Notes on Android development, indie shipping, and building the kind of software I'd actually want to use. Occasionally opinionated.
Dark mode isn't just flipping a colour palette. When I started Spectral I assumed it'd take two hours. Six weeks later, I had a completely rethought approach to colour, contrast, and depth that changed the way I design for Android.
Read the full piece →Rx felt like the obvious choice when I started building Spectral's networking. Twelve months later I rewrote the whole layer with Flow and never looked back. Here's the honest comparison.
ComposeCompose's Layout composable finally makes complex grid arrangements possible without dropping to Views. I built Spectral's wallpaper grid entirely with it - here's how.
IndieI'm a senior engineer at my day job. I thought building an indie app would be easy. Reader, it was not. A field report on design, marketing, and the empty feedback loop.
PerformanceLeakCanary pointed fingers. The Android Profiler disagreed. After three days I realized we were both wrong - and the bug was in something I'd trusted for years.