Hello. I hope you’ve had a great week.
I’ve spent this past week coding, testing, and fixing. Looking at that sentence my week seems pretty laidback, but the reality of coding, testing, and fixing/debugging, and especially the last two, is far from laidback. I did have quite a bit of relaxing no brain time, but most of what I can remember from the past week is a blur of “Why isn’t it working?!” and “Not again! Why can’t you just work?!!” I did learn quite a bunch from my troubles and discovered a new level of appreciation for my body’s ability to still function quite well after staying up working till 5 am.
Some of the things I’ve learned this past week are:
- The location manager doesn’t work to get the emulator’s location so use the fused location provider-client instead
- UX is a very complex, very horrible spiral of tiny UI details that make my developer’s brain want to fall to its knees and wail at the sky
- Send messages in an app without using a messaging API is a pain (especially when it comes to figuring out how to save the data in databases, yes plural) and I would not recommend it
- String arrays are the only kind that work with list preferences in android other kinds throw obscure errors that take you down rabbit holes of backend code
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you have a great week. Also, if you’re interested in becoming an Android developer or have had the fortune to not run into these particular problems so far, I hope this post will save you many hours of frustration.
Sincerely,
Mulan Lau
P.S. I can indeed hear my heartbeat thundering in my ears when I’m testing a feature and praying it works.
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