Sample Ballot: From pdf to custom page

Ballot Guide Last year I wrote Ballot Guide to learn Flutter and Firebase and to make election information more accessible. The 2019 election is coming up in November, so I thought, hey I'll use my app to get more information. But there was nothing. Google Civic Information API I went to check the list of elections on the Google...

Sep 2019

Meetup Child Care: Parents Night Out

As a meetup organizer, I strive to be as inclusive as possible, but I struggle with picking a time that works for parents. I've surveyed the members to see if moving from a weeknight to weekday lunch time or weekend would work better, but there was no obvious time that works for everyone. I was lamenting about this problem to Effie and she told...

Mar 2019

Modular Meal Planning

The topic of healthy eating often comes up when I'm chatting with friends. They are very impressed that my husband and I both work from home and cook lunch and dinner every day. We got quite the modular meal planning system in place and so I thought I'd share it here. Our taste I'm Chinese and my husband is French, so we have our own notion...

May 2018

Types of Android Tests

I saw this Reddit discussion on Android testing concepts, which tries to categorize tests into short, medium and long. I don't find that a very useful way to think about different types of tests, so I thought I'd give offer my view. Two dimensions I think it's more useful to think of tests in two dimensions Does it run on the JVM or needs a...

Nov 2017

Why I run a conference

As some of you know, I'm one of the organizers for 360|AnDev. It's a lot of work to run a conference, so why do I do it? I started the conference because I want an inclusive place for people to learn about Android: We want it to be welcoming to beginners so that they can plug into the community right away. That's why we have a "Getting...

May 2017

Droidcon Boston Keynote

I just came back from the inaugural edition of Droidcon Boston last week, at the beautiful Calderwood Pavilion. Yes, #DroidConBos is at a theater. pic.twitter.com/OjNjaQOnOv— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) April 10, 2017 Keynote preparation I had the honor to deliver the Day 2 keynote at Droidcon Boston. I prepared extensively when...

Apr 2017

Lint stuck after upgrading gradle plugin to 2.3.0

app:lint hangs after I upgraded the gradle plugin to 2.3.0. Unexpected failure during lint analysis (this is a bug in lint or one of the libraries it depends on) It complains about ProblemReporter.isClassPathCorrect(ProblemReporter.java:4761) and other places in ProblemReporter, but I was not able to pinpoint the problem. Turns...

Mar 2017

Constraint Layout beta5 lint error

Constraint Layout beta 5 is the release candidate, and added a lint to deprecate older versions. The easiest way to get rid of the lint error is to press Alt-Enter and choose the first option to upgrade. However, I encountered a bug, which forces me to stay with beta4 until the next version comes out with the fix. I still want...

Feb 2017

Java compatibility in build.gradle

I got an email from Google asking me to update Fit Cat for Android Wear 2.0, so I tried to compile that app after I haven't touched it for a few months. Since Android Studio evolves so quickly, I wasn't exactly surprised when I got an error: Error converting bytecode to dex: Cause: Dex cannot parse version 52 byte code. This is caused...

Jan 2017

Elite Worship

Yesterday I read an article called In a world..., which talked about the problem of elite worship in the iOS community. I'm an Android developer, but I see the same problems in our community as well. Here is how I see it: People who tweet, blog, speak and open source are considered elites Elites are held above the rest of the community, making...

Dec 2016