#AndroidDevJourney spotlight - April edition

Posted by Luli Perkins, Developer Relations Program Manager

We’re wrapping up the April edition of #AndroidDevJourney by highlighting Android developers from all over the world each with their own unique experience. Early this year, we launched the #AndroidDevJourney series to highlight our community on our social media accounts. Each Saturday, from January through June, we’ll feature a new developer on our Twitter account.

We’re getting near the end of our six month journey, so don’t miss your chance to be featured in one of our last two spotlight series, tweet us your story using #AndroidDevJourney.

Mohit Sarveiya

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

I started my journey first as a backend developer 10 years ago while teaching myself Android development on the side. I had an opportunity to create an app from scratch. My first app had in-app-purchasing, notifications, and video playback. It wasn’t easy. I was the only Android developer and I learned as I went along. I kept building on this experience and have worked on building many apps in the past 10 years.

In my journey, I was an early adopter of Kotlin. During that time, there were very few resources to learn Kotlin. I learned Kotlin by converting lots of Java code to Kotlin. I’m grateful to have learned Kotlin early on. Coding is what I do, but not who I am. There have been many obstacles in my journey. But, Kotlin was my medium to discover my passion. It has had a profound impact on my life.

I have helped companies adopt Kotlin and Kotlin Coroutines on both Android and backend. I enjoy teaching it. I shared my experiences through tech talks. For the past eight years I gave a tech talk every month in the NYC community. Every talk has meant so much to me, because of what I went through to prepare for it. My adversity has been my motivator. Everyone sees the results, but not the process. I discovered my passion for public speaking and developer advocacy. After eight years, I became a GDE in Android & Kotlin and I’m still on this journey to inspire others.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

Finding ways to incorporate automation in your solutions is one of the attributes of a good developer. I have observed it in many examples through out my career. For example, a developer wrote an annotation processor to generate custom adapters and to generate models based on API specifications. Another example is a developer who wrote a generator to setup the scaffolding for a module. Its valuable to find ways to automate tasks.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

You will seldomly work on green field projects. You will work on an app that already exists and has been built over the years. You’ll work on teams that have diverse perspectives on best practices on Android throughout your career. You may not work on an Android app that is using a modern Android development stack. You’ll find many obstacles navigating this spectrum. But, the obstacle is the way.

Imangi Studios

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

We first became an Android Developers when we made Temple Run! We started out with a bang. Fans instantly all of the world came to love playing Temple Run on Android and we were happy to develop the game for Android!

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

Tip 1 - To help deal with the larger number of Android devices out there, build a device farm with a wide range of devices, and do robust automated testing on your app from the start.

Tip 2 - Build releases and store listings can be updated independently.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Advice 1 - The biggest thing that struck us about Android development is just how many devices there are out there. Google Play supports tens of thousands of devices, and if you want to cover a sizable portion of those, you need to plan ahead for things like quality controls, asset tiering, and content delivery specced. If we could go back to the beginning of Temple Run 2 and have known that at the start, we could have planned a game that would look and run even better across an even bigger range of devices.

Advice 2 - The industry moves fast so be open to change and research your craft.

Valentine Rutto

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

My Android development journey started in 2015. I was doing my computer science degree and I felt that there was a gap between the theory and practical technical skills so I enrolled in the Moringa School coding bootcamp. Here I was introduced to Android development by the then instructor and cofounder Frank Tamre. I immediately fell in love with Android and I have been hooked ever since.

The Google Developer Groups and WomenTechMakers communities have played a great role in my journey. The tech community provides invaluable resources that have immensely helped in my career growth. I was the Women TechMakers Nyeri chapter lead for about two years where I taught Android development to aspiring developers. Through the community I was able to meet brilliant Android developers who I still learn from everyday.

Currently I always aim to contribute to the tech community in whatever capacity I can.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

I can't live without JsonToKotlin plugin it is an efficient tool that makes JSON deserialization easy and fast.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Read the developer documentation, it will save you a lot of time which would otherwise have been wasted on trial and error.

Joe Birch

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

I started working with Android while I was studying at university, and it was actually kind of by chance! One of my lecturers had some friends who were looking to build an app for their company. Truth is, at this point I had not even had an Android phone for long but I jumped at the chance to build something for a real client. During this build, I pretty much fell in love with Android and quickly became fascinated in how portable and accessible things that you build would become. As soon as I started building that project, I knew this is how I wanted my start off my career.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

For me, split screen in Android Studio has really helped my productivity when working on some projects. Whether it's during refactoring or working with a file and its corresponding tests, being able to display multiple files side-by-side removes the need to manually hop between them. Within Android Studio, you can do this by right-clicking on the tab for a file and selecting either "Split Horizontally" or "Split Vertically.” The selected file will then shift to a seperate section and you can work on that code at the same time as another file within a separate section.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Don't get too caught up in making things perfect or strictly following standards. When I started out building things privately or sharing things in the public, I felt I had to match up to these and was worried too much about making mistakes.

All learning is a journey, we will always make mistakes and that's where growth comes from! While things like that can be important, getting something tangible in your hands can be incredibly motivating - something that can be slowed down greatly if you get caught up here. It's still worth diving in deeper and learning how things work once you have something working, but it can be inspiring to get something built without getting caught up in too many of the details!

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The Android Developer community prides itself in its inclusivity and welcomes developers from all backgrounds and stages of life. If you’re feeling inspired and want to learn more about how to become a part of our community, here are a few resources to help get you started.

Dive into developer.android.com

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The Google Developer Groups program gives developers the opportunity to meet local developers with similar interests in technology. A GDG meetup event includes talks on a wide range of technical topics where you can learn new skills through hands-on workshops.

Join a chapter near you here.

Founded in 2014, Google’s Women Techmakers is dedicated to helping all women thrive in tech through community, visibility and resources. With a member base of over 100,000 women developers, we’re working with communities across the globe to build a world where all women can thrive in tech.

Become a member here.

The Google Developers Experts program is a global network of highly experienced technology experts, influencers and thought leaders who actively support developers, companies and tech communities by speaking at events, publishing content, and building innovative apps. Experts actively contribute to and support the developer and startup ecosystems around the world, helping them build and launch highly innovative apps.

Learn more about the program here.

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