App Building. Episode 2. Minimum Viable Product

#java #android

Introduction

This series is going to be dedicated to building and launching my first app to the Google Play app store. Join me and let us try to to make our way through this. If you are unfamiliar with what I am building. I am building a free android app to help cattle farmers organize their books during calving season(when baby cows are born)

So I am now at a stage where I can upload my app to the google play store. I know that my app is basically a glorified CRUD application but I am still very proud of it. The only tutorials I followed was for the design. Everything else was from reading the Android documentation and I honestly feel like a software developer. I am well aware of all the work in front of me regarding, testing, code organization and then further updates but I am happy to meet those challenges. With that being said, here are some pictures of how my application turned out:

Not great but not terrible. It also has the stereotypical swipe to delete functionality and an update ability when an item is clicked.

Software development is a very labour intensive occupation. Something as small as that took me a whole month to make. However, that was me learning how to implement everything from scratch.
Code organization is going to be very useful. I can already tell I need to read up on object oriented programming and learn some code reuse techniques.

From a coding perspective the biggest challenge was definitely trying to hook up the database and more specifically dealing with threads.

I am definitely most proud of the asynchronous method I wrote to help with the update aspect of my application. Instead of dealing with Android's very confusing ReactiveX library like recommended. I decided do all the thread handling and creation myself. It was about an 9 hour detour to learn about threads, future objects, fixed thread pools, executor, runnable and callable interfaces but I finally got it to work. The code might be terrible asynchronous code, that definitely will not scale well... But it's my terrible code that I wrote and I am proud of that :) .

The next step is to spend a couple of days learning about code reuse in Java and then publish it to the google play store. I am scared to but its good to be scared every once and a while.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this blog post of mine. If you have any questions or concerns please comment below or reach out to me on Twitter.