technical

Lets follow up the discussion about nullability and talk about error handling in Kotlin. Syntactically, the differences from Java are pretty nominal, except for one pretty major key difference that I'll get to in just a second. First some code to demonstrate how similar Kotlin Exceptions are to Java's Exception handling: fun doSomething(data : String) { if(data.contains("test")) { throw IllegalStateException("Test!") } } fun main() { try { doSomething("testData") } catch (e : Exception) { // This will always get called because an exception is thrown if a String containing "test" is passed to doSomething(. [Read More]

In the first part of this series I stated I'd very likely start all my new Android projects in Kotlin. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Java, but why would I make such a bold claim? The answer is null. Or more specifically, the explicit detraction of the use of null that Kotlin promotes. Kotlin has some nice features, but its handling of null variables is what hooked me. [Read More]

Everyone has their preferences, and I have mine. As I start the blog I'm finding myself setting up a laptop I haven't used in a while. So I have to do some configuration before I get started. I figured it might be helpful to some people to share how I prefer to configure my terminal on a new system. First off, I prefer to develop on Ubuntu. I'll bounce between various operating systems depending on the project I'm working on, but I find the majority of my work is easier to accomplish in Ubuntu. [Read More]