Speaking from experience — with a second chance in a software leadership position — In my early software development career, with much hard work, I am very fortunate to become a software manager relatively early. Being relatively young and naive as a new manager, my focus has been on commitments and project deliveries. Still, I did well and climbed the management ladder to become…

It’s not too late to restart your software development career at 40 — Someone once told me, “At 35 if you are still a programmer, consider start looking for some other options for the next half of your career. The younger generation is catching up, and soon you’ll be obsolete.” True enough, at 35, I did start to reflect on what I was…

The more we’ve learned, the more we’ve realized there’s so much more to learn — As developers, the longer we’re on the job, the more experience we gain. Eventually, we may even become the go-to person on our team or in our organization, seen as the technical guru of our field. At this level, we get a self-esteem boost, which is positive. But at times…

A tertiary education is important but some things look even better on a resume — Don’t get me wrong — a tertiary education is important, especially if you attend a school that is closely linked with the industry. It usually provides good pointers and sound fundamentals of what computer science is. However, in the internet-driven world we live in, if you want to start your…

An experience from unworkable solutions to a solution that can load, pop, and restore fragments as needed. — We know Jetpack Compose is the future. But many of our Apps are still having Fragments. We cannot migrate everything over all at once. So we should do using an incremental approach. One way is to do it bottom-up, where we migrate all the bottom components to Jetpack Compose, then…

Enable remote scripting control over an Android App — Server-driven UI is getting more and more popular in App development, where we can have the Server define the layout we want to display. However, the engine (logic) of the UI construction is defined by the client.

Even when he goes, he still teaches me — It has been almost 3 weeks since I have not published anything on Medium. Nor have I really learned anything technically. Something hit me really hard about 3 weeks ago. I never expected it. My brother passed away. We’ll never know when…. He looked strong and healthy. Just got back to his routine of…

Software development is never perfect — As a young software developer, I once told the new manager that the feature we worked on was completed. He then asks me, “Can you confirm that it is 100% all bug-free?”. I know I have tried my best to code and test. I was tempted to say “Yes”. But…

An Unconventional Refactor Extraction That Can Be Handy — We usually extract our apps and refactor them as library pods at a lower level. What if we need to have something on top instead, and make our original app a pod, as shown below, it is feasible?