Stay up to date with Android Development
Android Development is evolving rapidly now more than ever since Google announcing Kotlin as official language, releasing Architectural Components and lot of libraries becoming a de facto standard for developing modern applications like RxJava, Dagger etc.
You need to stay up to date with these trends which would be very helpful on starting a new project or refactoring an old one.
Being up to date doesn’t mean learning every new technology and following it. It simply means to know what’s going on in the industry and to know about things that are available to make our life easy.
You can engage conversation with experts, watch it become mature and if you like the technology/library, if you think it’ll be useful, then you can start learning it.
I’m going to show some tools and ways I use to be up to date with Android development.
r/androidDev
For those who don’t know what this is, this is a sub of Reddit dedicated to Android Development related discussions where most of the community spent their quality time. Just subscribe to this sub and visit once in a while. Every new trend, technology related to Android development will be discussed here. Some of the Googlers who work on Android like Jake Wharton, Chris Banes, Yigit Boyar are also pretty active on this sub.
If you are also interested in general Android stuff which is not related to development, like new gadgets and apps, you can follow r/Android.
Following fellow Android Developers on twitter is a great way to stay up to date among the kool kids. Here is a list of Android GDEs (Google Developer Expert) I found on twitter. Also following authors of the random articles/blogs you read about android is also a good way to increase your learning environment.
Slack
Here are the two most active slack groups for Android Developers.
There is also a slack group for Kotlin named KotlinLang which is not specific to android development, but for general kotlin users. Though there are dedicated channels for android and stuff . Join here if you are a fan of kotlin.
Blogs
Some of the blogs I follow..
Tool - RSS Feed
Wow, lot of blogs. So how do we keep up with updates on these blogs? Using RSS feed. I personally use this chrome extension to get updates.
Using this extension all I have to do is open the blog, click the extension, there would be a plus icon with badge count indicating number of feeds available in the current site. If it is more than one, you can click and select the feed you want and you are done. The extension will list the new updates on clicking it and you can read it anytime you want.
Github Repos
With RSS, you can also get updates on your favourite github repository releases. Go to release page of the repository, click the extension and save the feed. I follow android-ktx, realm, flexBoxLayout and some other repos.
Reddit threads and posts
As I said above, you can follow r/androidDev sub to get latest updates related to android development. You can also follow the sub posts using RSS. Go to androidDev, click the RSS extension and save the feed. Now you will get update on every post on this sub.
If you want update on comments on specific thread, you can use Reddit Enhancement Suite extension or simply RES to subscribe for comments on a specific post. RES acts like an add-on for reddit sites. After installing this, you’ll notice a Subscribe button on every reddit post. On clicking that, you will get updates in a pop up style notification on opening reddit.
Newsletters
By subscribing all the blog posts and reddit threads, it is hard to seperate quality content from them. For that, you can subscribe to newsletters which provides curated content from the above said source weekly.
Medium Profile and Publications
Finally, if you are reading this, then you must me an avid user of medium. You will also have preference for some of the authors and you follow them. But it would be nice to get an update as soon as they publish an article, right?
Unfortunately, medium doesn’t provide RSS feed in a straightforward way. Going to the profile page of the author and clicking on the extension doesn’t generate any badge count because that page don’t have any feeds. But we can construct the feed url manually based on the documented here and feed into the RSS extension.
User profile
To access a user’s feed, add
/feed/before their username: medium.com/feed/@MediumPublications
For a Medium publication’s RSS feed, add
/feed/before the publication's name, like so: medium.com/feed/the-storyCustom domains
For a publication on a custom domain, add
/feedto the end of the URL: https://journal.thriveglobal.com/feed.Tagged pages in publications
For a feed from a Medium publication’s tagged page, add
/feed/before the publication's name, like so: https://medium.com/feed/invironment/tagged/food
Now construct the url for the author/publication you need to follow and open it in browser.
This popup will appear if you have installed the RSS feed chrome extension I specified already. Click subscribe to subscribe for new posts.
Let me know what tools/ways you are using to stay up to date.
Meanwhile, subscribe to my posts through this feed url https://medium.com/feed/@muthuraj57. Cheers :)
