Kotlin support on Android:
i never liked Java, not because of the language but for the usual bad design implementations and Android is one of those.
Then Kotlin arrived, it looked very promising but it's when i looked at Coroutines that it simply blew my mind:
you just have to write your code and the Kotlin's compliler "magic" will do most of the boring/complex stuff for you and it's even great performance wise!
I even refactored inter-process calls to simple sync functions with few like of code and for a non-android developer like me it's just love at first sight!

Started reading this book completed 15 chapter in 21 chapter. Now reading co-routines. Wonderful book, lot of internal stuffs
PS: skipped chapter 4 text vs bytes.
Which book to read next ?

Writing coroutines for io_uring. Submissions aren't working (they go through but the operation never seems to complete). Just fixed a few segfaults because of error cases not destroying coroutine handles correctly. Been on this for two days, finding more and more things I need to do that unrelated to the task at hand. Don't have issue tracking set up yet because haven't had time. Mountain of things that need to get working just for a demo is only growing. Layered maps of data structures and code flow are in my head as I'm trying to mentally debug some of this. I'm focused, completely dead to the outside world.

Then I feel a small scratch on my cheek. Three hours of mental mapping and a deep stack of thought, vanishes into thin air in a single moment.

The trade-off is worth it though.

Not quite a rant, but looking for opinion/advice.

I have been programming for a little over a year now, excluding those cringy Lua scripting days with if statement hell. I'm pretty far ahead most of the people in my course (1st year Software Engineering), but I'm at this awkward point where I know quite a bit but not enough. All of my projects so far have been small 1-2 source file programs, mostly in javascript although Python is my main hoe. At the moment I'm reading a book on machine learning and I feel like I'm doing fine, not struggling too much with it, but I don't feel confident at all in my abilities. I had two programming internship interviews half a year ago, both of which I wasn't accepted in. I've been thinking of contributing to an open source project lately to get some "real world" experience but I can't find a good project to start with and just don't feel like I'm good enough. There are also a lot of small things I come across such as async and coroutines in Python which I'm not familiar with yet and they make my confidence drop even lower. I'm guessing most of you have been in a similar position. Would you have any advice for me? Should I search for a project or should I keep on studying with books?

Cocktail for disaster:

- TDD
- Mocking
- Multithreading
- Averagely well written, testable code
- All tests pass
- One test methods still shows some vague stacktrace in a worker thread ❌ but the test passes ✅
- Run only that test method and no stacktrace.

So I've been pulling my hair for the last two days trying to figure out what was throwing in that test method. Turns out that thanks to the multithreading going on, some other, similar method threw the exception in parallel. And apparently a different test method was already running when the exception was finally caught.

🖕

When I discovered that, it was fixed in a minute. 😭

aaaaaghh fucking Handlers man. Android is so fucking full of shit, i wonder why am i still doing it. love is pain.

Why can't there be one mother fucking solution to all lazy ass asynchronous programming? handlers, threadpools, asynctask, executers, Broadcasts, intentService, coroutines, rxjava,.... i don't what new stuff are people snorting these days.

Ok , leave everything. A handler is class- no sorry, Handler, alongside some fucking Looper clss (and maybe some more stuff i don't know) other classes is a way of handling inter thread communication. Handlers can:

-send data to ui thread
-recieve data from ui thread
-send "messages" to ui thread
-recieve "messages" from ui thread.
- can be attached to ui thread
- can be attached to any child thread
- can be accessed anonymosly via any view
- can be present in multiple places, working together
- can kill night king with a dagger
- can do porn better than johnny sins
- can run for president of the whole fucking world
- do some more shits that i have yet to discover

And where do i find this? buried deep insides some medium articles or in some guy's horrible accent video.
Is background processing really this much of a toughnut to crack?
earlier i was all about using asynctask or foreground/background services, because these are the most easy to understand abstraction of a fairly difficult topic.
But as i see more projects, i see underlying apis like handlers, threadpools , executers , being directly used.
Why cant there be a fucking single abstraction, that could be "lightly tweaked" to handle every ugly case.

ok this may look like a lazy ass beginner crying out for spoon feeding( which it kinda is), but i want some real industrial training in non documented Android coding.

For last 2 years i have been reading tons of Android articles and documentation on "how to use this library", "how to add this feature", "what this function of this class does", but not much about how to use it efficiently, like the way its used in industry.

When I interned with a startup, all they wanted from me was to push new design changes, fix layout bugs and work as fastly as i could. I had no time to understand their core code, which had so many things that i could have learned : those mvp/mvvm design/architecture patterns, dependency injections, kotlin , coroutines, state management designs, data bindings, eventbuses and handling, and VIPER,RIBS (I mean, not everything was particularly in their code, i picked up a few keywords from here n there)... a lot of stuff that is used by many apps for their codebase.
I can read up these stuff by myself, but i always end up feeling bored coz frankly, i got no big/valuable project to implement it upon and feel excited about it. I feel that open source projects from OSS companies could be my window, but their chat spaces are also mostly empty to discuss/get some guidance.

I want some specific training about these. Can you guys provide any online/offline course/company training/books in this subject, the best practices?

Any Kotlin fans out here? What's your favourite feature?

To me: coroutines and the flow API. I can't wait for the state flow and shared flow APIs to be released. Goodbye Rx! It'll come probably in the next release, which might come in a week already, because then JetBrains (Kotlin developer) hosts their online alternative to KotlinConf.

!rant
Just started a side project, helping a friend make his Android app more stable and add a couple more features. We'll release the sources sometime later.

Gotta say, his code is just terrible. And it runs on top of some code written by someone else, and that's even worse.
But I don't know how I got the motivation to spend the whole Saturday cleaning it up, fixing warnings, making abstractions, extracting features to separate classes, converting some stuff to Kotlin, even adding a couple coroutines. It felt good fixing bad code.

Maybe because I have some coding freedom I kinda miss at work.
Maybe because the project is not that big.
Maybe because I know the guy has many skills, coding is just not one of them.
Maybe because that project has some cool in it I can't even describe.
Maybe because that's entirely within my skills but challenging enough to have fun working on it.
Or maybe is just the mood of the moment, and in a week or so I'll lose all the motivation, as it happened too many times.

🤷‍♂️

anyone having a good understanding of kotlin coroutines? the weird extension lambdas, coroutine scopes, context , dispatcher and suspend are not making much sense to me. i can post a longer query, but first i just need to understand the relationship between a scope, context and dispatcher?

mann... either i am dumb or my team is a bunch of excited monkeys.

for last 6 months my senior and this contract dev (both in Android) have been fussing about adding coroutine flows in our codebase: how our codebase "needs" it and how flows will help our codebase become "better"

when i asked them why, they gave me even more shit about hot flows cold flows, state flows, and how ots the latest "solution" from google.

So today, while going through another existential crises in my free time, i decided to understand what these "flows" are.

and from what i understand, it is mainly for cases in which there os actively changing data and we want to get latest updates without any event or trigger, like those streaming datas , chat messages, location etc.

but we are a freaking insurance app! user presses a button and we make an api call! what is the fucking problem here that isn't being solved by good old livedata and coroutines? There isn't any "live" api in app as far as i know and even if there is the code should be modified for 1 such api.

why fuck the whole codebase for a usecase that isn't applicable for 99% of APIs?

also, if a flow is going to auto trigger and call api, how are we supposed to control it? like say there is a offers api(there isn't) which gives us the latest offer products to show user for 5 seconds then refresh. for this i will simply returrn

flow{

while(true){
emit (offer api results)
delay(5000)
}

}

but this is an infinite polling api! how to stop it when say user pressed a cross button or did some other interaction?

it seems useless as fuck.. i can achieve a more controllable polling using the same while loop in different location or some other solution that won't require me adding this wierd api

so am switching jobs as an Android dev from a company which made android libs (using almost 0 external dependencies and mostly java) to a company which makes android apps( and is probably using either rx/guava/ribs/hilt etc or the more fancy hilt/compose/coroutines/clean-arc etc. its either one of them depending upon the maturity of product)

B2C folks use tons of libraries in favor of delivering fast but learning about those libraries while taking new tasks and fixing bugs CAUSED by those libraries ( or their inappropriate usage) is a big PAIN IN THE FUCKING ASS.

I remember i had once became such a weird dev coz of my prev company ( before the current libraries one, which was also a B2C) .

on weekends i would come up with a nice app idea, start a new android studio project, and before writing a single line of useful code, i would add a bunch of libraries, gradle scripts and extensions .

that ocd will only settle once all the steps are done and i can see a working app after which i would write the code for actual code for feature implementation.

granted that these libs are good for creating robust scalable code, but most of the times those infinite kayers of seperation, inheritance and abstraction are not really needed for a simple , working product.

:/

i have also started reading about rxjava , and although i am repulsive to this library due to its complicated black box like structure, i find its vast number of operators nd built in solutions very cool.

at the end of the day, all i want is to write code that is good enough for monkeys, get it shipped without any objections and go back home.

and when you work on a codebase that has these complicated libs, you bet your ass that there will be thos leetcode bros and library lover senëõr devs waiting to delay the "go back home" part 😪

It's nice to finally figure out how to solve a complex puzzle in a coding project.

For me, this usually happens at a line in the grocery store or better yet at the lobby of the kindergarden while I'm picking up my kids.

starting out with a couple coroutines to spare is literally the worst bad habit I've got from golang and that's a compliment. rust, for example, got my over engineering OCD thru the roof!

Friday could have ended well, until my ide started hiding crashes in the logs!! 😤

luasocket decided to provide blocking network primitives to be used in single threaded lua environments. Sure I can overcome it with socket select polling, promises and coroutines. But WTF. It is 2016! Even node.js does it better.