Almost everyone have something to talk about 2020. What a year! It’s definitely a year that we will tell to our children and grandchildren as bed time stories. But this won’t be a story of how the Covid-19 shake the world. Rather it will be short summary of important events in my life this year.

Meeting with Jibble Product Team

Well, that’s actually an event of December 2019. Since the motivation and all the funny moments of that event have effected the whole 2020, I need to mention it. 

Jibble yearly event(also the first one) took place in Istanbul. It was a great one week long event. Because Jibble is a fully remote company, most of us met with each other for the first time in a physical world. We worked, planned upcoming year, made decisions on new products to develop and of course had a lot of fun. Oh, no need to mention that we ate a lot!

Looking back now, I’m so grateful that we had that event and created memories to remember. If Covid-19 was not exists, we might be having second one around this time of the year. 

Jibble 2.0

I was working on a good product. Especially after it’s redesign in 2019, it became much more appealing. We were in fast growth stage. Earning new users everyday. Adding new features almost every two weeks. And I was enjoying to work on it.

Since we are a team that always look for better, we decided that we can make this experience much better than it is now. An app that will have much more features, more user friendly, new and unified design language for the whole brand, up to date technology(sometimes cutting edge technologies) stack.

We doubled the mobile, web frontend and backend teams. Amazing new colleagues joined our team. Worked hard to accomplish our goals. It was not easy. Faced a lot of challenges. But we were sure that this will be a product that will give rocket speed to our growth. I think this gave us the motivation to continue no matter how hard it is.

Soon it will be publicly available. Even if I’m no longer part of the team anymore, I’m so proud and excited to be part of this journey.

Covid-19

This is the topic that I don’t want to talk about too much. Worst thing of the year. Many people died. Many people effected by its impacts on the economy. Some lost their jobs. Quarantines (still writing this from a weekend quarantine), breathing under a mask and living with the fear of getting infected. These are enough reasons to make this year a terrible year.

I’m thankful that I already had a job that runs entirely remote. No need to commute in crowds or working in offices. But even though, me and my wife got infected by Covid-19. In November this year, we went for a PCR test after showing some symptoms. And the result was positive.

Either I got it from a coffee shop I go bi-weekly or my wife got the virus from the factory where she work. We don’t know how but we stayed in quarantine, took our medicine and thankfully all the symptoms stopped after one week. In anyway, it was a bad experience. All the muscle pain, fever and other small symptoms are things that I don’t want experience again.

Family

This year made me cry few times. My grandma died at the beginning of the year. I miss her a lot. Then losing my cousin’s father due to cancer was second emotional shock to me. 2020 will never be a good year to remember.

Travel

I realized that there is no title in this post that I can talk without mentioning about the Covid. It’s the trending topic of the year, right? 

Me and my wife really love traveling. Almost each year, we were traveling to at least three different countries. Plus having great summer vacations here in Turkey. Like every citizen of the planet Earth, we stuck with local traveling this year. At the beginning of the year, we had plans to visit Japan, Portugal and Sweden. In fact we bought our flight tickets to Sweden but then all the flights cancelled.

Instead we had two amazing summer trips here in Turkey. First one was at the beginning of June. We planned it like half remote work and half holiday experience. So I was with my laptop. I enjoyed working by the beach and in front of our hotel swimming pool. First stop was Alaçatı. Then we moved to Bodrum. And finally ended our holiday in Kaş. There were not much people or tourists due to restrictions. Thus it was a quite and isolated holiday.

Second part of our summer holiday was in September. This time we headed to Adrasan/Çıralı first. It was our first time to visit this part of the Turkey. Honestly fell in love by its nature. Long and inhabitant beaches, forests behind, it was marvelous. We had an amazing boat tour with my wife on her birthday. Visited beautiful coasts of Adrasan. I wish we visit again some day in the future. 

We ended our vacation in Kaş. This is the second time we visit this place in 2020. I admit, we really love Kaş.

And of course I have to mention about amazing balloon experience we had in Cappadocia. We woke up very early, it was cold but I can honestly say it worth all of it. Watching that peaceful landscape from 1000 meters high was breathtaking. I will definitely try again.

Moving to Amsterdam

Not everything is sad or terribly bad this year. Exciting times ahead for our small family. We decided to move Europe and our next home will be in Amsterdam!

After almost 3 wonderful years and working with great people on exciting products, I’m leaving Jibble. And I’m joining Backbase as a Senior Android Engineer.

If everything goes well, we will relocate to Amsterdam at the beginning of 2021. This is so exciting and we are curious what the life holds for us in the upcoming years.

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At Jibble, we moved to a multi module architecture. Alongside with that, we have Kotlin Multiplatform that powers our core business logic and gives us a shared code between Android and iOS. It’s a monorepo project and we only use Kotlin Native for pure business logic code. Everything else related with iOS and Android is being handled on native side. The project is mainly a MVVM architecture. But we have extra couple of layers. Main components are:

• View → Activity or Fragment
• ViewModel → Communicator between Interactor and the View
• Interactor → Kotlin Native shared logic.
• Assembler → Assembles View, ViewModel, Interactor and Route.
• Route → Not the Router ❌

This can be another post topic but in short, the main benefit of this architecture for us is to avoid logical differences between platforms and reduce the amount of time to write Unit Tests for each platform. Cause we write tests for our core business logic only once, which are Interactors.

I will show a small example of how we use navigation in our multi module application. This example will be a shortened version of our actual navigation architecture without showing all the details about Assembler and Interactor. But rather it will focus on navigating from a Main App Module to Feature A Module and then navigation from Feature A Module to another Feature B Module.

You might ask, what’s the issue in here? Well, app module depends on featureModuleA and featureModuleB. Thus, it can easily start FeatureScreenAActivity and FeatureScreenBActivity. But what if we need to start FeatureScreenBActivity from FeatureScreenAActivity and vice versa. They don’t know about each other. And if we give dependency to each other, then we create a circular dependency graph which won’t work.

One way to achieve calling non-dependent activities is via defining the class package name on Intent creation.

val intent = Intent()
intent.setClassName(this,“com.uludagcan.navigation.SampleActivity”)
startActivity(intent)

Actually you can find a good article about this approach on this link from Gaël Marhic
https://proandroiddev.com/easy-navigation-in-a-multi-module-android-project-2374ecbaa0ae

But our solution to this problem will be a bit different. 🤔

Core Module and Route Contracts

Let’s introduce a core module to the project. That module will be the lowest level module in our module dependency graph. All modules will be dependent on it either directly or by depending on other module. Specifically, feature modules will have api dependency to core module. And main app module will have implementation dependency to feature modules. By doing that, app module will also be dependent to core module.

// Inside :featureModuleA module build.gradle file
dependencies {
    api project(':core')
}

---

// Inside :app module build.gradle file
dependencies {
    implementation project(':featureModuleA')
    implementation project(':featureModuleB')
}

Next thing is to create Route contracts for each screen to navigate. Inside core module, we create Route interfaces for each screen.

Here is how each of these contracts designed.

interface FeatureScreenARouteContract {
    fun setup(dataToPass: String)
    fun present(fromActivity: Activity)
}interface FeatureScreenBRouteContract {
    fun setup(dataToPass: String)
    fun present(fromActivity: Activity)
}

There are two functions. setup() is for passing data to that screen. And present() is to navigate to that screen. Each Route contract is a blueprint about how to navigate to itself. Not to other screen. This is why I said it’s not a Router.

Where do we put the concrete implementation of these routes?
👉 In each feature module’s screen package.

Let’s look at how each of these Routes are implemented.

class FeatureScreenARoute: FeatureScreenARouteContract {

    private var data: String? = null

    override fun setup(dataToPass: String) {
        data = dataToPass
    }

    override fun present(fromActivity: Activity) {
        val intent = Intent(fromActivity, FeatureScreenAActivity::class.java)
        val bundle = Bundle()
        bundle.putString("data", data)
        intent.putExtras(bundle)
        fromActivity.startActivity(intent)
    }
}

As I mentioned before, this is not Router. For example the above class is the definition of how to navigate to FeatureScreenAActivity. It defines which data will be passed to that screen and what is the present logic.

class FeatureScreenBRoute: FeatureScreenBRouteContract {

    private var data: String? = null

    override fun setup(dataToPass: String) {
        data = dataToPass
    }

    override fun present(fromActivity: Activity) {
        val intent = Intent(fromActivity, FeatureScreenBActivity::class.java)
        val bundle = Bundle()
        bundle.putString("data", data)
        intent.putExtras(bundle)
        fromActivity.startActivity(intent)
    }
}

We also removed the bundle data passing mechanism with the help of Assembler classes but that’s another topic to discuss.

Help of Dependency Injection

Another important component for this system to work is Dependency Injection. It could be Dagger2 or Koin. For the simplicity, we picked Koin for our architecture. (Also we had some issues with Annotation processor of Dagger and Kotlin Multiplatform) We need to define our contract classes in DI. To do that, we have a RouteModule file.

val routeModule = module {
    factory<FeatureScreenARouteContract> { FeatureScreenARoute() }
    factory<FeatureScreenBRouteContract> { FeatureScreenBRoute() }
}

We will put this DI package into app module.

We are ready to call screens from Activities. 🚀

How do we call FeatureScreenAActivity from MainActivity?

First of all, let’s imagine our app layout like below. Two buttons to navigate each screen. And on Screen A, we have another button to navigate us to Screen B.

Here is how we call Screen A from MainActivity. With the help of ViewModel and LiveData.

We send button clicks to ViewModel class. And here is what happen in ViewModel.

We inject our Routes to ViewModel class. From this ViewModel, we can navigate to both A and B screens. And when button clicked, we are also setting up the data we want to pass to each screen. After making route ready, we are ready to pass it to LiveData. That LiveData is being observed by the Activity.

When Route object observed, present() function will be called by passing the Activity instance as this . And Screen A will appear.

How do we call FeatureScreenBActivity from FeatureScreenAActivity?

It’s actually simple and the method is same. Here is the Activity and ViewModel classes.

Well, that’s all. ScreenA and ScreenB are on the different modules. But you can easily access to each other. Here is how it works:

You can access the full sample code from the link below.

canuludag/MultiModuleNavigationDemoAppThis repo is the sample demonstration code of my Medium article about Multi Module Navigation in Android app. …github.com

Originally posted on https://medium.com/@uludagcan/another-navigation-in-multi-module-architecture-1d4945c1fed0

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When designing your API/SDK functions in Kotlin, there are some useful functions that called Preconditions. Those functions can help you to ensure your functions are used in proper way. You can always define what are the requirements of your function in documentation. But Preconditions can prevent false use of the functions even if developer doesn’t care about reading the documentation.

I will show two of them in an example. require() and check()

Let’s say we are writing a function to read characters in a file. This functions takes an argument as filePath: String and returns the character count as Int.

We designed our function only to read .txt files. But developer can pass a path String to an .xls file. We can prevent this by require() function check. Basically require() will check the String whether it contains .txt. (Just take it as a dumb example)

And if it is something else, it will throw an IllegalArgumentException. So developer can know that it’s only possible to pass txt files.

Another function to use is check() . Let’s continue with the same dumb example.

What if developer passed the txt file but it’s an empty one? With check() we can check the state of the function whether the result have character sum. And if it’s zero, it will throw and IllegalStateException with a message.

Actually both require and check are very similar in terms of behavior. But the main use case distinctions are:
require: way to specify expectations on arguments
check: way to specify expectations on the state

I’m sure there can be many other scenarios to use Preconditions rather than my dummy sample. We can make code self checking. And even the need for Unit Tests can be reduced.

Other options are:

requireNotNull() , checkNotNull and error()

You can check the source code here https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/libraries/stdlib/src/kotlin/util/Preconditions.kt

Originally posted on https://medium.com/@uludagcan/kotlin-preconditions-in-api-design-548e44a2579a

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Often times I find myself observing simple values from LiveData or Rx observables and setting them to view items like TextViews or EditTexts. Or setting visibility of a Button or TextView.

Well, it looks ugly to me. We can do it more readable. RxSwift has bind() function to simply do this operation.

In order to achieve something similar, we can use Extension functions. So I created a file that called ReactiveBindExtensions in our project.

With the help of these extension functions, we can convert our bindings into much readable and clean version. Even cleaner than RxSwift bind() function 🙂

You can find the sample extension code in this gist.

	import android.graphics.Bitmap
	import android.graphics.drawable.Drawable
	import android.view.View
	import android.widget.ImageView
	import android.widget.TextView
	import androidx.lifecycle.LifecycleOwner
	import androidx.lifecycle.LiveData
	import androidx.lifecycle.Observer
	import com.jakewharton.rxrelay2.BehaviorRelay
	import io.reactivex.disposables.CompositeDisposable
	import io.reactivex.rxkotlin.addTo
	fun <T> LiveData<T>.bindText(lifecycleOwner: LifecycleOwner, textView: TextView?) {
	this.observe(lifecycleOwner, Observer { textView?.text = it.toString() })
	}
	fun LiveData<Bitmap>.bindBitmap(lifecycleOwner: LifecycleOwner, imageView: ImageView?) {
	this.observe(lifecycleOwner, Observer { imageView?.setImageBitmap(it) })
	}
	fun LiveData<Drawable>.bindDrawable(lifecycleOwner: LifecycleOwner, imageView: ImageView?) {
	this.observe(lifecycleOwner, Observer { imageView?.setImageDrawable(value) })
	}
	fun LiveData<Boolean>.bindVisibility(lifecycleOwner: LifecycleOwner, view: View?) {
	this.observe(
	lifecycleOwner,
	Observer { value ->
	view?.visibility = if (value) View.VISIBLE else View.GONE
	})
	}
	fun <T> BehaviorRelay<T>.bindText(textView: TextView?, bag: CompositeDisposable) {
	this.subscribe { textView?.text = it.toString() }?.addTo(bag)
	}
	fun BehaviorRelay<Boolean>.bindVisibility(view: View?, bag: CompositeDisposable) {
	this.subscribe { view?.isSelected = it }?.addTo(bag)
	}

view raw ReactiveBindExtensions.kt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Originally posted on https://medium.com/@uludagcan/observable-livedata-rx-bind-extensions-4f2188a53ad1
Thanks for reading ❤️

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I know 2019 haven’t end yet. But if something new pops out for me, I think I can update this list quickly.

I like watching docuseries on different topics. And mostly all of them in very different categories. The list that I write below is mostly a combination of Netflix docuseries (well, almost all of them) but I know there is more than that. I’m a bit lazy and rather than searching, I’m feeding my appetite with what Netflix offers to me. Luckily there are tons of content there and while watching some of them, I’m really having fun. Here is the list!

One Strange Rock (Netflix)

One strange rock is mainly about our blue planet Earth. How and why it exists. And all the creepiest and weirdest way of its existence. With the narrative of Will Smith(I think he will be the new God of documentaries after Morgan Freeman) and beautiful visuals, you will truly be mesmerized. Also you’ll hear from 8 astronauts that spend many days in space. Their experiences, and feelings about our strange rock. I think these are very valuable experiences.

Watch @ https://www.netflix.com/title/81071666

Abstract: The Art of Design (Netflix)

Abstract is all about design. But in every way. It varies from costume design to architectural design, from UX design to typeface design. In each episode, one talented person is being examined. Her/his contributions, creations, way of thinking and many more. And also you’ll see how design impacted their lives. I really enjoyed watching every episode of it.

Watch @ https://www.netflix.com/title/80057883

The Great Hack (Netflix)

If you’re in tech or politics, you may heard of Cambridge Analytica and how it impacted the results of 2016 U.S. presidential election. And possibly many other countries’ elections. The Great Hack examines this data company crisis and how data can create devastating affects on every field. I watched from beginning to end with a great excitement.

Watch @ https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542

AlphaGo (Netflix)

As a person who have great interest in Machine Learning and AI, I watched AlphaGo documentary with a great interest. The story is about how Deepmind team beat the ancient game of China, Go. There are a lot of efforts to create such an AI. And I really admired them and their passion to find General AI. 100% recommend this documentary to the people who have interest in AI and Machine Learning.

Watch @ https://www.netflix.com/title/80190844

Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (Netflix)

Well, everyone knows Bill Gates. Or do we? I think I’m away from Microsoft ecosystem for more than five years. But I was aware of Bill & Melinda Gates foundation and their projects about eradicating Polio disease and reinventing toilet for poor countries. But after watching this 3 part series, I really respect his contributions to the world. From fighting diseases to find better nuclear energy solutions. He is more than Microsoft. I think after he grown older and older, he really found the true meaning of life and pointed his all weapons to fight with the problems of our planet and society.

Watch @ https://www.netflix.com/title/80184771

Rams – A documentary about Dieter Rams (hustwit.com)

Dieter Rams is one of the most influential designers alive. He is mostly known with Braun products. He left his mark on design industry with his over fifty years of career. And also if you love Apple products, you must thank him because he is the man behind Apple’s minimal and clean design philosophy. You can rent or buy this documentary hustwit.com

Watch @ https://vimeo.com/ondemand/ramsfilm

Explained (Netflix)

Explained is a short series of documentaries about many different topics. And the title says it all. It explains a topic in each episode. Episodes are from 15 to 20 minutes long and fun to watch. Episodes are varying from tattoo to extraterrestrial life and from K-pop to cryptocurrencies.

Watch @ https://www.netflix.com/title/80216752

Street Food (Netflix)

Delicious docuseries from around the globe. First season was about Asian street food culture. Really enjoyable episodes and on each of them, you’ll find different tastes. And also how our cultural differences affect our foods. With each episodes you’ll witness the life of a street food master and her/his success.

Watch @ https://www.netflix.com/title/80244996

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I’ve been working remotely for more than a year. I should admit that it’s a wonderful opportunity. Less commuting time and stress, creating your own schedule(well, I’m definitely not talking about sleeping by day and being a night owl), allocating more time to your loved ones and being with them when they need your help are some of the perks of being a remote worker. I truly experienced some moments that I was so thankful for all of the above.

But this post is not about the perks of being a remote worker. It’s more of a comparison between working from home and a co-working spaces. During my remote work experience, I created myself a home office space that I can work comfortably all day long. All the essentials were a good chair, a desk, and your computer. If your company provide home office support budget you can create your dream office.

Having a beautifully designed office space and creating great products in your personal magical place is really something great. And If you can create a discipline for yourself, you can be much more productive than working from an actual office building. Because it’s less distractive and you have your time to arrange everything. I can honestly say that I created a good time planning for myself like I’m going to an actual office every day. And mostly followed 9 to 5 rule. By working like that I also get a chance to sync my time with my wife’s and my friend’s. After working for a few months with that discipline, being a remote worker became so natural to me and this affected my output at work in a good way.

But some people follow a different path while working remotely. A cooler or hispterish(is there a word like that?) way. Traveling the world! It’s another option that I find myself thinking about it time to time. Wouldn’t be great if we pack our bags and fly to Ubud for a few months? After that go to Europe just for no reason and spend some time. Yeah, that would be awesome. But also it’s hard if you’re married. And if one of the couples have a job in an actual office space, things can be harder. So it’s not impossible but it easier to create excuses for not doing this. Oh! BTW speaking of Ubud, it’s a wonderful place for nomads or remote workers. During my short stay for a vacation, I thought about that almost every day. Working and living from there would be extraordinary. But this can be another story.

Let’s talk about another option that I also start experimenting recently. Working from home is great. Don’t want to emphasize this again and again. But also it has some drawbacks or some side effects. Being alone is one of them. Even if you speak with your colleagues every day online, still you’re alone at home(accept that). But of course, this also leads to a better productivity by focusing on your work. Another thing is the problems on work-life balance. Ok, so you’re waking up early in the morning and after breakfast you’re getting into your little room. And when the day ends, you’re leaving your room but you’re still at home. Even if you want to go out at nights, your partner may not want like you do. She/he can be tired after a long terrible day and want to relax at home and just want to watch some Netflix shows. At some point, this cumulates and being 80% home person can be frustrating for you. You have to deal with that successfully for your social life. That’s happening to me from time to time. So in order to fight with that, I decided to give co-working space a try. And I started to buy a monthly subscription. Am I happy now? Yeah, much better.

So what are the benefits of working from co-working space? First of all, leaving home for a while is a good thing. And I think healthier too. Meeting with new people and feeding your social side is another part. Co-working spaces are much better than working from coffee shops. Because everyone around you is mostly a like-minded person. And everyone is working on something. (And also you can leave your computer behind when you go to the toilet without scaring if it can be stolen). With all those creative people around you, new ideas can nourish. That creates a motivation for you to work all they long without getting bored. It’s hard to get that at coffee shops. Coffee shops are more of a short motivation boosters.

After working at a co-working space for a while, I realized that leaving my little home office behind and working as an office person from there whole your time isn’t necessary. I have options and I should combine them. After realizing that, I started to use both of them. And also coffee shops. Now I go wherever I want. Do I need to focus on hard problems and need a giant external monitor or a whiteboard? Then stay at home. Do I need to socialize and feel the air? Then go to co-working space. Do I need more inspiration? Then go to a coffee shop and enjoy a good cup of coffee and cheesecake. After following this pattern, now I’m fully enjoying my remote work experience.

To summarize them all, I want to list the pros and cons of working from home and co-working spaces. And I want to summarize that these are my observations and humble opinions based on the experience. Let the judging begin!

Working From Home — PROS

• You can have any tools and gadgets you want. A large desk, a giant monitor, green plants.
• Focusing on hard problems and working quietly is much easier.
• You can dress highly informal (I don’t suggest that)
• You can grind your own coffee and brew it freshly. (This is so important for me)
• By leveraging the commuting time, you can use your day and working hours much more efficiently.
• If you have kids, you can watch them grow and spend more time with them.

Working From Home — CONS

• Being alone can be boring. And in time it can harm your emotions.
• Your home can become an unmeaningful place for you and you may want to be run out of it.
• Spending most of your time at home can create relationship issues between couples.
• If you cannot create disciplined working hours, your job may suffer from that.
• You can gain fat. (Of course not me, but you )

Working From Co-Working Space — PROS

• Meeting new and like-minded people.
• Attending talks and events. Or sometimes giving talks.
• Fast and stable wifi.
• Free foods and drinks.
• Finding new ideas and possible clients.(if you’re a freelancer)
• Managing your time by creating fixed work hours.

Working From Co-Working Space — CONS

• Co-working spaces can sometimes be noisy.
• If you socialize too much, you can lose your focus on work and start chatting with people unnecessarily.
• Tables and chairs are not usually the best. It can be bad for your ergonomics.
• You won’t have your gadgets like external monitor unless you set them up at co-working space. (That’s usually possible with extra pay)
• If your company doesn’t have support for co-working space, it would cost you extra.
• Coffee is usually terrible. (This can be a valid reason for me to quit a co-working space)
• You’ll have extra commuting time and sometimes you should dive into the traffic nightmare.

If you can find the optimum working style, remote work is really a great opportunity. I tried to share my observations and experiences of working from home and co-working spaces. I’d like to hear yours.

Thanks for taking time and reading this!

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