Interview with an Android Developer

ladies and gentlemen welcome to shop direct this is where I work not only is it incredibly innovative and there's fantastic new things happening all the time but this place is filled with amazing amazing people today I have a very special video for you to celebrate for my first YouTube milestone of 100 subscribers and to say thank you to all of you for your constant support I want to introduce you to one of those amazing people I was talking about ladies and gentlemen I give you an interview with an Android developer welcome ladies and gentlemen my name is Ben and welcome back to the channel this video is a celebration of hitting my first YouTube milestone of 100 subs yeah and of course I want to say a massive thank you to all of you for your constant support feedback and help and of course for watching my crap now without further ado I want to introduce you to a colleague a friend and of course a mentor mr. green Brian hi Graham hi Ben so Graham tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do my name is Graham as you know I am an Android developer which is why I'm here I've been doing it oh dear god I should have calculators 15 ish years now being a general developer and I've been doing Android developers specifically for about eight years okay I was gonna say Android development for 15 years yeah that would have just been back at the start of it right no no pre Android right I think what you were in them and what we did before Android development and what was who so journey back Android iOS a lot of like native Java and then into flash flex ActionScript that kind of stuff flash yes coming out the back end of a games development degree so how did you actually get into android development then what was your journey from all of that wonderful stuff including flash to Android I was doing some Apple development iOS mainly because Apple killed flash Apple killed flash yeah so obviously flash was a legitimate option for making an interactive web content and Apple came along right of the smartphone they led the way they just base it one yet no flash on our devices and just refused to support it which was a good choice you know it's just that it was not a great platform returns performance stuff like that I probably would have a bit car do it they're just like no you know doing that H not buyer was kind of on the horizon then anyway so there was more legitimate options for doing more interesting content on the web and they just come down on it and literally and there's bass about two three years just like flash just buckled basic am i right in thinking that flash is the thing that it was like oh you need this flash player to be able to do anything yeah all right okay so if you think like early 2000 nights where that like flash was just everywhere yeah it was twist won't get too much in a flash but it was legitimately nice platform to work with anyway so they'd put the end to that I thought what I'm gonna have to get on board with this this is the next big thing did some iOS development for a little while and got some basically was financial options there was a hell of a lot of Apple developers out there you know I'm doing a lot like job opportunities yeah yeah and then Android came along and just wasn't especially the first generation wasn't as sexy as Apple and iOS yeah so there was more job opportunities to go for it was paying better because there was less skill set in the area so I was like I'll give this a try cool anyways like I genuinely preferred the development environment of Android / io s like just in general terms so not a man fan of objective-c the tool sets round-eyed were terrible early on but they have vastly improved we're xcode's been a much more of a trickle based improvement and crank where's that Android about some like huge leaps have been really interesting to be Power so actually on that note then you're saying the development environment it makes me think of ide zwei actually was back in back in the storm and throw lips with plugins okay and anyone is done slandered well especially about them would know the the the nightmare and the headache that it was again Android nice working nice nicely yeah working nicely why just because it's all like plugins there PI plugins like different extensions and stuff for doing all different of things huge cell for setting up your environment variables are you pass all that kind of stuff we're just yeah just not tricky not easy sorry very tricky Wow okay so what is the best thing about Android development right now Kotlin Kotlin yeah okay changes at a time tomatoes i am i find the application lifecycle quite interested in android it's probably the best thing it's a definitely a thing that differentiates it from apple development and it feels that you're a lot more in touch with like the bare bones what's going on it's an interesting way of approaching it so I've always found that quite engaging think some of the times the the flexibility that Android has always been quite good this out there has been like a starkly like you know two or three ways of getting most things done yeah the varying degrees various pros and cons depending where you want to do but toys at the moment the most interesting part being under developer for me is Colin and the the jetpack labor api's and stuff because finally said okay we're gonna prescribe our way of doing things this is some tools to do that and there's some really interesting tools coming out of that awesome I've got two questions off the back of that then Kotlin why Kotlin what's so good about it so I think when you when you've been working in any area for quite some time like it can get a bit stale and repetitive I think so anything that comes in and mixes up a little bit is engaging as a developer and I think Troy's Kotlin is just so much nicer to work with than Java so yeah the fact that it's something new and interesting and I powerful to use and the fact is like it's a much nicer experience to use as well it's a very double whammy for me so yeah it's really reinvigorated my interest in the platform right um and it's a lot more I'm gonna screw this word up but idiomatic it's not easier to read and then the other side of that coin was you're talking about the Android architecture components and stuff tell me a little bit more about that why they was so good about them well historically Android like I said before they said here some tools do what you want with them and even when push to go okay what is like Google's prescribed method of doing things they've been really resistant to do anything they basically come out recently said okay you've been asking us we are now going to deliver a prescribed way of doing things in terms of like a parka texture and lifecycle matter and stuff and they said on top of that we're also we're gonna take all that I can fragmented libraries and stuff that I've been building up over the time we're gonna polish them all up we're gonna put them together and we're gonna bring in these components to help you develop faster in the prescribed manner we want so if you don't want to do in that manner this certain areas of that that's just completely wasted to you but to be honest I think the the quality of the tools that you're offering it will be sili tube to resist it to be honest so again it's just like bringing them into the apps being really fun toy dough as you know like since we brought Colin and jetpack api's into our library we'd like we've cut the code base now by like say 20 30 % yeah it's a lot cleaner tests around a lot more efficiently it's just been much much needed bit of housecleaning I think absolutely and on that point I am I'm not sure if people know about this there's a tool out there terminal tool called clock c-loc and we actually did a clock run of our entire code base so it basically counts the number of lines in a certain language yeah oh they go yeah count lines of code nice so we did before and after the sort of changeover and I'm I'm pretty sure correct me if I'm wrong we dropped by like 50 percent in like said area sort of lining cue like 30 percent in total but yeah certain areas it was over there was a 50% drop very cool and we are on a percent cut linear touch what is net with such I believe sup yeah on the last count I would see you some of the libraries that were still dependents on are still using Java yeah but to swim about to pros a Kotlin the interoperability of it just makes that like non secretary really obviously the iOS equivalent would be making Swift interoperable with Objective C which we know is a little bit tricky oh is that difficult is it just ask Joe Ricardo okay you can get them on for you next Yeah right there you go future interviews what advice would you give anybody in becoming a new not just android-specific what advice would you give somebody that wants to get into the dev world hmm be sure it's something that you think will keep you engaged long term okay because I've seen a lot of this people that I went to university where they're people have worked with de Leon you do get you can get quite a bit burning so programming can be a really engaging important way to make money it's definitely a really engaging hobby and pastime to a lot of people but when that translates over to you know what you are going to be doing for your career and actually working in industry being a programmer can be quite different to you know spending a few hours and evening working on a project they're a big fan of you need to make sure that you are going to be happy in that environment so for example right you've got yeah you've got your hobby project you're working on it's all interesting you're completely leading it and then you might go to what kind of Enterprise probably where you're working on a very small sub component where you know you might not even be while you're working on it very clear how that fits into the wider project especially early on when you come into them as a job as an industry I'm starting you know these days of your careers you're going to be doing very small sub components might not be very interested in it doesn't really see the big picture kind of thing now if you find pleasure and you know getting that small interest in little tasks and finding the the best interesting way to solve that then great then that's you're going to be able to get past that early days of the career of like it probably not feeling quite like it was when you were learning to develop but if you think you know you are gonna come into there and you're going to be you know completely in charge and telescopes of projects from day one I've seen a lot of people wait it's just like they just didn't find the satisfaction in those little jobs that they did when they were coming from like the hobbyist angle okay fair enough is there a particular differentiation in a skill ability that you need for Android so if I'm a generic dev and an Android dev what's the difference there is there any particular skills I need it's like less efficient now but I would say like specific things early days without phones as well and it's something that should still definitely be considered but less so big of an issue is the fact that you're working on a limited device okay so you know you have a finite amount of memory to work with you have a finite process and speed you want to be conscious of how much energy you using in terms of battery life and stuff and you want to be making sure that you're not unwittingly like exposing like security issues or anything like that yeah again no these these are these are the statements are becoming quite dated now because you know like the my latest phones as powerful as my laptop yeah so it's a it's it doesn't really think there's no kind of someone works far away OS updates like constantly looking to plug security issues MAME that's because of unscrupulous developers that I like you know that there are mister away there's some stuff in the App Store that's literally you know just a nonsense app just to be exposed and manipulate these security flaws right so these are these are sections in the industry that you know our active and constantly being updated and moving away far but especially in the early days about app development these were really upon you know you couldn't you know have like long-running processes that we're gonna eat up understand megabytes of memory because you would pretty quickly be here in a brick well yeah yeah especially an Android which isn't quite as efficient with its memory usage as as Apple as plummet any other specific skillsets if I may jump in on your point about sort of performance basically making sure you're not going over certain limits and whatnot is there anything but you do currently in your app you know where you work here at shop direct is there anything you do in the app at the moment to ensure those sort of things yes so another benefit of and our Studios you have a really good suite of profiling tools now so right you can quite quite easily jump on and see what kind of processor usage using memory usage there's some great stuff coming from Google Play pre launch reports as well now where he uses device farms and just runs a load over a random test at all devices and all these back some quite good reports that'll let you know about like what was that called sorry just from all pre launch support from Google Play that will give you all kinds of accessibility and usage reports back but part of that we'll talk like if you think she's using excessive resource anytime about Jesus about nice and of course for the few the viewers at home are dying to know what phone do you have I have a pixel three which I very recently smashed the screen in so I will be getting a pixel for at lunch today I imagine conveniently smashed this for you miss most very Inspira see it was a drunken phenom ball so I choose personally to stick with vanilla implementations of Android just again something Google are trying to improve on but like the Apple take a new OS releases on like third PI phones can be pretty slow it can be even like a year on certain platforms and I'm impatient so it's something new I like I like to have it I'm gonna have it I want to have it quick nice especially comes like the the industry I'm working in again as you know but the vast majority of the users of the app that we work on are actually Samsung users and that that's pretty common across the board to be honest so as an Android developer it is obviously good point to make you should make sure that you are doing testing on the devices that your customers are using there's no point using doing all your development on vanilla implementations of Android if like that's what your users are using absolutely in fact you give me a lovely little segue there into testing as a as a as a theme how do you test an Android what do you do about testing I for although to code down and then I give a bill to someone else to make sure it's not broken no so so there's obviously there's a lot of talk if you if you read any literature around are introduced of like that about best and presses for testing and stuff we tend to do that open know what that tool phrase would it before it be lazy testing testing after the fact so we would will develop a feature and then we will write the test for it once it's finalized then the environment see that's because the environment work in a lot of times when we're starting to approach development of a feature it's still very experimental so it doesn't really open up to using TDD I guess we're more of a BDD kind of platform so that's my testing based around the behavior of your users rather than priority of like testing upfront writing your code to pass tests this is a hot debate about which is better I think it's more on a more specific to your circumstances so yeah but what do we do right so we we write a code we supply some unit tests some instrumentation tests where appropriate how are they how these written so the unit tests and instrumentation tests well I'm winter okay so we use which is called J unit for our unit tests we use Quito and hamcrest for do a mocking our dependency right and doing our tests around that so we will break down our components as fully as possible we can talk about architecture a little bit I mean I think and wherever possible we are texting units of functionality in the unit tests and then we use instrumentation tests when we need to test off there's going to interact directly with Android lifecycle or Android OS components right the main difference there being if you are writing by default at least if you are writing code you're testing code that needs to interact with an Android OS you have to run it inside an android environments or has to be running on an emulator or on a device why that's just because that's where you execute the Android lifecycle so the thing to that the counter to that obviously is we're currently looking at integrating robolectric into our applications and that will basically create an entire mocks not specific well basically a virtual Android environment that you can run your tests in that allows you to run your tests as a unit task which basically means you can run them locally on a machine inside JVM rather than having to run it on a specific device which obviously is a lot faster yeah absolutely what is the best way to learn Android development how do I learn it what I do do some do some do some there's very low barrier entry to entry barriers barriers to entry there's very low barriers to entry when it comes to Android there's no initial cast it's very easy to set up a device to be able to build on - you can just download Android studio there's Wizards to get up and running and you can literally dive straight into him as - as far as actual getting an understanding of the platform yeah there's lot there's lots of ways I give a shout out to ray Wendell ik or Wendell itch whatever a great website they have definite helped me when I was learning just the Android basics but now I can tend to stick to Android documentation and I'll do some great code labs where they will literally walk you through every step of be able to implement a feature even like saying of the environment stuff to get it going in their local home and that's a step by step process and you can just download the code any point you know says go wrong so you can see how your codes come out sync with theirs awesome just to interject we'll put the links in the description down below - those links - raehwan lick and the code lab stuff that you talked about and we are non-commissioned with rain but by his books I'm trailing what other resources engagement this is a pretty good community out there if you want to talk to people to stay even make on the Google book report pages you can get deep dive chats into people open source communities shared projects get involved the trickiest thing you know that if you're coming from it from not knowing how to program at all that's a much trickier question if you're coming from it as a programmer that want to do a little Android dev you just need to get your head around the lifecycle and the OS specifics and once you got that down it's it's really easy to develop by brill actually on that and the fragmented podcast of course I'll link to those down below as well they've done a recent episode was about whether you should learn Java or Kotlin sort of first as your first approach whether you can come into Java color I just wanted to get your take on it column Kotlin out the box just like brand new Kotla fragment so they said they gave their fluffy answer of it's up to you it's but they sort of said that Kotlin was there yeah they sort of said that Kotlin was the that you know their sort of answer but they also said it's up to you specifically bit yeah just I'd say Cortland especially if you're coming to Android developer our language so Google have obviously made calling the primary language for the entire platform on new api's are being railing Cartland they're doubling down on cart lane maybe because of legal reasons which we won't bother getting into because there's a whole thing going on with like oracle and android and basically it's costing them a lot of money mm-hm so yeah you can see why they would make that decision to go well yeah if you want if you just don't come in as a Java developer though it's still purple a German to develop Android with Java it's there's there's no functional difference you could do everything just the same it's just I can say this the the codes a bit more pleasant to write and call an iPhone in person right so to close out the video I'm gonna ask um just a very quick couple of quick fire questions that are single word answers you ready sure here we go marshmallow or pie Jesus pipe OS sweet names or OS numbers sweet names hmm tea or coffee coffee Mac or PC Mac toilet paper over or under and then a big final question that I want you a little bit of an explanation with it is would you fight 10 duck sized horses or one horse-sized duck okay I'm gonna go with presuming that like bite four scales with size absolutely can we go ten duck sized horses okay how would you approach that I mean one one duck sized horse I can bite you in half right it's gonna break some bones no and how I would fight that I would remain in circles just where the man's good something like that smart what a manly your tone of voice I stop get away from me of course that makes sense yeah so first of all thank you very much for watching thank you very much to gray in for being part of this thank you very much it was horrific yeah thank you good I'm glad and of course don't forget to like this video if you enjoyed it and of course subscribe to the channel or put a little button there between this and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more of this content of course ring the bell icon do a little bell somewhere there it is ring the bell icon of course to be notified about new videos as they come out thank you for watching see you in the next video I'm ready people to watch YouTube videos right know where the subscriber is and why something what is something ding [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Ben Kadel

Views: 8,069

Rating: 4.9230771 out of 5

Keywords: android, interview with an android developer, professional android developer, learn from an android developer, interview android, shop direct, ben kadel 100 subs special, how to learn android development, android programmer, Graham Bryan, programming, coding, java, kotlin, android architecture components, androidx, where to start with coding, how do I start to learn how to code, best thing about android development, advice for new devs, mockito, espresso, android tests

Id: yeDTLGecH1k

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019

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Video data:

Field	Data
Title	Interview with an Android Developer
Thumbnail	Link
Views	104
Length	21:46
Likes/Dislikes	7/0
Comments	0
Description	This video as a very special celebration video, its a way for me to give back to you all, to say thank you for all your support and love the past few weeks/months. This is my video to celebrate reaching my first YouTube milestone of 100 SUBSCRIBERS! Thank you all so so much!⤶⤶In this very special video I Interview a real life professional Android developer from the company I work at, Shop Direct. The android developer is a fantastic gent called Graham Bryan and I ask him a whole variety of questions (questions and timestamps are down below if you want to skip ahead...) in order to learn from him about his journey into the world of android development and how he became an industry professional and some of the technical challenges that he overcame along the way, whilst at the same time exposing important knowledge about how you too can start your journey to become an Android Developer!⤶⤶We talk about some of the current topics that are prevalent in the world of Android, such as Android Architecture Components, migrating to Kotlin from Java, ways to get into Android development and how to learn it and even the vast world of Unit Testing in Android. Graham is an incredibly insightful and knowledgable person and I learnt a lot from him simply shooting this video, so its safe to say if you have any interest in the world of Android this is a video for you!⤶⤶I hope you enjoy this very special video, I know I enjoyed filming and editing it. Please let me know what you think and even maybe any other questions you would like to ask maybe in the future we could do a follow up video?⤶⤶...Pssssst by the way if you hang around long enough in the video and make it to the outro card there are a couple of video surprises at the end in the for of some bloopers and some strange wonderful things that the camera captured as we were rolling... check it out ;)⤶⤶Links and Question timestamps follow below:⤶⤶Links discussed in the video ======================⤶⤶Fragmented - Android Podcast (Should I learn Java or Kotlin)...⤶https://fragmentedpodcast.com/episodes/175/⤶⤶Google developer bootcamps...⤶https://codelabs.developers.google.com/⤶⤶Google developer bootcamps (Android + Kotlin specific)...⤶https://codelabs.developers.google.com/android-kotlin-fundamentals/⤶⤶CLOC - Count Lines Of Code project on github...⤶https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc⤶⤶Ray Wenderlich - Awesome android tutorial site...⤶https://www.raywenderlich.com/android⤶⤶Information about Android Pre-Launch Reports...⤶https://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/launch/pre-launch-crash-reports⤶⤶Questions that are asked and their timestamps ======================⤶⤶01:08 - Who are you? What do you do?⤶01:36 - What did you do before Android Development?⤶01:55 - How did you get into Android Development?⤶03:54 - What used to be the IDE for Android Development?⤶04:26 - What is the best thing about Android Development?⤶05:24 - Why Kotlin? Whats so good about it?⤶06:06 - Tell us more about the Android Architecture Components?⤶08:23 - What advice would you give someone that wants to be a Dev?⤶10:14 - Is there a difference in skills between a "normal" Dev & an "android" Dev?⤶11:55 - Is there anything you do now regarding app performace/limitations?⤶12:47 - What phone do you have?⤶14:04 - How do you test in Android?⤶15:16 - How are your Android tests written?⤶16:46 - What is the best way to learn Android Development?⤶18:49 - Should I learn Java or Kotlin as a new Android Dev?⤶19:52 - Fun Extra Questions...⤶⤶Thanks for watching, please let me know if there is any other topics that you would like me to cover as I start to slowly add more content to this channel...⤶⤶Twitter: https://twitter.com/ben_kadel⤶Github: https://github.com/kardelio⤶⤶-------------------------------------⤶Tools:⤶-------------------------------------⤶Video Editing: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/⤶Image Editing: https://www.gimp.org/⤶⤶-------------------------------------⤶Credits:⤶-------------------------------------⤶Intro Card Music: https://www.purple-planet.com⤶Music: https://www.bensound.com⤶Thumbnail Background: Pexels.com (No Attribution Required)⤶⤶Vid: 12⤶⤶#android #developer #interview

Channel Data:

Field	Data
Name	Ben Kadel
Thumbnail	Link
Subscribers	135
Videos	14
Views	1999

^{/u/SmallYTChannelBot made by /u/jwnskanzkwk. PM for bug reports. For more information, read the FAQ.}

[u/Real_Mr_Llama]

The editing is great, the quality is great, awesome video

[u/HighHeelKnight]

First of all, thank you for mentioning that your video might not be appropriate for all ages. I can't tell you how many times I've have stopped watching a video on this subreddit because the posters didn't offer that basic respect.

Second, congratulations on reaching 100, especially gaining over 20 subs in a single month. That is impressive.

Third, "Thank you for... watching my crap." A bit of self-depreciating humor can be fun, but you shouldn't make such comments within the same breath of celebrating a milestone.

Fourth, having the questions on the bottom of the screen was a wise idea. Well done. You should also feature the questions as time stamps in the description space, if you haven't already.

Five, nice outtakes at the end. Very fun.

Okay. That is enough from me. Congrats again. Be excellent and party on, dude!

[u/ViviFFIX]

I think the bearded man should take over the channel. He's great!

Though genuine feedback: Loving the final "outtake" section at the end.

[u/Jagart01]

Your guys thumbnail is very inviting! Looks like two best friends ready to just hang out and chat. I LOVE IT! Congrats on 100 Subscribers guys!

[u/AndreRankUp]

Now I'm interested in checking out the rest of the channel you seem like you already got your thing going on nothing I can really add on

[u/jjsplayworld]

Congratulations on 100+🍾