Do you have properties in your Kotlin types that you want to create later after initialization? You may want to avoid making them nullable, avoid using lateinit or delay an expensive set up process to a later point. In Kotlin this is where delegated properties and lazy properties in particular…

Using Retrofit, OkHttp and Okio — Do you want to upload a file using the clean Retrofit syntax, but aren’t sure how to receive the result as well as the upload progress? We will be using Retrofit to perform the file upload, building an implementation that is able to receive the completion progress at intervals and…

Keep them out of Git and encrypt them — When developing apps we will often need to use secret values that we don’t want anyone to get access to, such as tokens, IDs and API keys. There are many reasons they may be needed in our source code and in Gradle scripts, the most common being when we are…

For codebases with many different entities, most of us will at some point have hit a bug due to the wrong ID being assigned to a property or passed to a function. Why don’t we use the type system to give all of our IDs their own type and ensure…

A single type, many possibilities — Wouldn’t it be great if you could represent a single type that can come in different forms, each able to be constant or carry their own data? If programming in Kotlin, we are in luck as that is exactly what a sealed class is perfect for! Enums or enumerated types…

Let’s build a concise and user-friendly view binding solution — Remastered on 1 Sept 2019 When working in the UI layer of an Android app, it won’t be long before we need to perform an operation upon one of our views. In order to do this, we first need to retrieve it via findViewById. Although using the API can seem…

Configuring Circle CI and Bitrise for an Android app — When working on a software project, particularly in a team, a common workflow involves branching from the main branch, often master or develop. The created branch is where changes for a particular feature or issue are applied. One way of managing this branch would involve committing all work for a…

Exploring Apple’s currently recommended logging approach — When it comes to logging in Swift and iOS applications in particular, the APIs that first come to mind might be print and NSLog. More recently, however, Apple has introduced a new standard for logging in the form of unified logging, accessed via OSLog. It is the current recommended way…