Rebecca is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google. Focused on Jetpack Compose, this blog has content covering how to create beautiful apps on Android.
Building a Pride Rainbow Easter Egg into the Over Android App 🏳️🌈
Jun 13, 2021
This post originally appeared here on the GoDaddy Engineering blog. The Over App is a playground for creating beautiful content for social media. As developers
Writing a better Tech Resume / CV
Apr 18, 2021
Your resume doesn’t need to be boring! In the past couple of years of my career I’ve been involved in the recruitment process of software
start(“Your Career in Tech”); 🚀
Apr 6, 2021
Getting starting in the tech industry is a daunting experience. I remember being fresh out of university back in 2012 with big expectations of what
Language Injections in Android Studio / IntelliJ IDEA 💉
Jan 20, 2021
Android Studio is a powerful IDE with a multitude of features that I’ll probably never discover. However, when I do discover a feature of the
Resources for Learning OpenGL - An Android Developers Guide
Jan 8, 2021
In 2018, I started my journey of learning OpenGL, we were migrating our app from using the Android Canvas system to using the more flexible
Using Github Actions to Automate Our Release Process
Oct 7, 2020
At Over, we’ve recently translated our app into 12 new languages. This meant that our release process started to get a bit more tedious as
Smooth Operator: Using StrictMode to make your Android App ANR free
Jun 15, 2020
Performing any kind of long blocking operations or disk IO operations on the Android Main thread can cause ANR issues. (Application Not Responding). You may
Getting Started with the Motion Editor in Android Studio 4.0
Jun 1, 2020
Android Studio 4.0 has been released in the stable channel! 🥳 What does this mean for us? Well, the new Motion Editor is in Android
AsyncAndroid: Getting Started with MotionLayout
Apr 24, 2020
Wow, what a weird time to be alive, huh? I’m writing this on Day 29 of the lockdown in South Africa due to the COVID-19
Lessons Learnt with Kotlin: Using inline classes 👩🔬
Mar 3, 2020
What is an inline class? 🧐 An inline class is a special type of class defined in Kotlin that only has one property. At runtime, the
Become a Master Builder with these Android Dev Tools
Feb 7, 2020
Day-to-day tasks as an Android Developer can consist of varying jobs to complete your work effectively. Whether it is making sure your network requests are
Dark Mode Musings: Beware of the Context 🌗
Dec 9, 2019
I’ve been working on getting Dark Mode in our app fully supported and I stumbled upon an interesting finding: The Application#applicationContext does not keep information
Lessons Learnt with Kotlin: Extension Functions
Oct 16, 2019
At Over, we’ve been using Kotlin since we started the new Android version of the app in November 2018. From day one, we’ve been excited
Over ❤️ Kotlin – How we’ve used Kotlin to build our design app
Oct 14, 2019
I recently presented this talk at Kotlin Everywhere South Africa as the keynote for the event. I really enjoyed preparing this talk as it spoke
Android Canvas Drawing: Useful Graphics Classes & Operations 🧪
Aug 10, 2019
Drawing on an Android Canvas is quite overwhelming, there are many different classes and concepts to understand when drawing something. If you haven’t already read
Getting Started with Android Canvas Drawing 🖼
Jul 6, 2019
Learn the basics of drawing with the Android Canvas Class Diving into using the Android Canvas class can unlock magical super powers you never knew you
Android: Using Physics-based Animations in Custom Views (SpringAnimation)
Mar 30, 2019
Learn how to use physics-based animations in a Custom View implementation for natural looking animations in your app. You’ve used all the standard Android animation techniques,
Android Canvas APIs with Kotlin and KTX
Mar 21, 2019
Learn how to use the Android KTX extension functions to clean up Canvas drawing code Have you ever wanted to write a Custom View on Android
Building Responsive / Resizable Android UIs for ChromeOS 📐📏
Feb 24, 2019
Learn how using ViewModels can help create great user experiences on ChromeOS This post originally appeared here. Supporting ChromeOS devices sounds like a large undertaking with many unknowns.
Android MotionLayout Tutorial – Collapsing View
Feb 1, 2019
MotionLayout is a layout class that extends from ConstraintLayout. MotionLayout has all the features of ConstraintLayout. On top of that, it also provides the ability
Android ConstraintLayout 2.0: ConstraintLayoutStates
Nov 25, 2018
With the introduction of ConstraintLayout 2.0, there is an interesting new feature called ConstraintLayoutStates. ConstraintLayoutStates allow you to create a layout with different states and
ConstraintLayout 2.0: ImageFilterView
Sep 24, 2018
Whilst browsing through the various examples online with the new ConstraintLayout 2.0, I stumbled upon ImageFilterView. This got my attention immediately and I decided to investigate further.
Building a Custom Machine Learning Model on Android with TensorFlow Lite
Aug 4, 2018
Building a custom TensorFlow Lite model sounds really scary. As it turns out, you don’t need to be a Machine Learning or TensorFlow expert to
Variable Fonts in Android O 🖍
May 18, 2018
This post initially appeared here. After attending DroidCon Italy 2018 last week, I was excited by the presentation from Nick Butcher and Florina Muntenescu. They spoke about many different aspects
42MB to display account information?! Use the Android APK Analyzer to reduce your APK size!
Jan 18, 2018
After looking around at a few Android applications, I realised that there are many developers who don’t know about a great tool in Android Studio
Android ConstraintLayout — Build a layout from Scratch + Q&A — Sunday (26 Nov) 5PM GMT+2 [Live Stream]
Nov 26, 2017
I’ve seen quite a lot of misuse/misunderstanding of how to use ConstraintLayout practically. I was contemplating the best way to talk about these common “Don’ts”
Android Accessibility – Making your app Switch Access Compatible
Oct 28, 2017
I received an email a few days ago, where I had a request for the Book Dash Android app to support “Switch Access”. To be
ConstraintLayout – Guidelines, Barriers, Chains and Groups
Sep 19, 2017
Since my initial blog post about ConstraintLayout, there have been a whole bunch of new features added (and lots of improvements) to ConstraintLayout. This blog post
Highlights from Google Developer Days Europe 2017 – Kraków, Poland
Sep 9, 2017
This past week I was in Kraków for the Google Developer Days Europe Conference and the Google Developer Experts Summit. There was a lot to
Android Oreo – (8.0) – Features I’m excited about
Aug 24, 2017
Google has officially announced the next version of the Android operating system and it is called Android Oreo! If you are a mad Android fanatic like
Resources for Getting Started with Modern Android Development
Aug 14, 2017
After putting together resources for the Mobile Developer Graduate Program that we run at DVT, I realised that the content I referenced could be a
Android Architecture Components – Looking at Lifecycles – Part 3
Jul 15, 2017
In the previous posts (part 1 and part 2), we looked into the new Architecture Components that were announced at Google I/O 2017. The Android
Teaching High School Girls about the Different Careers in Software Engineering
Jun 14, 2017
Yesterday I was invited to speak at St. Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls in Pretoria about Software Engineering and the different aspects of my every
Google I/O 2017 – Highlights for the Android Developer
Jun 7, 2017
This year’s Google I/O 2017 was an exciting few days for developers. After last year’s complaints of long queues and no shade, Google listened and
Android Architecture Components – Looking at ViewModels – Part 2
May 31, 2017
The Android Architecture components were recently announced at Google I/O 2017. There are a few different components that are a part of these libraries. These
Android Architecture Components – Looking at Room and LiveData – Part 1
May 18, 2017
This week at Google I/O 2017, there were a lot of new announcements for the Android Platform. One of the announcements was the new architecture