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In this episode, Romain Guy from Google gives us the lowdown on a bunch of Hardware related stuff.

He starts off by explaining how the refresh rates on screens matter, what it would mean to have something like a 120Hz display for Android screens, how things like V-Sync and double buffering work, using different screen technologies, how much work is done by the CPU and GPU and so much more.

This was one of those episodes where we tried so hard to hold back for fear of recording for another 2 more hours. Romain is clearly one of the most knowledgable and interesting engineers to talk to today in the hardware land of Android. What a blast!

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In this episode, we talk to Florina from Google about the recently released Database library Room. Room was introduced as part of the Android Architecture components and has been picking up a lot of steam in the community.

Room focuses on being a beautiful api layer to Sqlite. Florina explains to us how we can use Room to create a database, creating entities and how they map to tables using DAOs to access data and even “observe” them. Listen on for more of the details!

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In this episode of Fragmented, Donn talks about a common problem almost all software engineers face in their career – Design Patternitis.

So, you’ve read the books on design patterns and now you’re applying them everywhere. Just because some code can be put into a pattern doesn’t mean you should. Or should you? How can you apply them when needed? Donn shares 5 tips with you that you can use to help combat Design Patternitis.

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In this episode of Fragmented, our friend and RxJava paragon of the Android – Dan Lew, returns for a record 3 and 1/2 time.

We’ve been using RxJava over the years now and have even talked to Dan about it in previous episodes.

How has our understanding of Rx use in Android changed over the years? We know some of the super standard usecases for RxJava in AndroidDev. But the important question to be asking is: when are the times we “shouldn’t” be using RxJava? Are we over-complicating our code by shoe-horning it in different places. Concepts like functional programming and reactive state management have picked up steam again, how has this influenced our RxJava use?

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In this second episode of our learning Kotlin series, we talk about Kotlin’s support for static members or … lack thereof. Kotlin as a language was designed so that there’s no such thing as a “static member” in a class but there are times when having static members can be useful.

So what do we do in those cases? do we just avoid static members? are there better alternatives? what are the costs with some of these approaches?

Listen on to find out more!

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In this decompress episode, DF and KG kick it off with a brief discussion of the highlights from the recent reddit AMA that the Android Engineering folk conducted. What were the interesting things they learnt or were surprised by etc.? They then go on to briefly discuss two topics they’ve always chatted about (off-air) packaging by feature (not layer) and most recent thoughts on testing. Listen on to find out more:

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At I/O ’16 Google announced the super cool new feature Instant Apps. At IO’17 we started to see real world examples and third parties pull off this feature. In this episode, we talk to GDE Zarah Dominguez who’s company “Domain” was one of the partners for this program.

What is the Instant Apps feature? What are some usecases where this comes in handy? How does it actually work internally? What does it take for a developer to implement this feature in their own app? Listen on to find out!

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In this mini Fragment, KG talks about his journey learning Kotlin as a newb. Given that Kotlin is most likely going to be the de-facto language for most developers, it makes sense to deepen our understanding of the language (as we have strived with Java over the years).

“Properties” in Kotlin are a first class language feature. But what does that actually mean? What are the nifty features we get with properties? How are these resolved from a Java class when there’s potential a name clash? What are some other gotchas and learnings from using properties? Listen on to find out:

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In this episode of Fragmented we talk to our friend Piwai from Square.

Piwai’s a pro at testing and breaking apps (he built LeakCanary – so not terribly unexpected). He teaches us some strategies on debugging app crashes and briefs us on this concept he calls “offensive programming” which has helped him a lot with his Android development.

It’s good stuff and we hope you enjoy the show.

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In this mini-Fragment episode, Donn talks about Item #16 of the Effective Java series – Favor Composition over Inheritance. You’ll learn why using inheritance is not always a great idea and how you can use composition in place of it to make your code more anti-fragile, resilient and clean.