Medium has gone downhill sharply since I first published some blogs on their platform 5 years ago. It’s been irritating to me as a reader of other blogs to be pushed to login or subscribe or whatever, and I don’t want my content used like that. So, I’ve finally sorted out my own blog - using Hugo & GitHub Pages. Farewell, Medium.

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted a survey to find out more about how Android developers were modularising their apps. It’s a broad and complicated topic, with no clear standard approach or conventions to follow, so I was interested to learn more. Do you work on an android app that's split up into modules? If so, it would great if you could spend a few mins filling out this survey, gathering data on your approach - I'll publish the results so everyone in Android community can benefit!

When I joined Monzo I was keen to keep a track of metrics that would help us keep a handle on the app’s size and method count. I set up a shell script on our CI to upload the numbers to StatHat each time we merged a change to our develop branch. This was great in theory, but not visible enough to be actually useful - in fact, one of the stats stopped uploading properly some months ago and we didn’t even notice.

This week I found myself confused by an exception when writing a simple extension method on Android’s TextView. Consider the following extension method: fun TextView.doSomething() { } This is about as simple as it could get - it has no parameters and returns nothing. However, when I tried to use it, I found myself with the following exception: Parameter specified as non-null is null: method kotlin.jvm.internal.Intrinsics.checkParameterIsNotNull, parameter $receiver But that’s weird - it looks like there’s a parameter called $receiver which is null… Except, I don’t have a parameter at all!

In building an app which guides a user through a process, stage by stage, we would probably use an enum to represent it. For example, consider a process which goes from NOT_STARTED, through IN_PROGRESS to one of either REJECTED or COMPLETED: The logic for moving between these stages is transparent to the app, we show different screens based on which stage a user is in. But what if the mapping of stages isn’t 1:1 on the client and the server?

Recently, I needed to change the colour of part of a drawable - and I wanted to do it better than manually swapping out the whole image, or swapping in and out the changing part and overlaying this on top of a base image. I knew I wanted the assets to be vector based if at all possible - SVG support was added in Lollipop with the VectorDrawable class and have been a great addition.

Clean Status Bar is an app I created in September 2014 to try and make taking nice screenshots for the Google Play Store easy and fast. Ugly screenshots are a distraction from the app you’re trying to show off, and have become somewhat of a pet peeve of mine. When I’m looking at an app on the Play Store and wondering whether it’s worth downloading or not, the first thing I look at is the screenshots.