In January of 2013, I finally decided to make the leap and start my own consulting business. It’s only been 3 months since then, but I’ve already learned quite a lot from the experience.

After reading a recent article on Inc.com I couldn’t help but feel a little offended and reflective on my own experience in the workforce.

One thing that I’ve come to realize is how much more productive I feel now that I’m working for myself. It’s not just that I feel productive, I get projects done faster, build better stuff, and have learned an amazing amount in the last three months to become a much better programmer.

There are a lot of great apps on mobile devices these days, made by a lot of great people. Many, if not most, of these apps use various open source libraries for features or backwards compatibility. This is excellent, but we have to make sure that we give credit where credit is due.

Open Source is Great

I have always been a big proponent of open source. Not just software, either. I love the idea of open source hardware, and even open source house plans. I love the idea that, if only people would share what they created, we could all work towards the common good.

The Android APIs are filled with things that don’t quite seem right.  I’ve always been annoyed by the lack of relationship between interface elements.  For instance, isn’t a ListView really just a special case of a GridView with only one column?  Yet GridView and ListView aren’t directly related, so we get oddities where I can add header and footer views to a ListView, but not a GridView.

One thing that seems to trip people up is the Button class.  Android has a Button class for text (and images if your not really concerned with formatting them) and an ImageButton class for images.  Like the ListView/GridView situation mentioned earlier, these two buttons are not, in fact, related.  Button inherits from TextView and ImageButton inherits from ImageView.

In the world we live in today, basic computer understanding is a must have.  The folks at code.org have made this excellent video which really shows why everyone should learn to code and how easy it really can be.

{% youtube dU1xS07N-FA %}

The biggest question that I hear is “Where do I start?” and my answer is always the same, just start.  You can spend years worrying about which language is best and what your first app is going to be, but none of that is really important in the long run.  I think the most important part is that you start and get the basic idea of programming.

Fragment are a great addition to Android.  They allow reusability of sections of your views at the controller layer, and they also provide better encapsulation of your app’s logic.  This can really help developers speed up code development and also keep their code clean, which makes it easier to maintain.  All of these benefits are available if you follow a few guidelines when developing your code.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see developers make, particularly those coming from other platforms, is casting the parent activity.  The Fragment API provides methods for communicating with the parent activity because there are many things, like navigation, that should not be handled by the Fragment.  This requires a mechanism for the Fragment to notify the parent Activity when certain activities occur.