Recently, I had to add a perfect squared CardView and I wanted to achieve this without hardcoding its width and height. I happily discovered the power of ConstraintLayout. And so this is how I managed to create a perfect square which should work on every dimension. Heres some sample code that I used to create […]
LLM Prompts for Code Refactoring: Structuring Your Requests When you’re facing a large refactoring task in your Android codebase, asking an LLM the right way can save you hours. Unlike simple coding questions, refactoring requires your AI assistant to understand the architectural context, the business logic you’re preserving, and the specific constraints of your project.
Generate Architecture Documentation Automatically from Your Codebase You know the problem: your app’s architecture documentation is either non-existent, wildly out of date, or buried in scattered wiki pages that nobody reads. By the time you onboard a new developer, they’re confused about module boundaries, data flow, and how components talk to each other. Modern LLMs
Creating Realistic Sky Gradients That Change With the Sun When you look at a great live wallpaper, what makes it feel alive isn’t just animation — it’s the sky. A static blue-to-orange gradient at the top of your screen feels dead after five minutes. But a sky that actually shifts through dawn blues, golden hours,
The Networking Problem in KMP Projects Before Kotlin Multiplatform, Android had Retrofit and OkHttp while iOS had URLSession or Alamofire — two completely separate networking stacks, two sets of models to keep in sync, and twice the bugs to chase. KMP solves this at the shared-module level, and Ktor Client is the library built specifically
The Core Problem KMP Has to Solve Kotlin Multiplatform lets you share business logic across Android, iOS, desktop, and web — but each platform still has its own APIs. Android has Log, iOS has NSLog, Android has SharedPreferences, iOS has NSUserDefaults. KMP’s answer to this is a two-keyword mechanism: expect and actual. It’s the single
Why Property Delegates Often Go Unnoticed Most Kotlin developers know lazy — it’s everywhere. You see it in Android ViewModels, dependency injection setups, and library code. But the standard library ships two more property delegates that are surprisingly powerful and almost never discussed: Delegates.observable and Delegates.vetoable. If you’ve been wiring up manual setters or using
Making Your Wallpaper Respond to Real-World Weather A beautiful sky gradient is a good start, but what makes Seasons Live Wallpaper feel special is that it reacts to the actual weather outside your window. Rain particles drift down when it’s raining. Snow accumulates during winter storms. Fog creeps in on humid mornings. Lightning flashes light
The Hidden Cost of Eager Collections Kotlin’s collection functions — map, filter, flatMap — are a joy to use. But they share one characteristic that can quietly hurt your app: they’re eager. Each call processes the entire source and allocates a brand new intermediate list. Chain three or four of them on a list of
Rubber Duck Debugging with AI: The Modern Approach “Rubber duck debugging” is an old technique: you explain your bug to an inanimate object (a rubber duck), and in the process of explaining, you discover the problem yourself. Today’s AI assistants make this technique more powerful. Instead of talking to a duck, you can ask an
What Skills Are in Claude Code Once you’ve used Claude Code for a while you’ll notice you repeat the same prompts. “Create a new feature screen with a ViewModel and UiState.” “Add a Room entity and DAO for this model.” “Write a Hilt module that provides this repository.” These are perfect candidates for skills —
What If Your Wallpaper Knew the Weather? Most live wallpapers loop the same animation forever. They look nice for a day, then you forget they’re even there. Seasons Live Wallpaper is different — it’s a wallpaper that actually pays attention to the world around you. Built by an indie developer from Romania, Seasons brings four
The Part of Android Development “Nobody Enjoys” :P Writing tests and debugging are the two parts of Android development where most developers lose the most time. Tests feel like writing code twice, and debugging often means staring at a stack trace while trying to hold an entire call graph in your head. Claude Code doesn’t
A Familiar But Slightly Awkward Pattern If you’ve written Kotlin for a while, you’ve almost certainly written code like this: fun getActiveUsers(users: List): List { val result = mutableListOf() for (user in users) { if (user.isActive) result.add(user) if (user.isPremium) result.add(user.copy(label = “Premium”)) } return result.toList() // convert back to read-only } The pattern works, but
The Problem With Try-Catch Everywhere Exception handling in Kotlin (and Java before it) has always had a composability problem. Once you introduce a try-catch block, you break the expression-oriented flow of your code. You can’t easily chain operations, return from them in one line, or pass the “success or failure” result to another function without
