This is Part 2 of my Android Touch System series. Part 1 does a deep dive into touch functions (onDispatchTouchEvent(), onInterceptTouchEvent(), onTouchEvent()) and how they affect the way touch events flow through the views hierarchy. This post will show visual examples of how these functions work. The visualizations are based…

Without a deep understanding of how Android views handles touches, a lot of touch behaviours seem confusing. Why is this button click not working? Why is that RecyclerView not scrolling? How do I handle nested ScrollViews? This article covers how touch events flow through the view hierarchy, and how a…

You spend half a day stuck on one bug before you ask your more senior teammate for help. They look at it, click around the codebase a bit, change one of the parameters you’re passing, and it’s fixed in 10 minutes. That’s when the imposter syndrome kicks in, at least…

Android Studio is a very customizable IDE, and over the past few years of using it, I’ve discovered a few customizations that made a huge impact on my development speed and enjoyment. Editor Recommendations Auto import Preferences → Editor → General → Auto Import → Select “Add unambiguous imports on the fly” and “Optimize…

Table of Contents What is Gradle? The build directory and incremental builds Gradle build cache Android Studio system cache Android Gradle Plugin build cache Additional resources So what is Gradle? Android Studio includes a powerful code editor and developer tools but rather than reinventing the wheel and managing a project’s build process as well, it delegates to…

#13: Don’t treat test code as a second-class citizen — 2020 was my first full year working as a software engineer and my full first year living in San Francisco. Thanks to a pandemic, I did a lot less exploring of an exciting new city than I’d intended and a lot more baking and Tiger King-watching. The one silver lining…

I came across Michaela Greiler’s Code Review Checklist earlier this year and it’s now one of my favorite and most frequently-used programming resources. However, it’s a high-level checklist and doesn’t include anything specific to a platform or a language. I decided to write an Android-specific one. It’s meant to be…

This is Part 5 of Kotlin for Interviews, a series where I go over Kotlin functions and code snippets that came up often during my Android interview prep. I also compiled a cheatsheet that covers all 5 parts of this series, which you can find here. You can find Part…