Android Thanksgiving 2017: Tools & Libs We're Thankful For

This Thursday is Thanksgiving in the U.S., which means it’s a sacred day to eat too much and fall asleep watching football. 🦃 🏈 😴

Oh, and to give thanks too! 😅 Here at Realm we’re thankful for all of you – our awesome community and users! We’re constantly amazed by all the awesome tools, libraries, and apps you build that make our lives as developers better, and all the learning resources you share with the world.

In the spirit of thankfulness, we reached out to a few friends and community leaders in the Android space and asked them to share the tools and libraries they’re especially thankful for this year!

Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃

Android Devs give thanks!

Donn Felker, Android GDE and host of “Fragmented”

“I’m thankful for Dagger. I’ve been writing code for over 15 years now and each time I start on a project I immediately reach for a dependency injection container. In Android, Dagger is the one that makes my life easier by allowing me to decouple my code so that I can worry about business problems and not the plumbing that is behind the scenes. Furthermore, Dagger allows me to make my applications more testable by facilitating the ability to inject alternative implementations at test time due to the decoupling. All of the functionality that Dagger provides allows me to ship applications faster, with confidence and reliability for my clients and customers.”

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Huyen Tue Dao, Android developer @ Trello

“I am so thankful that Alex Lockwood granted my wish for an easier way to create awesome icon animations.

I’m an engineer that loves the UX/UI side of things and have wanted to incorporate more of those delightful details that are part of Material Design. I just didn’t quite have the skills or time until Alex released ShapeShifter, a web app for producing path morphing animations that can be exported for web, Android, and iOS! On Android we can directly export to AnimatedVectorDrawables! Thank you, Alex!”

Eric Maxwell, Mobile engineer @ Realm

“I would like to thank the teams responsible for Android Studio this season. Android Studio makes Android development fun and easy…. and the fact that I can convert my Java code into Kotlin simply by pasting it into a Kotlin file is just magic(!!)”

Andrea Falcone, Software engineer @ Google

“My favorite tool is Slack screen sharing. My team does a lot of pairing, even when people are remote. Screen sharing allows you to easily show someone the code you’re working on, a bug you’ve found, or some unexplainable behavior that only you can see on your machine, and let someone who is remote take control and help out. It’s invaluable for teamwork!”

Christian Melchior, Android lead @ Realm

“This year I’m thankful for the Android Architecture Components Team at Google. They are really killing it with great new tools like LifeCycle, LiveData, ViewModel and the Paging Library, making it so much easier for me as a developer to create apps that I know can scale and doesn’t crash because I forgot to handle some exotic cornercase in the Android Lifecycle. That they go so well hand in hand with Realm is just icing on top.”

Gabor Varadi, aka Zhuinden or EpicPandaForce, Android dev

“I’m super-thankful for the new (still-alpha) Android Architecture Component, the Paging Library. A canonical solution, that is not only customizable for your needs, but its API is simple as well.

It finally solves the problem of reading from a data source, on a background thread, displaying those results on the main thread, in a paginated way, and also handles the invalidation and refreshing of the paginated data set. And it can do that for pretty much any data source!”

Levi Bostian, Freelance Android & iOS

“This year, I am thankful for CircleCI v2.0. I use CircleCi with all of my projects big or small to test, lint, build, and deploy my apps. CircleCI has been around for a number of years, but the v2.0 update makes builds faster (way faster), and much more powerful with the added Workflows feature.

I use CircleCI v2.0 along with Docker and Fastlane to build, test, lint, and deploy all of my APIs, Android, and iOS apps to production. All you have to do is push code up to GitHub and CircleCI takes it from there. CircleCI has made me feel like I have super powers.”

Ty Smith, Tech lead on Uber’s API

“Everyone knows testing is important, but it’s often daunting to effectively test API interactions with your server, especially when thinking about integration tests over unit tests. Fortunately, WireMock makes this a breeze. WireMock allows you to run a local mock web-server that can be interfaced with in the testing code. This framework can record, replay, and verify network calls. This is agnostic to the app’s http client, allows the use of the real networking implementation, and mimics the real requests that will happen in production, all while making it straight forward to write test code and stub the API responses.”

Israel Ferrer Camacho, Android developer @ Periscope

“I am grateful for ShapeShifter! Which makes amazing animations possible by automagically converting incompatible Sketch animations and allows export to AnimatedVectorDrawable”

Next Up: Explore Realm Studio for managing local and synced Realms on Mac, Linux, and Windows!

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Realm Team

At Realm, our mission is to help developers build better apps faster. We provide a unique set of tools and platform technologies designed to make it easy for developers to build apps with sophisticated, powerful features — things like realtime collaboration, augmented reality, live data synchronization, offline experiences, messaging, and more.

Everything we build is developed with an eye toward enabling developers for what we believe the mobile internet evolves into — an open network of billions of users and trillions of devices, and realtime interactivity across them all.

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