November 2021 - Interesting reads

Read

• The untold story of Larry Page https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4
• I've started mentoring a young Kenyan woman remotely, trying to understand a bit how does the tech scene looks like in Nairobi https://www.vogue.com/article/female-coders-from-nairobi

Books

I was hoping to extend some of my general knowledge around functional reactive programming but unfortunately this book was just, mostly the basic theory and very long examples written with Sodium. I felt it was more a book about a specific framework than about concepts, not what I was expecting but I think good for those who want to start digging into FRP https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24671986-functional-reactive-programming

After reading The Three Body Problem trilogy I was excited about reading this one by the same author. The base idea is great (if you can get behind that somehow if you're young you don't get any radiation) but I wasn't a fan of the execution, too much time spent describing the games children play rather than going in depth with what it means to have a world without adults. Still a quite enjoyable read if you're good at skipping pages. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43263225-supernova-era

Tooling

• What if you could write Rust in your native language? https://github.com/michidk/rost
  https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille
• Getting started to learn about Compose (not the UI toolkit) https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/qomi6s/learning_about_compose_not_the_ui_toolkit/hjo047q/

TIL

You can generate an archive of any of your project under Git without any of the files / directories present in the .gitignore! Perfect to send coding challenges without the build folder for instance.

git archive -o test.zip HEAD  

Watch

• How Mario Kart Live (VR) was developed, a lot of really interesting nuggets, especially the part about SLAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVznFTIDsUg&list=WL&index=8

The recordings for Droidcon Berlin are up! https://www.droidcon.com/content/?filter_postyear=2021&filter_post_event_tag=droidcon-berlin

Here are some of my favorites so far (there's a LOT to watch):

• Good presentation highlighting what are currently the pain points in using coroutines / common threading system on both iOS and Android via KMM https://www.droidcon.com/2021/11/10/coroutines-for-kotlin-multiplatform-in-practise/
• Best practices around creating a highly customizable SDK with Compose https://www.droidcon.com/2021/11/10/building-a-production-ready-chat-sdk-using-jetpack-compose/
• Iterative approach on how to measure, identify and fix some problem related to your Gradle build time https://www.droidcon.com/2021/11/10/nail-your-gradle-build-time/

Shortcut of the month (Intellij IDEA)

With now a lot of people working with Compose and functions everywhere instead of actual custom view classes it might be hard to find the @Composable you are looking for as they don't appear under classes (CMD+O) or files (CMD+SHIFT+O) search. CMD+OPTION+O is what you need!

Bonus

• I Have Delivered Value... But At What Cost? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ