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BrewDog IPA API

A little API that lets you query BrewDog’s bars, their opening times, and what beers they have on tap. You can try it out at api.ipa-api.net/brewdog/bars, get individual bar details at api.ipa-api.net/brewdog/bars/9998 - for London Angel pub, or find out

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The State of Kotlin

A survey on the Kotlin programming language, and an associated report. A project we ran at Pusher to learn about Kotlin’s adoption, it’s usage, and what developers think about it. We had 2,744 respondents in total, and produced a swanky little website for it. Find it at

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Making a live bitcoin price notification on Android

I wrote a tutorial on how to make a live notification on Android, similar to what the excellent Guardian Mobile Lab did for their US election experiment. You can read more about it on Pusher’s blog: https://blog.pusher.com/making-live-notifications-for-android-using-pusher/ Happy pushing!

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A rather meta Kickstarter idea

I just backed the book Attaché guide to travel on Kickstarter. It’s a project by Alex Hunter, maker of the excellent Attaché Travel show on YouTube. Attaché is a travel show aimed at a modern jet setter, focusing on the essentials to get around in a new city. It

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How to properly watch Node and TypeScript apps 👀

I’m really liking Node, especially as a prototyping tool. It’s just incredibly fast to hack something together that kind of works. My preferred language to work with it is TypeScript, because types. When prototyping it’s very common to do a lot of rebuilding and observing changes -

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I like JavaScript now

If someone told me a year ago that I’d be saying praises to JavaScript I’d probably choke on laughter. It’s mid 2017 now and I’m saying praises to JavaScript. All it took was using it for a while. Here’s a few of my reasons why

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How to get a half decent seat on EasyJet without the $$$

Budget airlines use an army of dark UX patterns aimed at robbing you of your hard earned $$$s, £££s, and €€€s after you’ve bought your ticket. Luckily, you can use some of their tools to your advantage. I discovered a way to get premium seats without paying any extra

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Goodbye, Ghost Pro! Hello, Jekyll!

Hello, 🌍! I’ve decided to move my content and all my future writing under my personal domain and start using a new (old) blogging engine. For a while now, I’ve been using Ghost Pro to run my site, geniously titled Space Cowboy Rocket Company (dot com). It’s worked

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Asus C302 - a rather biased review

So I got myself a new toy computer, a Chromebook to be precise. It’s my first non Macbook computer in 5 years. Hardware-wise I’m a massive Mac fan, but hardly use any Apple services or software products, apart from the OS and a few apps. Instead I’m

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Rant about the state of presentation software for developers

I’ve been doing a few talks here and there over the last few years, and want to ramp it up even more. But apart sending the talk proposal and getting it accepted by a conference or a Meetup, and from going on stage and talking about that topic, you

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Bye @mandsdigital, it's been totes emosh!

This is not your average quit lit post. Back in August 2013 I got a job. A proper one, not the startup shenanigans. Yesterday I returned my pass and laptop and left the office for one final time. I stayed there for 3 years and a few months, never thought

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Divide and conquer your Android modules with Artifactory

In this article I’ll cover the easiest way to roll your own maven repository for hosting private libraries. This will allow you to make faster, more reproducible builds. We’ll use a tool called Artifactory and install it on AWS’s Elastic Beanstalk service. To finish, we’ll take

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Cooking up clean architecture on Android (talk writeup)

I just got back from the lovely mediteranean shores of Tel Aviv, where I gave this talk. The slides, as well as a writeup of the talk itself are below. But first, let’s mention the event itself. Codemotion - the venue, the setup Codemotion is a developer conference (network?

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Testing it & Loving it @ Big Android BBQ Amsterdam

I recently delivered a talk on the first Big Android BBQ this side of the pond. Unfortunately it wasn’t recorded, but the slides are available on Speakerdeck. In short, it covers different testing techniques, and why I like it so much and think you should too.

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Mob Driven Development

For most of us, thinking about a mob, we probably picture Italian crime syndicates of New York or Chicago in the prohibition era. Men in suits bootlegging, shooting tommy guns, running protection rackets, smoking cigars and drinking in speakeasies with Frankie Sinatra. Or Marlon effing Brando making an offer he

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All aboard the Bug Train! 🚂🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃

We’re currently in the final stage before releasing our rebuilt app, and that unfortunately means most of our work is finding and fixing bugs before the users find and complain about them. Our regular development process is great for developing features, but works really slowly for the bugs at

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Know Your Tools

Us old timers love to share our knowledge. We taught ourselves through trial and error. Extensive googling, being ‘taught’ by hackers to type sudo followed by rm -rf / followed by reinstalling whole 8 or so CDs of SUSE Linux…(yes reader, I really fell for that). We learnt our skills

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Why an Android dev doesn't hate Apple?

As I earn my living writing Java code that runs on Android, some people assume by default that I must hate Apple. They couldn’t be more wrong. Here’s why. This blogpost was written on a Macbook air. A machine that survived a 1.5m fall with merely a

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Reacting to Google Play Services

Google Play Services (PS) is an awesome library and every Android developer needs it. It makes location super easy, allows you to use the G+ sign in button thingy to forget about passwords, figure out what you’re doing using Google Fit, etc… Of course there is a but. It’

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Pet Death Goblin - An Owners Manual or how I learned to stop just hacking and love my tests.

So you tell me your pet project has become a burden to maintain? You might be experiencing a Death Goblin infestation. It is a particularly nasty pet. I have several, you may have several, Mark Zuckerberg probably has a horde of them. Mark Zuckerberg’s Death Goblins (artists imagining) It’

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Raygun and Proguard: There and Back Again

I’ve recently had some fun trying to make Raygun and Proguard play nicely in one of our Android application so I think it might help some people. If you know what each of these tools do, just skip to the Problem section, otherwise, keep reading. Note: the examples I’

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Android Versioning Hell in the CI-land

For the last two days, my colleague Paul and I had been battling with a weird issue in our Android test suite running on CI. We had been getting Unable to find instrumentation info gradle errors whilst running the connectedCheck task. Suckers looked like this: "Tests on Nexus 5

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Beginning TDD

Last Wednesday, my colleagues @Hetal_Patel and @cpatuzzoand myself ran a Hands-On session with the same name at the London Software Craftsmanship Community. First off, big thanks to @SamirTalwar and @roberttaylor426 and everyone else who helped us pull this off, including Pivotal Labs London office for hosting us and providing