Developer Spotlight: Meet the Android Devs
In this blog post, we are putting the spotlight on the individuals that make up Digital Strategy and Products at CBC. With the dedication of serving the Canadian audience, our teams are made up of various backgrounds, diverse talents and vast wealth of experience. Day by day, we are striving to make great leaps in advancing our products to solve our users’ needs and transforming the digital ecosystem. In this spotlight, we will learn about three Android Developers and the challenges they are solving at CBC.
If you like what you read and think that CBC could be a good fit for you, please review our open positions on CBC’s job board.
Let’s Meet the Developers
Heitor — Senior Android Developer
What does a typical day look like?
A typical day for me begins with a cup of coffee and a quick email inbox cleanup. I check my calendar to review the day’s meetings and catch up on the latest news and stock market updates. With these tasks completed, I refer to my “Worklog,” a personal text file where I track my daily activities and maintain a well-structured To-Do list for the next day. This early routine ensures I stay informed and prepared to participate in the day’s meetings, such as the Stand Up and Ticket Grooming sessions. By dedicating just 15 to 30 minutes to these meetings, we align as a team and share our progress, upcoming tasks, and challenges.
Throughout the day, my responsibilities vary, ranging from working on specific tickets, reviewing code submissions from fellow developers, to exploring side projects for personal growth and discovery. One of the most exciting aspects of my job is the emphasis on continuous self-improvement. We are encouraged to allocate 20% of our time to enhance our skills and knowledge. This might involve taking courses, experimenting with new technologies, creating prototypes, or brainstorming innovative ideas and solutions. The possibilities are endless, and this self-driven learning empowers us to contribute to our projects and future product enhancements.
What is one technical challenge that you have overcome recently?
Recently, I faced the challenge of learning and utilizing new technologies, such as Compose Navigation and Android Auto. Thanks to the dedicated time for self-improvement, I delved into these domains, not only acquiring knowledge but also creating prototypes and developing a roadmap for their integration into our projects.
What are you looking forward to learning or advocating for in your team?
I’m actively advocating for the adoption of Clean Architecture principles. By enhancing our understanding of this architectural approach, we aim to improve the modularity, sustainability, and testability of our projects. Additionally, I’m excited to expand my skills by delving into iOS development. As an Android developer passionate about mobile development in general, adding iOS proficiency to my repertoire is something I’m looking forward to.
What is one piece of advice you would give to someone starting their career in mobile development?
To anyone starting their career in mobile development, my advice is firstly, to seek out a mentor who can guide and inspire you. This could be a coworker, a friend, or even a family member with expertise in the field. Mentors provide valuable insights, promote learning, and encourage insightful discussions. Secondly, cultivate curiosity and explore new technologies. Mobile development is a rapidly evolving field, and staying up-to-date is crucial. Consider building a portfolio to showcase your experiments and share your knowledge with others. Such a portfolio not only serves as a testament to your capabilities but also serves as a reference for future projects and challenges.
Nevena — Solutions Architect
What does a typical day look like?
I start my day early in the morning by checking my inbox, take a look at the calendar and I roughly plan out my day. I have a lot of meetings as I work with all of the App teams across the department, but I also have concrete goals I am working towards. To keep my focus, I usually have only one or two technical plans I am working on at a time, but I keep all of my tasks/thoughts/to-dos documented in my to-do board to make sure I revisit them daily. My technical plans involve research and assessment, collaboration with Developers and other Architects, technical documentation, solutions to problems, departmental directions and goals, tooling etc. After work, I love to spend the afternoon doing anything with my toddler.
What is one technical challenge that you recently overcame?
A challenge I recently had to overcome was my first problem to solve as a Solutions Architect. I had inherited a large cross-platform cross-team project. To get to the technical decisioning part, I needed to put all parties in sync, which meant getting out of my comfort zone and learning about other technologies so I could split tasks for the right teams and create processes that didn’t exist. Next, I needed to address technical problems, that included making decisions on how to sync two platforms that behave differently, how to handle the transition, and learn how to support all of that in very tight time constraints. The result was an achievable MVP with a maturity plan that included a new technology. I love how my work can be creative in situations like these.
What is one thing you are looking forward to learning or advocating in your team?
Collaboration and sharing the knowledge between individuals. I strongly believe we have great talent and strong minds in our teams, and if I can help Lead Developers connect the Developers in the right way and channel our knowledge, our practice would evolve immensely.
What is one piece of advice you would give to someone starting their career in mobile development?
Find what interests you. To truly be good at something, you need to want to dedicate part of your life to it and to have your passion drive it. Android was definitely mine, but now I realize it is also higher level problem solving that attracts me to my work.
Asad — Lead Android Developer
What does a typical day look like?
My day starts off with a cup of tea and organizing my personal to-do list, to get a better idea of my focus throughout the day. Each week, the development teams have specific goals that they wish to achieve, so I often participate in standups and ticket grooming meetings to stay aligned with the ongoing priorities. I often work closely with the Android Developers in our Android working sessions and 1:1 chats to provide further context and unblock technical challenges. When I am not in a meeting, I am usually trying out new experiments, discovering ways to improve our workflow, documenting our codebase and reviewing pull requests.
What is one technical challenge that you have overcome recently?
One of the biggest technical challenges that the team is currently facing is migrating off legacy systems and modernizing the codebase to support new features more rapidly. This involved a lot of planning with various stakeholders such as Product Managers, Product Owners, Solutions Architects and backend teams. Once a plan was in place, the Development team and I broke down the current implementation and started to migrate to newer chunks of code. Throughout this phase, we discovered a lot of technical debt and missing contexts, so we used this as an opportunity to document the newer implementation, fix technical debt and improve our architecture to enhance the maintainability and reusability of our products for the future.
What are you looking forward to learning or advocating for in your team?
The focus of learning and collaborating is at the core of our work. Whether it be documenting our findings, encouraging others to try new experiments or presenting at one of our internal Mobile Developer meetups. What I look forward to learning next is collaborating with the Mobile Developers to find opportunities to reduce technical debt and start to make use of newer technologies such as Jetpack Compose.
What is one piece of advice you would give to someone starting their career in mobile development?
My one piece of advice would be to stay open minded and true to your craft. There is no one-size-fits-all in your career. Your path may look different from others and that is okay. Do not be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and try new things — who knows where that might lead you? Always be curious to push the boundaries and if you are not breaking stuff, you are not risking enough.
This concludes the spotlight of our three Android developers, but there are a lot MORE people that keep the show running. Stay tuned in the future for more blog posts, where we place the spotlight on other Developers at CBC. If you are interested in the projects these developers work on, you can check out the CBC Listen, CBC News and CBC Sports Android applications.
