I’m a huge fan of Kotlin — it’s powerful, concise and makes it fun to write code. But even our biggest heroes aren’t perfect and there’s one thing I don’t like about Kotlin: destructuring declarations. Let’s see why, and what they do! What are destructuring declarations? Destructuring declarations are a convenient way of destructuring…

Many years ago in school I was learning about matrices. I don’t remember much of it, but what I do remember was thinking, “but… what do you actually do with that knowledge?” Fast forward a few years and I started working as an Android Developer and had to work with…

Last week I wrote about my initial experience using the new Navigation Architecture Component. But after my first few days of working with it I still had many questions. How do I pass data back to the origin? How does conditional navigation actually work in practice? How can I start…

Navigation on Android can get quite complicated — from passing data to handling the back stack there’s many things to watch out for. There’s many solutions out there trying to solve that problem — often working with a single Activity, but none of them satisfied me so far. …

Sometimes coding can be a bit frustrating — why is this build taking so long? Why is it crashing? What is happening? While I won’t answer those questions right now, there’s a few tips that can make it more bearable and easier to deal with — with colour. First up…

No more ifs? That sounds great! Well with Kotlin that is possible. Kind of. Kotlin has multiple language features that can replace ifs in many cases. But are they always a good idea? Let’s find out. Let’s take a look at an if statement you probably wrote in the past…

At the start of the year Apple announced their acquisition of Buddybuild, along with the news that Android support would end by March. This meant we had to find an alternative quickly, and Bitrise was our eventual choice. Here’s why, and how we switched. We use CI for various things: …

Kotlin was the big topic of the year in the Android community. Many of us are talking about it or have started using it. In this blog post I will share a few tips and tricks we’ve learned while converting our application to Kotlin. For us at Deliveroo the journey…

Public speaking is a scary experience. But it’s also a great experience. With Droidcon UK 2017 I’ve done my second talk and I’d like to talk a bit about the experience and give some tips for public speaking. …