is common in large scale systems. In this article we take a look at how to support incremented build numbers in Google Cloud Build.

Google Cloud Build is a Continuous Integration environment from Google Cloud that’s very flexible, and very affordable. In this post we look at how it can be used for Android projects.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a Google Pixelbook. I’ve been doing a bit of Android Development on it, mostly to optimize Pigment for Chromebooks. It’s taken some experimentation and discovery to find out how to get things set up, largely because the Android documentation is slightly out of date, so I thought I would share my experience, hopefully saving others time. This post serves as a step by step guide to getting up and running with Android Studio on a Pixelbook (and, hopefully, other Chromebooks as well).

A few months ago I was tasked with rewriting the subscription code for Pigment, the coloring book app I work on at Pixite. Our users were suffering from a bug causing paying users to sometimes lose access to premium content, and the original implementation was somewhat hastily written, so I decided it made sense to invest the time to rewrite the billing code from scratch. Play Billing Library Google makes interacting with the Play Store’s in app billing infrastructure pretty easy with the Play Billing Library.