Understanding the fibonacci mechanism in 1D dynamic programming — Dynamic programming (DP) can be an intimidating topic to learn. Give or take, I’ve arranged notes on the topic from previous job changes in the form of a digestible guide for quicker ramp-up. Less mathy, more pseudo — sciency. At a high-level, dynamic programming follows a similar strategy across the…

Strange Fragment/View lifecycle interaction, Rx leaks, and dependency leaks — This article is a continuation of part 1 of this mini series of memory leaks cookbook for Android. Talking about memory leaks sometimes involves more than the technical problem itself. For one concern, the definition of a memory leak is subjective. The authors of Programming Android with Kotlin: Achieving Structured…

A quick reference guide loosely based on “Programming Kotlin with Android: Programming Kotlin with Android” — Out in the wild, Android faces real-life challenges that affect performance and battery life. For example, not everyone has unlimited data in their mobile plans, or reliable connectivity. Android apps must compete with one another for limited resources. Performance considerations allow you to examine concerns that may impact your application’s…

Lexers, parsers, PSI, AST v. CST, and other fundamental concepts to help understand writing IDE/compiler plugins — As programmers, we like to talk about tech things being a “black box”. For better or worse, the Kotlin compiler feels a bit like one. There is documentation around Kotlin PSI use for IDE plugins, but aside from whatever comments are left in the source code, there’s not too much…

A closer look at the relationship between Kotlin and programmatic/dynamic view inflation — Today, we explore the question “Where does initialization occur around the lifecycle of a view?” This is topic my teammates hotly debated over for months, so I’ve decided to see for myself. This blurb covers two ways of inflating a custom view for comparison: via layout resource and programmatically.

Part 1: Navigation UI, MVVM, and the SingleFragmentActivity Pattern — Space Coast, Florida has one of the world’s most unique environments in the world. The St. John’s River is one of 3 rivers in the world to flow north, and for Brevard County, the Indian River and the Banana River are estuaries, which are warm part-salt/part-fresh water bodies, giving home…

Researching & negotiating how much you’re actually worth — So you’ve aced the interview! You’re sitting in relief knowing you’ve passed the weeding process, only to get hit with perhaps one of the more difficult questions in any interview process: How much are you looking for compensation? Searching for jobs is nerve-wrecking by itself; I often spend so much…

Chicken Soup for the Engineering Soul — Someone probably told you that you don’t have the ability or the means to solve a problem. Someone probably told you “don’t worry about it”. Someone probably told you you can’t be the engineer you want to be. Like many women in engineering, I got my start in my career…

A neat trick for working with incoming/outgoing data for GraphQL queries — For those that haven’t heard yet, GraphQL is a hot new query language for your API. The setup between ourselves and the API team had several bumps and wild cards, but we really had a great time exploring a new framework responsible for creating a GraphQL client with Android. …