Don’t fear the unknown. I felt insecure early in my career and would get nervous when pairing with developers who knew what they were doing. Part of me didn’t want to admit I didn’t know how to test so I shunned it instead.
Start early in your career. It makes you a better coder that thinks more clearly about the code you are writing. Testing is important and shouldn’t just be practiced by experienced developers. Continue reading 6 Testing Tips
I was inspired by my recent appearance on the Fragment podcast to get recording! I can’t wait to share what we talked about on the show, but in the meantime …
An idea I’ve been kicking around for a while was show Android TDD in action. The Android Activity Book gives a thorough introduction, but since it’s a book, it’s harder to get an immediate feel for TDD.
To make it more accessible, I created an Android Kata so that people could practice TDD on a small throw away app. I gave this as a workshop to my coworkers and they really loved working through the example project. I turned it into a downloadable workshop so that you can walk through it too.
Get your copy today! I’d love to hear your feedback.
Last week I attended the Global GDG Summit and Google I/O in San Francisco.
It’s great to see the top Android developers in the world — all in one place! It felt like everyone I’ve ever met at past international and domestic conferences was there.
I captured everything in sketchnotes. Here’s a taste, but you can download the whole set here.
Last week, just before Google I/O, I attended the Global Google Developer Group Organizer’s Summit in San Jose.
The summit was up to 500 organizers this year, so we took over the Computer History Museum.
We discuss relevant topics to organizing as well as upcoming Google announcements. The best part, however, is interacting with organizers from all around the world!
I captured the activities from day one on video (using Google Glass), check it out to see different phases of the process.
As you may have noticed, I’ve become a little obsessed with sketchnoting since I saw Chiu-Ki’s notes from Write/Speak/Code. I tried my hand at the conference and later that week at Capital One’s Women in Tech Summit.
One of my favorite tools for creating polished apps is Robolectric, which allows you to unit test directly in your IDE — fancy debugging and everything.
I’ve been kicking around the idea for a while to create katas to practice technique and help others start out with the tool. I didn’t want them to go through the same pain of spending several minutes (or hours) trying to piece together disparate suggestions for how to test something simple!
Continue reading Kata: Simple Android App
I’ve been sketchnoting up a storm and created a series of sketches about public speaking.
Continue reading How to Prepare a Conference Talk
I spoke on an authorship panel this weekend at <write/speak/code>.
This is one of my favorite conferences because it focuses on action and building each other up. Read on to see what we learned.
Continue reading <write />
The lovely Angie Hilem wrote a blog about live tweeting events after we attended <write/speak/code> together this weekend. She got me think about my secrets.
I’ve been live tweeting events for many years and have met so many people this way. I’ve made friends in Rome, Amsterdam, London, Tunis, Mexico, and Argentina.
A coding kata is a way to practice something to get better at it — just like the karate counterpart. I also use katas to get familiar with new tools and approaches.
In Android, it’s difficult to get started with TDD because JUnit isn’t supported natively in the JVM. Robolectric gets around this restriction, but must be configured each time.