How to advance in Android development?

from the CommonsWare Community archives

At April 25, 2020, 10:17pm, Zakariyaf asked:

Hello @mmurphy and everyone,

Thank you for having me in, I’m really grateful for joining this awesome community.
I have been doing Java Android since around 2 years, but I’m not sure whether I’m making progress. I’ve been following tutorials, I understood them 100% but I can’t get out of their scope, meaning I can’t be creative.
I like Mark’s collection of books and I have found it extremely useful and unique. I would love to know whether I’m doing something wrong that’s holding me back please?

Thank you all in advance.

At April 25, 2020, 10:33pm, mmurphy replied:

Could you give us an example, or otherwise explain in more detail what you mean?

At April 25, 2020, 10:46pm, Zakariyaf replied:

Thank you for your reply!
I mean, when I watch a tutorial on how to make a GitHub client app for example, I bend all my other projects to be the same as this app. It’s like I’m reusing the same app in every project…

At April 25, 2020, 11:25pm, mmurphy replied:

That is a fairly common way to learn, particularly as you are learning new techniques.

Personally, I have been programming computers for 35 years, so it has been a long time since I was starting from the beginning. :grinning: But, for some new things, I too will lean on how existing apps approach some problem, until I either get more comfortable with the technology or abandon it.

For example, with Android Studio 4.0 and higher, you can write your Gradle instructions either in Groovy (build.gradle) or in Kotlin (build.gradle.kts). So, on a recent project, I tried following the approach used by an existing sample project using Kotlin Gradle scripts, in terms of how they organized those scripts. In that particular case, I concluded that I was not very happy with how it turned out, and I will look for other examples or experiment on my own going forward.

In the end, the objective is to write software that works today and hopefully works tomorrow. How you get there is an “implementation detail”, as it were. Some developers lean very heavily on existing code. Other developers are not. Neither approach is right or wrong, so long as people are happy with the results.

TL;DR: don’t worry, be happy. :grin:

At April 25, 2020, 11:37pm, Zakariyaf replied:

Thank you very much! :grin: