Fragmented Podcast Update – TSHIRTS 🐤

We’re extremely excited to announce a brand new T-shirt sale from Fragmented.

Our last run with the Spacedroid was so successful with listeners that we decided to work again with our good friend Taylor Ling for this brand new design.

Taylor’s DroidTee designs have gained legendary fame amongst Android devs and this time he’s made something extra special just for us:

The pragmatic programmers will astutely observe why this design is so close to our hearts. We’re big fans of the Rubber duck approach to debugging and we hope you’ll proudly wear these as you champion on with your development.

The campaign closes April 7th, so please place your order before then. We hope you love the t-shirt as much as we do.

Purchase the t-shirt here!

Fragmented Discord Chat Server

Kaushik and I are excited to announce that we’ve created a public Discord server that you can join, for free to chat with other folks in the community.

We wanted to create a place where listeners could get together, ask questions, communicate and help each other. The goal of our podcast has always been to share knowledge and we feel that this is only a natural extension of our original vision.

Join Here

You can join the discord group by installing the Discord app and joining the server via the link below.

Why didn’t you use Slack?

This is a great question, and one that we grappled with for a bit. Ultimately it came down to the fact that Slack has a 10,000 message limit on the free plan. This severely limits the usefulness of Slack (in our opinions). Without message history its a limited chat. With history, it provides a rich history of searchable content for the community.

Therefore we decided to go with Discord. It is free to use and has unlimited message history that can be searched.

Why didn’t you use Telegram? Discord is mainly for gamers …

Discord allows us to have various channels/rooms where discussions can be broken out into. We have rooms for design, testing, architecture, etc. Using Telegram, this would not be possible.

While Discord is very popular for gamers, it is used widely in various other industries as well.

Code of Conduct

We do our best to model ourselves as responsible stewards of the community and in doing such we have established a code of conduct that all members of the discord server must abide by. Read it here.

As always, please let us know if you have any comments, questions, etc.

-✌️ Donn & Kaushik

134: Get Effective Help with an SSCCE

In this episode, Donn talks about how you can get effective help with your coding problems with an SSCCE – a Simple, Self-Contained, Correct (Compilable), Example.

Using an SSCCE provides others with a quick, concise way to examine the problem without extraneous libraries, UI toolkits and various other parts of your application that do not matter to the problem at hand.

Donn breaks down each component of the SSCCE so you can wrap your head around what you need to get help quickly.

Download

Links

Sponsors

  • Instabug – Instabug is the simplest yet most comprehensive bug reporting and In-app feedback SDK.

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Fragmented Podcast Update – Sol 2 – TSHIRTS!

Everybody loves t-shirts! More than one listener in the past has asked us when Fragmented is going to have a t-shirt – one they can wear at conferences and such.

We thought about it, but never could hone in on a wicked design. The bar is set SUPER high for good t-shirts these days! The design has to be iconic, yet you should be able to comfortably wear it to work and it shouldn’t turn you into a public billboard. Most importantly though – the design should be distinctly Android…

That calls for an extra special t-shirt and we’re stoked to tell you this… we have something extra special for you … check it out …

Announcing the Limited Edition Fragmented T-Shirt:

fragmentedT

If the design is familiar, it should be. We worked with Taylor Ling who’s released a bunch of amazing DroidTees in the past. Taylor Ling is a phenomenal designer, who also happens to be a GDE for design and clearly understands Android design intimately.

We asked Taylor if he would do a limited edition special Fragmented t-shirt and he gladly obliged (thanks a ton, Taylor). We are super stoked to be releasing these t-shirts. They’re available in a whole bunch of colors and sizes for a limited time. We would be honored if you got one for yourself!

Purchase the t-shirt here.

Fragmented Podcast Update – Sol 1

Heya Folks,

We wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to with the Fragmented podcast lately. Don’t worry, all things below are good for you as the listener.

You may or may not have noticed that the episode length has been getting gradually shorter. We’re trying to get it under 40 minutes.

Why under 40 minutes?

Well, simply because we’ve heard nothing but good things about all of our shorter episodes. Plus, research shows that the optimal length of a podcast is somewhere in the realm of 22 minutes.

Ha. 22 minutes. That’s funny.

Have you ever tried explaining a complex topic like dependency injection in 22 minutes, with an intro and outro? Yeah, probably not going to happen … and if we did try to do it … well … the show would be as dry as scarfing down an entire bag of saltines without a gulp of water … #knowwhatwemean? For us, we’re finding that an action packed episode comes somewhere between 30-40 minutes (sometimes over – it is what it is).

Secondly, the shorter fragment episodes are coming back. We’ve taken a short break from fragments to re-identify our strategy with them. We’re still going to cover the Effective Java series, but we’re going to sprinkle those in with other Fragments we want to do. We learned that the listeners really loved the super actionable content like we had in episode 12 (Continuous Integration and Collective Code Ownership). Therefore we’re going to do more of those kind of fragment episodes with Effective Java fragments episodes sprinkled in here and there – think of them like cute little surprise Android cupcakes that you occasionally run into <– See what we did there? Cupcake, Android, get it? .. Ok, stop throwing tomatoes – we get it, we admit … it was a bad joke… :)

Lastly, we’ve decided to join the Spec.FM network. This is the same network that is the home to many other great podcasts, such as – Developer Tea, Design Details, Immutable, Does Not Compute and more.

Why are we joining a network? Simply put – they help us get content out faster and handle a bunch of the administrative workload that we have to deal with. With this extra help we can focus more on the show, the content and getting more episodes out to you folks much faster and efficiently.

What does that mean for you as a listener?

More awesome of course! Hopefully, you notice anything but better content and more frequent releases. That said, we’ve already started moving our feeds over to our new podcast media host at Spec.FM. Hopefully, your podcatcher realizes this and does not double up episodes for you. If it does, let us know so we can try to remedy the situation for others.

Joining a network also helps us out on the admin side too, especially in an area we’re not too versed in … let us explain. There’s an old saying that we’re all familiar with – Time is money. This is also the case with the podcast.

We LOVE doing the podcast, so much in fact that we’d probably both do it full time if we could.

Unfortunately, that’s not possible as we don’t make anything off of the show. It’s actually the opposite – it costs us a bit of cash to keep this thing going. Not that we’re going broke, but it definitely does make the “time is money” adage ring true. That said, we have had quite a bit of interest from companies who have offered to sponsored the show. We tried to figure out how that would look and how it would work and how to set that up. Long story short – we’re not good ad salesmen. We’re good developers (we think … err … we hope we are … Kaushik … we’re good dev’s right ?? … man … I hope so … anyway …).

Spec.FM will help us with some advertising spots on the show. Here’s the thing though, we will only be advertising things we feel our listeners can get value out of. Therefore, you won’t see us advertising used cars, enhancement pills or mortgage deals (wow, that combo of keywords should put us on some spam lists….). The only time an ad will be on our show is when we approve it and feel that listeners could possibly benefit from the product in the ad.

We hope these small, incremental changes help improve the podcast in the long run. <– See what we did there again? Small. Incremental. Just like software! Iterative … releases … Ugh… yeah … bad joke again. Hey, we tried. :)

As always, if you have any questions, let us know, we’d love to hear from you.

Hugs and bunnies and robots and stuff, your Android ear-bud buddies (say that 10 times fast) –

Donn & Kaushik