While learning to use Coroutines and Flow in several different projects (including my own), I noticed some common anti-patterns that tend to arise while coming to terms with structured concurrency and reactive streams. In this article, I will outline how to recognise and refactor four of the most common cases. — 1. Using Flow instead of a suspend function When designing your methods and functions, start with a suspend function and if you get stuck, change it to a Flow.

“This Job has not completed yet” is the error message that gives me nightmares while writing unit tests for my Kotlin Flows. This article describes the typical way I have tested Reactive Streams (LiveData and RxJava) in the past and how I tried to adapt these methods to Flow with…

The Why, the How and the What-happened-next. Late last year, I decided to swap my main development machine away from OSX and MacBook Pro to a custom-built PC with Ubuntu. The following is a narrative about why and how I decided to make the switch, my journey and some answers…

When should I start to worry? It’s not often you have to worry about backpressure in the average Android App. Events just generally don’t scale on our puny little mobile devices to levels where backpressure becomes important. Not to say that it’s not possible, it’s just not common in my…

Using Kotlin’s callbackFlow builder on Android — A short guide on when and why to use the callbackFlow builder function in Android. Click on the handsome man below for the full code. shredderskelton/callbackflow Mucking around with callbackFlow GitHub is home to over 50 million developers working together to host and review code…github.com The key to understanding when callbackFlow is appropriate is to be able to recognise a “callback” in the first place.

Some specific tips for designing a technical test for your candidates. — Part 1 explores the idea that every developer should be able to interview candidates and Part 2 explores some more general guidelines for hosting an interview. The third and final part goes into some specific guidelines for creating a technical test for the candidates. Technical testing guidelines Although these days, I prefer homework…

Some general tips for interviewing candidates for a dev team position. Particularly for developers who are finding themselves on the other side of the interview table for the first time. — Be sure to check out part 1 of this series to understand the fundamentals of this approach where I argue that interviewing is a skill every professional developer should have under their belt. General Interviewing Guidelines

Excellent software teams are naturally motivated to protect the quality and value of team membership. All you need to do is leave them to it. — This is the first part of a small three-part series of articles outlining a process for hiring developers. Part one begins with the governing philosophy behind the process, part two goes into some tips and guidelines for the interviewers, and part three looks into the ideas behind the technical tests…

#4 You don’t need to go to classes — We humans, we’re suckers for a shortcut. It’s so easy to convince someone that there is an easier way when that’s exactly what they want to hear… German classes are hard, they are a large investment in terms of time and a fair one in terms of money too. You…