As you've likely seen, ChatGPT is getting a lot of attention lately. I wanted to experiment with it and see what I could learn, so this past weekend I tried out integrating ChatGPT into one of my apps. What was it like to work with and what could I potentially get from it? This is a recounting of my experiment. A while …

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Why can't you just add this new feature or fix that lingering bug? After all, it's the time and effort for that change alone - right? But it's not just the cost of what work you choose to tackle - you're also paying the price for all the other work you didn't implement instead. That's the opportunity cost. Opportunity …

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Over the past 15 years I've reviewed hundreds upon hundreds of pull requests. From pull requests against projects I built and maintain to PRs submitted as promotion portfolio reviews in projects I've never seen or worked on, and everything in between. Over time I've developed a set of four key items I look for in each …

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Maestro is a great library for writing high-level UI tests that verify your Android app works from your users' perspective. For a more detailed intro into Maestro, please see my recent Maestro intro post. If you're testing an app that makes REST API calls, you'll need a way to verify those parts of the app work …

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For fun I've recently been building an Android app with Kotlin and Compose. With this app, I can set goals for the week and track my progress towards those goals. My schedule is too varied day-to-day to successfully finish daily goals of say, read X minutes a day. But I found that setting goals per week helped me …

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Tests for your Android application can come in a couple different flavors: Unit tests Connected Android tests You can execute the regular unit tests under the app/src/test directory without any special setup, but for the connected Android tests under app/src/androidTest you'll need a real device or an Android …

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As you move along in your software engineering career, one of the biggest ways you can have a larger impact is to be a force multiplier. What does it mean to be a force multiplier, you might ask? Having an outsized impact on others beyond your direct contributions. For example, helping level-up the skills of other …

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Software engineering teams are a critical component of many companies, where the effectiveness of these teams can have a significant impact on the company's success. Making investments in areas such as these in improving developer productivity will pay off significantly, giving development teams more time to focus on …

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We've all seen it, code comments that are so obvious they add nothing but noise to the codebase. Redundant comments restating exactly what operation the code is performing. For example, this function's purpose is obvious from its name - adding a comment as well doesn't add any value: 1// Verifies if the auth token is …

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Code coverage - how many code lines and branches are accessed during a test - is easy to measure in many languages and test frameworks. And at first glance, measuring code coverage seems like a no-brainer. After all, who wouldn't want to make sure their code is sufficiently tested? But just because a metric is easy to …

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