@brwngrldev - July, 2018
Hey! Welcome to the twelfth issue of my newsletter. It’s been blazingly hot here in Amsterdam the past few weeks, so I could really use some cool weather. Hopefully the weather is treating you better wherever you are. Other than that, I’m looking forward to my final talk of the year at KotlinConf this October.
I’m also spending some time working on a passion project of mine: a poetry book!!! I’ve always wanted to write one and now seems like as good a time as any. I’m really excited to get to channel my creativity into another avenue. So stay tuned for updates on that!
Upcoming Engagements
KotlinConf, 2018 - https://kotlinconf.com/speakers/#speaker=annyce-davis
KotlinConf promises three days of content from Kotlin creators and Community enthusiasts. This is the second year for the conference and they’ve managed to sell out already. I’ll be presenting my talk for the year on GraphQL. It’s a gentle introduction to the specification and shares some reference implementations using UFO Sighting data. It was a lot of fun to put together and I’m grateful that I have the chance to present it at another conference. I had a great time at the event last year and I’m looking forward to seeing old friends again. Hopefully I’ll see you there as well!
Books I’m Reading
The Image of Leadership - https://amzn.to/2LUzRzC
This book talks about your “professional imprint”, or how others see you in a business setting. The author, Sylvie Di Giusto, applies an “ABCD” approach to dealing with your professional image: appearance, behavior, communication and digital footprint. One thing I appreciated is how she covers the importance of looking like a leader even when you work from home. I loved this line, “Make sure that you always perceive yourself as the professional leader you want to be.” Sometimes at home I tend to be in pjs but that can take away from the confidence you exude when interacting with others at work. I also appreciated that she used research on human behavior and psychology to back up her recommendations. This was an easy read with useful nuggets spread throughout.
Head First Design Patterns: A Brain-Friendly Guide - https://amzn.to/2O8EyqI
Design Patterns help you to apply software designs to your code to improve its flexibility and maintainability. I’ve read several books on the subject, but this one helps to bring it all together with a fun, quirky style. Instead of just tons of text explaining a pattern, it uses examples and silly scenarios to help you understand the reason for a particular pattern. In fact, I’ve found several examples in my current application where the Command Pattern has helped to clean up the code tremendously. I’d recommend getting the paperback version as this is one that you should keep in your library.
Let’s Talk Podcasts
The Speaker Lab - Preparing For Your Speech
In this episode, Grant and Melanie share their tips for how they prepare for a talk. I enjoy hearing about how others prep for giving a talk to see what little things I can steal for my own process. One thing they both mentioned is making sure they nail the opening and closing of the talk. For me, those are the two sections I practice the most. I basically try to memorize the first and last 2 or 3 minutes. That helps me to feel more comfortable with my delivery. If you’re a speaker you may find some of their tips in this episode valuable.
I.T. Career Energizer - Learn Foundational Concepts and Principles First
Nicki Watt, the CTO of OpenCredo, was the guest of this episode. I enjoyed hearing her story and the very practical advice that she shared. She mentioned that the best way to maximize your learning is to “learn foundational concepts”. Basically, spending more time understanding the underlying way systems work over learning the latest and greatest library. I agree with her on this and it takes more time to do it, but it’s worth it. You become more of an expert and can move between solutions faster when you have the foundations covered. Nicki also goes on to talk about the importance of being able to communicate problems to different people in your organization effectively. Lots of great tips squeezed into this short episode!
Fragmented - Dependency Injection and Service Locators...
I really enjoyed taking a trip down memory lane with Danny Preussler in this episode. He talks about the history of Dependency Injection and various libraries that we use today to handle it. Many people have a love-hate relationship with Dagger 2. It can seem overly complex and difficult for newcomers to a codebase to grasp. Yet at the same time, it does solve the problem of having a decoupled application. But at what cost? That’s what the bulk of the show was focused on. I also appreciated that Donn and Kaushik both shared their pain points when working with the library. I’ve used Koin, another DI library, in a side project and I really enjoyed it. So maybe it is time to find new ways of handling our dependencies with Kotlin? Either way, give this episode a listen!
My Recent Videos
In case you missed it, there’s a new chapter in my Android Data Persistence course dedicated to Room. In it I give you an overview of the library and then cover how to use it for all of the CRUD operations in your Android applications. I hope you give it watch!
Until next time, thanks for reading!
"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
- Maya Angelou
Blog: http://www.adavis.info
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