“This tool sucks ”

For the past year or so, my team has been all-in with data binding. And if you know me at all, it obviously makes me one happy duck!

EDIT
Aaaaaaaand an update literally two minutes after I posted this: I was told that the data binding fix made it to the latest Android Studio Canary release.

Over the last year or so, we have been writing a lot of Kotlin at work. There is a consensus within the team that we all like working with the language. It really helps our productivity a lot by reducing a lot of boilerplate, we can actively enforce nullability rules that makes business logic obvious, and having the option to make extension functions offers a lot of flexibility.

I have recently been working on a feature that has a bunch of pre-conditions. Things like the user must be logged in AND the feature flag has to be turned on AND it only appears the first time the user lands on the screen.

One bit of task that I find myself doing over and over again is managing a bunch of Views and their visibility. In the olden days <insert old person handwave>, before there was ConstraintLayout, I have written my fair share of container_s to make this task manageable. Say we have to do something like this:

Last week, I was talking to someone on my team and it became apparent that they weren’t aware of one super useful feature of data binding. If you know me at all, you know that I like love this library, and I would take every opportunity to spread the love around.

Last year, I wrote about my talk preparation process. I mentioned that I try to practice my talk verbatim a bunch of times, especially the night prior.

Today is my last day at Domain. After three years, seven months, and three days, it is time to move out.

Last week, I was giving feedback to someone about improving the commit messages they write. I was very taken aback by their response – “it does not matter what the commit messages are”. Now this is confusing for me, mainly because I know from years of experience that having relevant commit messages is important.