Epson Moverio App Challenge

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Kio

epson_moverio_bt-200

I recently participated in the Epson Moverio “Develop the Future” challenge, an online hackathon.  Usually I’m not a fan of online hackathons, but I was excited at the chance to develop on some new and interesting hardware, the Epson Moverio BT-200.

I was introduced to the Moverio at CES in 2014. They had a really impressive augmented reality demo set up, where you could “repair” a broken AC unit using directions from the smart glasses overlaid on the actual AC unit.  Fast-forward to a year later, and Epson has released a second edition of the hardware along with a public app marketplace.

App Challenge: Develop the Future

For this online hackathon, developers could submit to 2 categories: enterprise or consumer gaming.  I decided to focus on a consumer facing application. Naturally, I wanted to pick something that show-cased the Moverio’s talents. I played around with some ideas involving games and the accelerometer, but I felt lukewarm about all of my ideas, and they also would have all taken a pretty huge time investment on my part.

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DroidCon Berlin

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Kio

droidconDe

I am very excited to announce that I will be speaking at DroidCon Berlin this summer! I am so looking forward to sharing my knowledge about accessibility at my first international speaking engagement.  You can read more about my session here.

I’ve been checking out the other talks as they are announced, and it looks like a really fabulous line up already. Hope to see you there!

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AnDevCon Boston

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Kio

boston

So excited to announce that I will be speaking at AnDevCon Boston this year!  I will be giving a lecture & workshop on programming accessible Android applications. I am really looking forward to sharing my knowledge, and learning from the other fabulous speakers as well.

Read more about my course “Accessibility in Action: Technical Solutions to the Accessibility Challenge”.

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SVG Rendering on Android

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Kio

SVG_logo.svg

Recently I was working on a project which required me to obtain an SVG image from an API endpoint and display the image in the Android application. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphic, and is a way of describing an image in XML code, instead of mapping out pixels. This way the image can be scaled up and down and still look great.

SVG rendering is not supported natively on Android, so I had to set out and find a library that could help.  The first library I came across was svg-android, by Google.  I was surprised to see the library hadn’t been touched in over 3 years, but this library was the most referenced in other blog posts and Stack Overflow questions so I figured I would give it a shot.

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Posted in Android, UI | 4 Comments

Women Techmakers – GDG Boulder

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Kio

logo_wtm

At the beginning of March I had the great opportunity to speak at GDG Boulder’s celebration for Women Techmakers.  The event was Lightning Talks by women in the tech industry, and it was a total blast!

When I was invited to give a talk a month ago, I immediately said yes. I really enjoy public speaking, and was really excited to speak at Google’s office; what a treat!  However, I was a little nervous about the format. I had never given a lighting talk before. What on earth was I going to say in just 5 minutes?

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I’m a Team Treehouse Success Story!

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Kio

treehouse

I’m so excited to share that Team Treehouse has featured my personal journey to a career in Android development on their blog as a student success story!  You can read my full interview here.

Ben Jakuben, one of my personal heroes and the Team Treehouse Android teacher who first introduced me to the platform, even shared a really nice tweet about the article!

https://twitter.com/benjakuben/status/575750569949851648

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Posted in Android, Press | 3 Comments

Android Dependency Management: A Saga

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Kio

gradle-icon-512x512

I’ve been having quite a time playing around with dependency management on Android.  I am following the typical Model-View-Controller design pattern, and I’ve got an internal library that I want to reference, which handles the Model and Controller aspects of my app.  This library is then included by my “shell” app, which has all the Views.  So, what is the best way to manage this library?  Here are a few things I’ve tried so far.

Git Submodules

Git submodules are a way of referencing a specific git commit SHA of another repository within your own project.  This is my personal favorite way to do dependency management at the moment, but most people dislike it.  For one thing, it is easy to mess up if you don’t get your head around what exactly Git is doing.

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Posted in Android, Dependency Management, Git, Gradle | 1 Comment

Strategies for Success

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Kio

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Last month I had the phenomenal opportunity to attend a leadership conference “Strategies for Success” at Aetna, our parent company.  50 of Aetna’s ‘top high-performing, high-potential women’ were invited to attend the conference, and to say I was honored to be among them is an understatement!  In some ways it was a pretty different experience from a typical tech conference (no t-shirts and jeans here! 🙂 ), but very similar in other ways: the week was jam-packed, I learned a ton from everyone there, and had a complete blast!

The conference was organized with the help of the Center for Talent Innovation, a New York based group that does research and outreach to leverage talent across the divides of gender, generation, geography and culture. This is a great group, and their website contains a wealth of material free for anyone to check out.  About a month before the conference, they hosted a virtual meeting, where we all logged in anonymously, and CTI facilitated a conversation about our perceptions of leadership and opportunities. I’d never done something like that before, and it was really interesting and well-run. It was also a great way to gear up for the actual on-site conference.

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Jenkins, Robolectric, & Gradle

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Kio

Jenkins.sh-600x600Robolectric-FINAL         gradle-icon-512x512

Recently I was working on a project to integrate Robolectric, a great Android unit testing framework which doesn’t require an emulator to run. I ran into a few ridiculous issues that I never found documented on the internet, which arose because I am using Gradle and Jenkins and Robolectric all together. I’d like to share them here and save some other poor soul from the head bashing I had to go through.  I’m also going to share a few other tips that weren’t as obscure, just to have it all in one place. Yay, let’s get started!

DIRECTORY STRUCTURE
If you were an early adopter of Android Studio, your directory structure might look different than the current default directory structure of Android Studio, pictured here.  Robolectric has hard-coded this current directory structure in their code, and there is no way to get around it by gradle.  You’ve just got to update your directory structure to the new one.

GRADLE VERION
The most recent version* of the Robolectric Gradle Plugin is 0.13.+, and it uses Gradle 2.0.  Gradle 2.0 is currently available in the Android Studio Canary Channel (as of  0.8.11), but Android Studio Beta Channel (currently 0.8.9*) is still using Gradle 1.11.  If you are on the Beta Channel, you want to pull in the 0.12.0 plugin, and then update it when you move on to Gradle 2.0. (Sidenote, there is a great blog post here by Larry Schiefer about what to expect when you transition over to Gradle 2.0.)

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Posted in Android, Gradle, Jenkins, Robolectric | Leave a comment

Denver Startup Week 2014

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Kio

Denver Startup Week

Last week was Denver Startup Week here in beautiful Colorado, and man was it epic!  DSW is a weeklong event where the coolest people in Denver get together to learn, network, and celebrate Denver’s startup culture.  This year’s event was the best yet, with just over 8,000 attendees.

I started the week off attending a panel discussion about bringing together the oil & gas industry with the tech industry, hosted by the relatively new group Energy Tech Mashup. Energy and tech are two of the largest industries in our state, so it only makes sense that we start talking with each other at some point!  It was a pretty interesting session, but I had to leave early to prepare for an event I was participating in: Google Glass, Wearable Computing and More.

The Glass event was hosted by a new co-working space in town, ModWorks, and our backdrop was gorgeous; Denver Civic Center, the state capitol building and panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains.  The event started out with a thought-provoking presentation by Cecilia Abadie about wearable technology.  If you aren’t familiar with her work, I suggest watching her TED Talk.  I am so happy that the Denver Google Developer’s Group sponsored her trip to Colorado for the event!  Her presentation was amazing, and set a great tone for the second part of the event: a panel of Glass Explorers.

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