When we talk about “mobile” development, generally what we mean is the development of a two software products with identical feature sets on two distinct platforms, Android and iOS. Developing for these two operating systems requires different tools and programming languages, and that usually translates into isolated development environments where teams build duplicate applications with the same requirements and design with almost no overlap in actual engineering.

In this two-part series, we’ll talk about converging the architecture and code of mobile apps across platforms — no third party frameworks or libraries needed. In this first part, we’ll talk about traditional…

It’s that time of year: Goal Setting. Every company wants every employee to have goals, and there are definitely good reasons for them. But there are also some bad reasons. Goal setting too often becomes purely a performance metric that is misunderstood and misused.

Let’s take a look at goal setting and what goes wrong.

Your Goals Aren’t Yours

The most basic problem that many teams have is that the person pursuing the goal is not the person who created the goal. Now, of course, part of having a job on a software development team is helping the team achieve its goals, and maybe…

Remember back in 2017, the first days of Google having an opinion about application architecture because countless developers were begging them for advice? I do. As they laid out their opinions at Google I/O that year, I remember thinking the same 2 things I’ve thought at every Google I/O since then, which were:

1. I’ve already solved this problem

and

2. I like my way better.

Before we dive in, let’s be clear: I’m about to tell you why I think Google’s approach to app architecture is garbage. …

Building Gradle plugins isn’t new, and Kotlin isn’t new, and Android isn’t new. By the same token, building Gradle plugins in Kotlin isn’t new, and neither is building Gradle Plugins for Android apps. But building Gradle plugins, in Kotlin, for Android? Well, there’s really just not that much information out there on that.

Before we get started, I’ll just mention that writing Android Gradle plugins is, in many ways, much easier if you write in Groovy. But what we wanted to do was easy, we wouldn’t be talking about it. So let’s just stick to the plan.

The Android Part

So there are…

If you’ve been following my work at all, you know that I’m obsessed with Passive View MVP software architectures, and that I’m constantly looking for new and better ways to implement them. Enter ResourceProvider: The Annotation Processor I wrote to generate agnostic resource management APIs for Android app development.

Lots of you might argue that setting resources can just be a responsibility that you delegate to the View class in your MVP system, but logic around which strings and images go where needs to go into the Presenter, and that can lead to writing lots of View-class APIs with names…

HockeyApp is dead, long live AppCenter.

Now that Microsoft has acquired HockeyApp and decided to smash it into AppCenter, some things are changing, and you may be encountering some unexpected consequences of it all. One of these unforeseen complications comes about if you organization previously used HockeyApp, but also has an enterprise subscription to Office 365. If this is the case, you might actually now be seeing two versions of AppCenter, depending on how you sign in… if you sign in with a personal account, you’ll get the AppCenter account that you migrated from HockeyApp, with all your apps transitioned…

Slack is dead, long live Slack. With Microsoft swooping in with its Slack-clone, Teams, and making it included with Office 365 licenses, it seems that the writing is on the wall for the once-king of workplace messaging. Now the question is not will we, but how will we rebuild all our Slack integrations in Teams? (and, of lesser importance, what is the verb form of Teams? If I “Slack’d” you yesterday, do I “Teams” you tomorrow? That sounds weird. A topic for another article, maybe.)

Long Live the Incoming Webhook

Lots of our integrations into Slack are just publishing data to a channel when an…

Quality Assurance is an essential part of software engineering and technical product management that absolutely cannot be neglected. A strong QA process and team can provide immense value, but more importantly, ineffective QA can incur immense cost. Let’s look at the stages of QA, and the mounting costs of failures at each level of the software development and test lifecycle. For the purposes of this article, we’ll look at the details of QA as pertains to a software development team operating under Scrum. …