Droidcon SF & 40 Under 40

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Kio

View of the Golden Gate Bridge from the conference venue

A few weeks ago I had a whirlwind two days, attending the Denver Business Journal 40 Under 40 awards ceremony Thursday evening, then flying off that night to Droidcon San Fransisco where I spoke on Friday!  It was epic, but I got lucky with minimal flight delays and plenty of coffee.

Denver Business Journal 40 Under 40 Awards

At the DBJ awards event I really enjoyed spending time mingling with other winners, and was so excited to meet Carrie Wallis, another woman engineer! She is currently working on a really amazing project for the I-70 east corridor here in Denver. The whole night was filled with phenomenal people, doing some really groundbreaking and impressive work in Colorado.  I was completely humbled to be listed alongside them.

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Posted in Android, Awards, Conferences, Dependency Management | 2 Comments

40 Under 40 Publication

Posted on March 20, 2016 by Kio

I’m excited to share the Denver Business Journal article on all 40 Under 40 winners!

My personal profile is here, and you can see the full spread of all winners here. Paid subscribers get the full scoop, but there’s still a few fun things for free. 🙂

Posted in Awards, Business, Colorado | 1 Comment

React Native on Android: Styling the Cursor

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Kio

android-logo react-logo

As you may have noticed by recent tweets, I’ve been exploring a little React Native.  I’ve got a few massive overview posts in the making, but for now I just wanted to share a quick tip about styling.

Recently I was trying to style an `EditText`, which is called `TextInput` in the world of React Native.

You can see from that doc, there are a lot of styling options for `TextInput`, and I was hoping to style the cursor, highlighting, and underline color.  At first it looked like I just needed to set `underlineColorAndroid` and `selectionColor`, but then I noticed that `selectionColor` only changes the cursor color on iOS. Bummer!  I set those items and confirmed that sure enough my cursor was not the desired color.

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Posted in Android, React Native, UI | 5 Comments

Circle CI and gradle.properties

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Kio

gradlephant gradle logo

 

circle-ci-logo

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently I was working on getting a Circle CI build up and running for an Android project, and ran into a bit of trouble getting it to work with my `gradle.properties` file.  Here’s an overview of the issue I experienced, and how I solved it.

What is Circle CI?

Circle CI is a continuous integration tool like Jenkins or Travis, which allows you to automate builds and tests in the cloud. You can automate builds to run on every push to certain branches or pull request, so you can maintain quality code. It’s pretty awesome! Circle CI is a relatively new player in the market, adding support for Android just over a year ago.

What is gradle.properties?

If your app has any secret credentials like API keys or other authentication data, you should never check this information into version control where somebody else can access it. You should instead keep it secret by only referencing it via a local file.  In Android development, this is typically stored in a file named `gradle.properties`, which lives in your `~/.gradle/gradle.properties` directory.

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Posted in Android, Circle CI, Continuous Integration, Gradle | 1 Comment

Android Developer Perf Matters

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Kio

thoughtbot robot logo painted on the wall, with a poofy android robot sitting in front of it

Early this year I made my debut on the thoughtbot blog Giant Robots Smashing into Other Robots!  For my first post, I chose to write about how Android developers can make their development process more efficient.

Check out my top tips and tricks here!

Posted in Android, Press | Leave a comment

40 Under 40

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Kio

Denver Business Journal 40 under 40 logo

I am beyond thrilled to announce that I have been selected for the Denver Business Journal 40 Under 40 for 2016!  I’m so honored to be listed along so many phenomenal & brilliant leaders in our community.

Check out the full article about all award winners here, and my individual page here.  There will be more information coming up in March, and I can’t wait to share it with you all!

Posted in Awards, Business, Press | Leave a comment

2016: Be Intentional

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Kio

As I mentioned in my annual recap post, 2015 was a big year for me! I did lots of stuff that I thought was scary, and it really paid off. 🙂  It was awesome, but I did do **a lot**.  One thing I really super don’t want to do is get burned out, so for 2016 my mantra is “Be Intentional.” I want to do awesome things, but I don’t want to go off the deep end and regret it. I want to have a really good reason for each thing I do, and I want to approach each day with meaning, instead of floating through it.  Outside of my main mantra, I’ve also chosen a few specific goals for the year:

New International Speaking Engagement

I’d like to visit a new international city via speaking at a technical conference.  I love traveling, seeing new places, and meeting new people.

Release Architecture App (Kotlin)

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Posted in Android, Finance, Speaking | 1 Comment

Android Dialogs Interview

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Kio

I’m super excited to say that I was invited on Android Dialogs last week to chat with Huyen Tue Dao  about Android!  She was an excellent host and interviewer, and I had an absolute blast chatting with her. Thanks for having me! 😀

 

Posted in Android, Press | Leave a comment

2015 Recap

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Kio

Being interviewed at Google IO

2015 was a really **really** exciting year! It really flew by (and I spent a lot of it literally flying!)  I was inspired by Chiu-Ki’s post, so here’s my list of 2015 accomplishments:

This year I tried more than ever to “do things that scared me,” and boy did it really pay off.  I really spread my wings with technical public speaking, and loved every second of it.  I had so much fun visiting new cities, sharing my knowledge, and learning from and getting to know brilliant people all over the world.

I’ve also had a lot of fun sharing my knowledge with people all over the world via my blog. Its been really fun to watch my daily visits slowly climb up and up this year.  My most popular posts in 2015 were:

  1. SVG Rendering on Android
  2. Jenkins, Robolectric & Gradle
  3. Android Studio Lint Options

This has been a really busy and rewarding year, and I’m super excited for what 2016 holds!

Posted in Android, Speaking, WWC | 1 Comment

AnDevCon Santa Clara 2015

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Kio

Me with giant android girl

This year has been quite a busy one for public speaking, and I closed it out by talking about accessibility at AnDevCon Santa Clara.

The Conference

I arrived at the conference Tuesday around noon, where I got to attend a lunchtime keynote about Gradle improvements by Hans Dockter.  It was a great talk, but since I was eating I couldn’t take notes. 🙁  Luckily, he was giving another Gradle talk later during the conference.

After lunch I jumped into the second half of Karim Yaghmour’s Android Internals day long tutorial session.  I recently purchased his book Embedded Android, and have been slowly making my way through it when I get time, so I was *really* excited to sit in his class!  I was bummed to miss the first part, but still absorbed so much from the second part.   If you get a chance to see him speak, don’t miss it.  Not only is he very knowledgable, his content was really well organized and well delivered.

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Posted in Accessibility, Android, Conferences | Leave a comment