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 we may fall into the trap of getting an unnecessary ego. The wrong mindset creeps in, which can lead to the beginning of our downfall.

I’ve been through that journey. So I now consciously remind myself not to fall into one of those mindsets again. …

The Programming World

If someone asks which jobs will be obsolete in the next decade, the jobs that come to mind are those that could be replaced by machines and software, e.g. professions like driver, broadcaster, travel agent, sports official, and many more.

To many, software development is never on the list. Software is the future, hence it is the most secured job. Really?

Well, it makes sense but it’s not always true. Here’s why:

Software Development Is the Most Changed Profession

Hardware architected to last;
Software architected to change.
Change is the only thing that last;
Software wins.

Assembly programming was considered software. Then C language became the norm…

As I was looking for some useful coding quotes, I discovered many funny ones. Enjoy reading them — I thought these should be compiled together.

Most are from other sources (as per linked), with the exception of a handful that are my own.

I have separated them down into:

1. The Programming Life 
2. Software Engineering
3. Languages and Logic
4. Platform, Tools, and Administration
5. General

Hope you enjoy at least some of them!

The Programming Life

1. “Programmer: A machine that turns coffee into code.” (source)
2. “Computers are fast; programmers keep it slow.” (source)
3. “When I wrote this code, only God and…

The Programmers World

When we talk about Software Quality, the first thing that comes to mind is testing. Many organizations even have special QA groups to perform testing or write automated tests.

There is no question that testing is crucial to ensure quality, but it is just one of the many things that can be done to ensure Quality. In software development especially, there are other things that can be done to improve our software product.

I’m breaking them down into two categories i.e.

1. Preparation Quality Assurance
2. Preventive Quality Assurance
3. Reactive Quality Assurance

Preparation Quality Assurance

Fail to plan, plan to fail — Benjamin Franklin

Preparation…

Learning Android Development

I previously wrote about how to set up Android Emulator for M1 MacBookPro as per the article below.

Unfortunately of late, there’s some issue faced. After compiling the project, and the Emulator started, Android Studio keep staying in the status

Waiting for all target device to come online

Apparently, the issue is adb cannot detect the Emulator is running (even though it is running already). When we use adb devices, it will report

List of devices attached
emulator-5554   offline

It only happens on Version 3 onward

It was okay previously. Just after updated to the latest System Image v3, then this happens. You can see as below.

Learning Android Development

One of the main tasks of Gradle is to help the management of code dependencies. When we perform compilation, it will automatically download the dependencies and store them in cache before the compilation.

Have you ever wonder if you can do the following?

• Manually download them ahead (great for some CI environment setup)
• Know exactly where the downloaded cached dependencies are stored

Here, I’m sharing how to create a simple task in Gradle to do that.

Setup a basic task structure

To do that, let’s create a skeleton of a task as below.

task resolveDependencies {     
    setDescription "Resolves all projects dependencies." …

Learning Software Development

It was announced that JCenter and Bintray are retiring soon. All new libraries update should be uploaded elsewhere. One of the places is MavenCentral. But how can we upload it there?

There are various tutorials out there, but the one I like most is from Steam: Publishing Android libraries to MavenCentral in 2021. It has all the detailed steps. There are some hiccups while following it (perhaps the steps have changed) but overall it’s great.

However, it was still too complicated for me. So I wrote this to simplify the steps required. There are many terms that are unfamiliar like…

Learning Android Development

When we first learn to develop in Android, we just follow the tutorial steps and code accordingly. A few of the parts we don’t even understand especially the code in Gradle.

If you like to learn basic about Gradle for Android development, check this out.

We probably have seen code as below

repositories {
    google()
    mavenCentral()
    jcenter()
    mavenLocal()
}

I know these are places storing all libraries, but that’s it, and not knowing what it means.

And lately, you probably heard the JCenter is retiring on Feb 1, 2022. Many are asked to move to MavenCentral instead. So I check…