In this article I am not going to go over any deep technical issues neither am I going to solve big problems. I am going to talk about simple and small things that I did to make my life easier being a developer.
A Lazy Developer is a Smart Developer
In my opinion the lazier you are the more innovative ways you are going to search to make your life easier.
For example: “shortcuts”. Yes, I know there are no shortcuts to success BUT there are keyboard shortcuts on Android Studio. These are the shortcuts which I found really useful:
- cmd + shift + O (to search a file by name in your project)
- cmd + shift + F (to do a project wide search)
- shift + F6 (to rename a variable globally)
- ctrl + g (to select a word/variable name which occurs repetitively in a file)
- option + F8 (to open debug evaluator) This particularly has made the debugging process very fast for me. For someone who does not know what debug evaluation is: It is a tool in Android Studio which helps you in evaluating any variable value or any flow values which you want to know how it behaves during runtime.
- ctrl + d (run the app in debug mode)
- cmd + F9 (Make Project)
- ctrl + R (simple run the app)
There are plenty more which can be found here but above are the ones which are really handy.
Here is a trick to learn the keyboard shortcuts faster: disconnect your mouse or disable your keypad and then continue writing code. It will be really problematic in the beginning but will force you to learn shortcuts even faster.
Emulator vs Real Device
Although Android has made significant efforts in improving the Android Emulator which is remarkable but I recommend using a real device for faster development, you know…it’s faster.
On a side note I remember the time when I had to make changes in the BIOS of my Windows machine to make the emulator run on it.
Keeping a Simple Naming Convention
This topic can have many different notions but I have found developers taking a lot of time to decide two things:
- What should I name the class?
- In which package or folder should I put the class?
In the starting of the project itself it is really important to decide on the naming convention to make things easier for fellow developers and the naming convention should be duly documented.
I highly recommend making a naming convention for tests. Having a proper naming convention for Unit Tests especially in an Android project helps new developers joining your team to understand the business logic faster especially if they are coming from TDD (Test Driven Development) environment.
Simple CI/CD Process
It is the job of senior developers in the team to make the CI/CD process really easy for the fellow developers so that they can spend most of their time for development and do not worry about builds and testing and release process. Simple build process with good caching technique is the right way to go with CI/CD process.
