What are some ways we can use GenAI to make developers' lives easier? A couple of years ago I had the chance to use GenAI to help build out a natural-language-to-query-language translator in a software observability system. This capability allowed users to ask a plain-English question such as "What are my slowest …

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Over the course of your career you will hear about many design patterns. From higher-level design patterns like model-view-controller and model-view-presenter to implementation patterns such as observer, singleton, and adapter pattern. These patterns are valuable to establish a consistent design / architecture and …

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Spend less time waiting for your build to run and more time developing software by enhancing your Gradle build with caching and parallel execution. The fastest part of your build is one you don't even need to run at all. And then run the necessary parts of your build in parallel.

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Recently I came across a Reddit post where the author wanted to know if their on-call situation was standard or if it was out of the ordinary. The post describes a tire fire, not a production-ready software system: "Is it normal to get alerted multiple times each and every hour of oncall, and then expected to go …

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As you've likely seen, ChatGPT is getting a lot of attention lately. I wanted to experiment with it and see what I could learn, so this past weekend I tried out integrating ChatGPT into one of my apps. What was it like to work with and what could I potentially get from it? This is a recounting of my experiment. A while …

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Why can't you just add this new feature or fix that lingering bug? After all, it's the time and effort for that change alone - right? But it's not just the cost of what work you choose to tackle - you're also paying the price for all the other work you didn't implement instead. That's the opportunity cost. Opportunity …

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As a staff-plus engineer, you likely advanced through your career solving challenging technical problems. And now that you've reached the staff-plus level, it'll just be more of that - won't it? Sorry! While in well-crafted staff-plus roles you will have sufficient focus and time for helping teams solve technical …

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Over the past 15 years I've reviewed hundreds upon hundreds of pull requests. From pull requests against projects I built and maintain to PRs submitted as promotion portfolio reviews in projects I've never seen or worked on, and everything in between. Over time I've developed a set of four key items I look for in each …

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Maestro is a great library for writing high-level UI tests that verify your Android app works from your users' perspective. For a more detailed intro into Maestro, please see my recent Maestro intro post. If you're testing an app that makes REST API calls, you'll need a way to verify those parts of the app work …

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For fun I've recently been building an Android app with Kotlin and Compose. With this app, I can set goals for the week and track my progress towards those goals. My schedule is too varied day-to-day to successfully finish daily goals of say, read X minutes a day. But I found that setting goals per week helped me …

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