#AndroidDevJourney spotlight - March edition

Wajahat Karim

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

Since the age of 14, I was very interested in animations and graphic design. I used to watch advertisement animations or cricket match animations of player profiles on TV and wonder how I could create these. Later that year, when my sister purchased our home's first PC, I started learning Microsoft Paint and later Adobe Flash. I worked on Flash for about 11 years throughout high school, University, and my first three jobs in game development.

Game development was and has been my first love in computer science. But, Android became something special for me. It was NOT love-at-first sight because I hated Android when I first learned about it. I still don't know why. Coming from a poor family background, I got a fully-funded scholarship through Prime Minister ICT R&D Scholarship Program and enrolled in National University of Engineering & Technology (NUST), SEECS Islamabad campus.

In my 3rd semester, Android was at 2.2 Froyo. A company organized a workshop at our campus which was attended by high-level tech folks like CTOs, software architects, and lead engineers. University management decided to send three students to attend that workshop and I was lucky enough to be one of them. In simple words, the whole 3-days workshop was over my head. I was a newbie in C++ programming and didn't know anything about Java. And here I was trying to learn high-level Android.

After the workshop, I decided that Android was not for me. However, the university announced an open programming competition for any technology. But they gave extra points for Android submissions. This was my calling. In greed of those extra points, I took up the challenge. I borrowed the only Android book "Hello Android" from my teacher, Sir Shamyl bin Mansoor, and tried to learn as much as I could. Somehow, I managed to submit my first Android app which I showcased on a borrowed laptop with a very slow emulator of Android 2.2. To my surprise, I won it and got Rs. 100,000 prize money. First thing I bought was an Android phone and my journey started.

I started writing about it in a WordPress blog, organized workshops in different universities, made my final year project a 3D game in Adobe Flash, and AIR deployed on a Samsung Galaxy 10 tablet which had a new Android 4 Holo theme and the great Fragments.

After graduation, I got an opportunity from PacktPub (a book publishing company) to write a full book on Android. This was the best achievement I ever received. I managed to co-author two worldwide published 300+ page books (Learning Android Intents & Mastering Android Game Development) on Android in the following two years.

Having about seven years industry hands-on experience in Android development, I spend a lot of time on writing and sharing my knowledge with the community. I mostly write on my . Besides writing, I have been active in open source and have created some Android libraries like EasyFlipView, Room Explorer, etc.

In 2017, I started doing public speaking again. At first, it was a little tough to manage time while working a full-time job and freelance contracts, but it was worth it. I got more and more active in speaking and gave talks at events like Google IO Extended Karachi & Hyderabad in 2018 and 2019, DevFest 2019 Karachi, Pakistan's first DSC Summit, Kotlin Everywhere 2019, and other local events.

From these events, Sami Kizilbash noticed me and nominated me for becoming a Google Developers Expert. It was a tough time because of a serious medical situation with my father at that time, but a year later in February 2020 I became Pakistan's first Google Developers Expert in Android. I never thought that I would be a GDE in a field like Android. It is a big honor and achievement for me, along with a feeling of responsibility to help the community in a better way now. Android development has been my life fuel, career, brought bread for me and my family and happiness in developing and delivering more than 100 apps. With more than 2.5 billion Android devices today, this is an excellent career choice with high growth and potential for upcoming students and developers.

My GDE journey has been a fantastic one. I have enjoyed every moment of it, all the love I got from Google and fellow GDEs - including Joe Birch who actually inspired me to become GDE, Hasan Abid, Saurabh Arora, and Juhani Lehtimaki, and Saad Hamid who also helped me through the process. In all the chaos of 2020, it was a very talkative year for me, as I did 25+ online talks on Jetpack Compose animations concepts.

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

I simply love how Mnemonic Bookmarks make code navigation so much faster and easier. When you are working on a large codebase, it becomes harder to remember which method was where and what was happening in another Fragment. Simply, press Ctrl + F11 and choose any number or character, let's say 1. Now, when you press Ctrl + 1, Android Studio will bring you back on that exact line.

What's the one piece of advice you wish someone would have given you when you started on your journey?

Karolina Pawlikowska

Tell me about your journey to becoming an Android Developer and how you got started.

From a young age, I’ve always loved science fiction books and movies – I always had a gut feeling that whatever career path I went down, it would have something to do with computers. Programming quickly became my favourite creative outlet – it started with creating websites and apps when I was 11, mainly as a way to enhance my other passions such as drawing and making puzzles for my friends.

I got my first Android phone when I was in high school and immediately knew it would open a whole new world of opportunities for me, so I picked up a few books and found a few online tutorials which got me started with code on my phone running Android 2.1 Eclair.

My first app was a flashcards maker. I needed something like that to help me learn English and I couldn’t find anything online - so I made my own!

Thanks to a few of my passion projects, including a flashcard maker app, I managed to quickly land a job as an Android Engineer while I was still completing my Computer Science degree at university. I then tried working across a few other areas in software engineering, but ultimately, Android was always my favourite and ended up becoming my specialty!

What’s one shortcut, tip, or hack you can’t live without?

It’s not quite a hack, but I honestly don’t know how I lived before ConstraintLayout became a thing! Oh – and Android Weekly’s