Estimation is one of the hardest problems in software development. Trying to calculate the time required to solve complex technical and organizational problems is more magic than art. As Kelly Vaughn on Twitter put it…

When you give a developer 5 hours for a task, they’ll let you know they need 50 hours once they’ve used up 10.

Even looking at the most atomic of these calculations — estimating an engineering task or user story — it’s clear to see that estimations are no exact science. …

Launching suspend functions in Kotlin can be a complicated affair. Managing your CoroutineScope and making sure exceptions are handled properly can be confusing and easy to forget.

In Android, when using the ViewModel or Lifecycle specific scopes this gets much easier. We let the Android system provide a CoroutineScope and manage killing our coroutines when the lifecycle of those things end.

fun getObjectFromNetwork() {
  viewModelScope.launch {
    val response = networkRepository.getObject()
  }
}

However, there are cases when exceptions can be thrown from the CoroutineScope. A real life example I experienced recently was a SocketTimeoutException that was thrown from a Retrofit…

I’m still blown away when I think back to my experience attending WWDC 2018. The sheer scale and production value of the event, the overwhelming number of world class developers, and the downright fun I had attending — it was just so awesome.

When I reflect on my time in San Jose and everything that I learned and saw, and I think back to all of the awesome events and talks I attended, one of the most unlikely sessions still stands out. Session #221 — TextKit Best Practices.

Like it’s name suggests, the talk focused on the basics of TextKit…

The highest level explanation of GitHub Flavored Markdown in the context of iOS markdown rendering.

To start, lets break it down.

What is Markdown

Markdown is a markup language that uses plain text formatting syntax to allow it to be easily converted to HTML. This means you can write content in a more intelligible way (no more <> everywhere) that can be easily displayed in a prettified HTML form.

Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.

What is a Markdown ‘spec’?

Markdown was originally created by John Gruber in 2004, but there are many different implementations — or flavors — of it that…

Static sites have become something of a hobby of mine recently. I’ve become addicted to spinning up new Jekyll sites both at work and for fun for a myriad of purposes. Portfolios, blogs, documentation — really any site hosting static content or managed by a CMS are great candidates for a simple static site.

I’ve been a huge fan of Jekyll to do just that. It enables you to write and manage content in markdown and just sit back and let Jekyll to the heavy lifting of putting your site together. …

For a recent episode of the podcast “What’s Tech?” from The Verge, Chris Plante has a conversation with The Verge’s Social Media Manager Kaitlyn Tiffany about what Tumblr is.

Listening to this podcast, I began reflecting on my time over the last several years of using Tumblr, and I began to realize that I actually have a somewhat interesting perspective of the site after my experiences. …