Understanding Different Gradle Caches for Android Projects, part 1.

There are several ways Gradle stores information between builds to drastically reduce subsequent build times. You may be familiar with some of these methods, but what’s important is that they build upon each other gradually improving build speed. If you are only benefiting from one, then you have something to gain by also looking into the others.

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Leaving Google Fi

I’m sharing the story of a bad situation I had ordering a new phone through Google Fi. It turned into a two month long ordeal where the service got worse and worse. At every turn the Google Fi team was presented with a chance to make things better and every time they blew it. I’m sharing this because I hope a long form review of the process is helpful to other potential Google Fi customers.

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Spoon and test apk WRITE_STORAGE_PERMISSION

I want to get this out quick without a lot of polish because something is better than nothing.

We use Spoon to aggregate our end-to-end tests and capture screenshots of our Android app. In order to save these screenshots, our app’s AndroidManifest.xml needs to declare the WRITE_STORAGE_PERMISSION permission.

However this is the only reason that our app needs this permission. We don’t write to external storage any other time in the actual app. So my goal was to remove this permission from our app manifest and see if I could instead declare it our test .apk.

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Childhood Architect

In the summers after 4th, 5th, and 6th grade my brother and I attended a “summer school for smart kids.” We would board the bus every day with the “remedial” summer school kids and head off to school. It was a half day program in which we took two 90 minute classes. For one (or both?) of these classes we took an architectural drafting class.

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