Freeish Time: Android Developer Fundamentals

As you will know, we love innovation, and in particular our very own innovation time or “Freeish Time” as we like to call it. For those that don’t know, “Freeish Time”, is the opportunity for our Cubes to work on passion projects outside of their work projects. They have an entire week to identify a problem, build and create a solution, then present it to the rest of the crew during our Friday Happy Half Hour meeting.

This is an extra-special edition as we sit down with Georga, our apprentice Android Developer and overall coding rockstar! Georga is our first apprentice and has been an absolutely fantastic addition to the team. We wanted to find out what Georga got up to in her latest Freeish Time… 

This looked at installing Android Studio, understanding project structure, building your first app, creating activities, testing your apps, and using the Android Support Library. This was a pretty easy introduction to all things Android, and covered the basics of getting started, so it was nice to go over stuff I already knew before starting some of the more in-depth parts of the course.

This unit covers how to get input from the user, implement navigation strategies, use themes and styles, test your user interface, and follow Material Design principles. It was really interesting to cover elements like this, as usually I just have to implement pre-made designs, so now I know a bit more about the factors to consider from a design and user perspective when I create my own app!

I think the practicals for this unit will be especially useful as his unit covered how to do background work, how to schedule tasks, and how to trigger events. It covers the performance implications of executing work in the background, as well as best practices for reducing battery drain. This unit is as far as I’ve been able to get in the course, but I’ve definitely already learned loads!

In this unit, you learn how to use shared preferences to save simple key-value pairs, then you learn how to use the Room database to save, retrieve, and update user data. I am looking forward to eventually covering this unit as I feel the theory in this will be beneficial to me as I haven’t yet learned much of what the unit covers in as much depth as the course will go into. I’ll definitely have a lot of notes to make when covering the theory as well as the practical!