Various IT/development/android interesting articles
Building a live wallpaper is one of the best ways to learn Android’s rendering pipeline — and one of its harshest teachers of battery discipline. When your app draws on the home screen all day, every wasted frame eventually shows up in someone’s battery stats. Over the years building Seasons Live Wallpaper, I’ve learned that […]
The Problem With How Most Developers Use AI Today You open Claude Code or Cursor, describe what you want, and the agent immediately starts generating code. Sounds great, right? Except ten minutes later, you’re staring at a ViewModel that ignores your DI setup, tests that weren’t written, and a pattern that doesn’t match anything else
Why Unstructured AI Coding Fails for Android Projects You open your AI coding agent, type “add a settings screen with dark mode toggle,” and the agent immediately starts writing code. Three minutes later, it’s generated a SettingsActivity with XML layouts — except your app uses single-activity Compose navigation. It didn’t check your architecture. It didn’t
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from Your Codebase You know the problem: your app’s architecture documentation is either non-existent, wildly out of date, or buried in scattered wiki pages that nobody reads.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
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 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
Writing a Play Store listing that converts is harder than it looks. The character limits are tight, keywords matter, and you have about three seconds to grab attention. Here’s how I use Claude to make it easier — including the exact prompts I use for Seasons Live Wallpaper. Keyword Research Prompt “I have an Android
Learn how to get the Application Context anywhere in your Android Kotlin project using Hilt dependency injection. The modern, leak-safe replacement for the old Java singleton pattern.
Have you migrated or want to migrate to the SignIn with Google that uses CredentialsManager and it’s not workin? Well, in my experience, when I tried recently to integrate this in a new project I faced 2 major issues that consumed some of my time. First Issue The first one was the lack of some
In this article I would like to emphasise over a few options that we have when working with data structure and more precisely with collections in a mutable and immutable fashion. So let’s start with a few of them and see their mutability state. But first, what makes a list mutable or immutable? Immutable Collections
Android Studio and productivity One interesting feature that Android Studio and IntelliJ IDEA have is the Productivity Guide panel. It helps you see how much of the productivity tools that are available and you are using. You can see here a quick screenshot with the one I have, on one of the computers I am
Sometimes you might need to add setup files (json/xml/.properties/etc.) to your instrumentation tests (androidTest) and load them in your tests. You usually do that when loading for example some mocked data set or some fixture. In testing, fixtures often take the form of JSON or yaml files that mimic the responses from real API calls.
While debugging some Android instrumentation tests that were ran using adb shell am instrument, I needed to print some logs into the terminal/console to inspect the flow and resolve some issues. Ever been coding away, trying to track down what’s happening under the hood, thinking Log.i/e/d or System.out would be your trusty sidekicks for logging
