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

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!

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 -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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’

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’

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’

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 -

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