While we’re waiting, here is a way to implement multiple receivers now! During the Kotlin 1.4 Online Event in 2020, Roman Elizarov discussed a potential future feature, Multiple Receivers for extension functions/properties¹. With member extensions you can access the properties and methods of the container class allowing you to have…

The secret to losing weight successfully. — When most people notice or hear that I lost weight, they tell me they gained weight during the pandemic. The next question is, “How are you doing it?”. After they hear my method they always respond with varying levels of seriousness to sarcasm, “No magic pill?”. Nope! …

A better way to store preferences — On Sept. 2, 2020, the Jetpack team released the DataStore library to alpha. This library is the replacement to SharedPreferences and it is awesome! DataStore comes in two flavors: Preferences — for storing key value pairs. Proto — for storing custom data types using protocol buffers. Proto DataStore has some…

Convert any callback API into a self cleaning Flow. Kotlin Flows are amazing. Not only do they provide a non-blocking asynchronous way to deal with sequences of values, but they provide a clean and powerful API for dealing with event driven programming. Flows are easy to clean up to prevent…

Help prevent remote meeting interruptions — In April 2020, at the start of the global quarantine, Elio Struyf posted an article detailing how to use a Raspberry Pi Zero W and Pimoroni Unicorn pHAT to create a busy light or in meeting indicator for your home office. After some interruptions in…

Key attributes that will help propel your team to function at a higher and healthy level. — A few years ago my team was 3 developers covering 16 apps.We released 4–5 times a month and maintained 4+ star ratings in the Play Store during this busy time. These apps ranged from business style apps, to multimedia apps, to book reader apps. During this same time, we outpaced…

You should really be using canary builds I remember sitting in the audience at Google I/O 2013 and hearing the announcement that Android Developers had a new IDE built on top of IntelliJ, as well as a new build system based on Gradle. This was the biggest announcement of that entire conference. Up to that point, my…

The release of Hilt is one of the best things to happen to Android development. — I have been developing Android applications since 2012, and at that time the main dependency injection library was RoboGuice. Dagger 1 went 1.0 in May of 2013. Dagger 2’s initial release was in May of 2015. …