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In this episode, Donn and Kaushik talk to long-time friend Dan Lew about his recent career switch from Android developer to TypeScript/Node.js/Progressive Web App Developer (and more).

It’s an interesting discussion that covers …

• Why Dan decided to leave the Android world
• The challenges he faced when he moved from one tech stack to another
• How to prepare for a big change like this (mentally, financially, etc.)
• How to create the life you want live vi by identifying what’s important to you
• and much more …

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In this episode, Donn and Kaushik talk about one of the age old bike shedding topics – code formatting, and how you can solve it with automation and tools.

Code formatting can turn into an endless debate amongst peers and teams, and what Kaushik and Donn have found is that this can be delegated to a tool and automated. Freeing you and your team of having to worry about proper indentation, bracket placement, etc. By relying on a well defined tool and some automation you can clean your code up, make it much more uniform and easier maintain.

We talk about ktfmt, a Kotlin code formatter that was released by Facebook. We dive into ktlint, detekt and more. We also dive into spotless which can help you by integrating ktfmt into your gradle build pipeline.

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In this episode, Donn and Kaushik talk about the fear of shipping, some impostor syndrome and how it contributes to uncertainty and doubt in your capabilities as a software developer.

Recently Donn embarked on a mission to come up with an idea and ship it within 24 hours (which he did do). The end result was a net benefit of confidence, speed and skill acquisition. This helped reduce any doubt, uncertainty and ultimately fear of shipping a product faster.

That’s what this conversation is about … how to doing a project like the 24 hour MVP can remove fear, uncertainty and doubt and help you ship your side project/products faster.

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In this episode, Donn and Kaushik talk about 5 new-ish Kotlin constructs that you might not be aware of.

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In this short episode, Donn talks about the CODEOWNERS file and how it can help you ensure teams review the code that they are responsible for before merging.

The CODEOWNERS file is a file that you drop into the root of your project (or into the /docs or .github/ directory) that tells GitHub (or whatever git host you’re using) to require a review for any code changes that match the patterns as defined in the CODEOWNERS file. You’ll specify a matching pattern and users, or teams that own that pattern of files and they will be required to review the PR before it can be merged. This helps prevent unwanted changes to files that may or may not be owned by one team or another. This is useful as teams grow larger and need more control over the changes in their application codebase.

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In this episode, Donn talks about the tips and tricks he’s used over the last 20 years of consulting, freelancing and working full time to find jobs and new opporftunities. We’re hoping some of these tips help those affected by the recent tech layoffs.

These are tips that Donn still uses to this day. They work wonders to help you land a job quickly when you do them.

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In this episode, Donn and Kaushik talk about their thoughts on Jetpack Compose and XML for Android layouts and which one you should learn first.

As with every conversation in tech … it depends on what you’re trying to do, where you are at in your career, what the company is doing and more. Donn and Kaushik go into both of their thought processes around Compose and XML and when you should learn one or the other, or even both and whether Jetpack is the future … or is XML here to stay?

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In this episode, Donn and Kaushik talk about the thought of having a terminal for Android.

Have you ever wished you could whip up a quick script to get the current location of a device, add it to cron and do some automated tasks on your phone? Wouldn’t it be nice to have low level access to your system like you do on your desktop?

In this episode, Donn and Kaushik dive into the details of what that might look like and why they find it intriguing.

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In this episode, Kaushik goes solo and interviews Ben Orenstein. Ben is a prolific Ruby developer, an amazing conference speaker, an ardent vim-ster, and now the CEO of Tuple.

Kaushik has been a big fan of Ben’s work and was super stoked to talk to Ben and pick his brains on a host of topics: starting the company Tuple, pair programming in general, learning different programming languages and technology, giving better conference talks and more!

This episode is chock full of wisdom from Ben. Enjoy!

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In this episode, Donn and Kaushik talk about how many Android applications seem to suffer from the disease of over-architecture while neglecting the product (UI/UX) itself. They discuss why this is deterimental to the user experience in the Android platform and how they’ve seen it evolve over the years. They attempt to provide some thoughful ideas on how this can be rectified in the future and more.

We’re looking for your feedback on this show. What are your favorite product apps that are just a joy to use on Android? Let us know on Twitter at @donnfelker and @kaushikgopal and @fragmentedcast