Today is the last day of 2016. It’s been a really tough and demanding year for me and in an effort to account for the year and also inspired by Dan Lew’s post, I have decided to do a review of the year. Going forth, I will make this a ritual.
Most important thing for me this year, is that I made a decision to write more and share my challenges and thoughts through this blog.
Top Articles
This year, I wrote (a lot), and my top 5 posts this year are:
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I shared a tip on how to manage Android dependencies versions using gradle extra properties.
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“Remote config with Firebase” showed how to do A/B testing on your Android apps, and “update” your app without updating it.
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Bottom navigation became “legit” on Android and I wrote on how to implement it in your apps.. Check out the sample code
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“Firebase Crash Reporting” in Android is really sleek. 0 lines of code to get it working. I also shared how to setup and get it working in your app.
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You know that thing Twitter for Android does? It opens a link within a chrome-like sandbox, still within the Twitter app. Yea. It’s called “Chrome Custom Tabs” and I also shared how to implement it here.
Talks
This year also, I had the opportunity to give a number of talks at local meetups and international conferences.
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In June, I gave a talk at “ForLoop”, a monthly developer meet up here in Lagos. The talk was about “Material Design” as it applies to Android devs. It covered the concepts, tools and resources to implement it in the apps. The slides are here.
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“Faster Android Development with Data Binding” at Android fortnightly meet up organized by Google Developer Group, Lagos
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I also had the opportunity to give a talk at the Lagos edition of the Google Developer Launchpad Build Sub-Saharan Africa. I spoke about “Firebase Crash Reporting in Android”
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In September, Prosper (the fire developer 🔥) and I gave a talk on “Identity Management in Your Apps” at DevCraft conference in Nairobi, Kenya.
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“Firebase on Android. What’s new?” was the title of my talk at GDG #DevFest16, Lagos. I gave a breakdown of the “new” Firebase suite and how to set up and get started.
Many thanks to those that gave the opportunity to give talks, I look forward to giving more talks and sharing more in 2017. Feel free to drop me an email at segunfamisa
Projects
I didn’t get to do many open source projects this year, but I worked on an annotation based tool for saving and restoring instance states in Android) - Icicle. Feel free to use, star, fork the project here:
Travel, Fun and Adventure
- This year, I also decided to travel more. I visited 2 new African countries - Ghana and Kenya.
- On adventure, I hiked a total of 4 hills/mountains - Kwahu Mountains, Idanre hills, Ado Awaye and Erin Ijesha. I did zip-lining and a canopy walk as well. It was fun and adrenaline intensive.
- I “turned up” a lot more this year 🙄 (S/O to my turn up squad 😂).
What next?
In 2017, I’m going to be using Kotlin more for Android dev while exploring Swift for iOS dev. The goal is to become a rounded “Mobile Engineer”.
Thanks
Shout out to Nigerian developers killing it 🔥, hope to see more of the developer fire in 2017.
Special thanks to all my friends, all Android Devs around the world that inspire me daily (they’re so many, I can’t name all) and everyone that reads my posts.
Cheers to an amazing 2017. 🎉🍻
Segun.