Free digital book for the Android dev community

5 Minute Bedtime Stories
For Android Devs

A free digital collection of short bedtime stories for developers: funny, slightly unbelievable, and occasionally suspiciously specific.

This book began, like many good ideas, late at night. After long days at conferences, meetups, and talks, a group of developers would often find themselves gathered together, sharing stories. The kind of stories that only make sense if you’ve lived through them. Stories about bugs, strange systems, questionable decisions… and the occasional disaster.

More often than not, many of those stories were about the disasters Ash Davies brought upon himself.

At some point, it became a running joke that these stories deserved to be written down. Naturally, the only reasonable next step was to actually do it. So here we are.

PDF, 2.8 MB. Free to download. No signup, no JavaScript, no attribution of stories to authors.

About the book

Conference stories, production mistakes, and developer folklore

Some stories in this book are funny. Some are slightly unbelievable. Some are… suspiciously specific.

Not every story in this book is guaranteed to be entirely true. But as the Irish say: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

To protect the innocent (and the guilty), the authors are not matched to their stories. You are free to guess who wrote what.

Enjoy the stories, and hopefully get a good night’s sleep.

Free and immediate

Open the PDF right away. No signup, no JavaScript, no friction, and no reason to overthink it.

Written by people who have actually been there

Conference stories, real disasters, and the kind of software folklore every Android developer recognizes immediately.

Short enough to actually finish

A book you can read in one sitting, send to a teammate, or drop into a group chat the next time release week gets weird.

Contributors

Built by a very capable group of people with questionable production decisions

This book would not exist without the people behind it. What started as a joke quickly turned into something real thanks to a group of developers who were willing to share their stories, the funny ones, the painful ones, and the ones that probably should not have happened in the first place.

Each story in this book comes from lived experience… or at least something close enough to it.

To keep things interesting (and to protect the innocent), the stories are not attributed. You are free to guess who wrote what.

A sincere thank you to everyone who contributed their time, creativity, and questionable production decisions to make this possible.

The authors

  • Alexandra Davies
  • Andy Barber
  • Ash Davies
  • Ben Kadel
  • Ben Weiss
  • Chet Haase
  • Chris Ward
  • Cicero Hellman Ratti
  • Ed Holloway-George
  • Eliza Camber
  • Erik Hellman
  • Greg Fawson
  • Hadi Hariri
  • István Juhos
  • Jaewoong Eum
  • Jake Wharton
  • James Cullimore
  • Jesse Wilson
  • Lucas Villa Verde
  • Marc Reichelt
  • Mat Rollings
  • Matthias Geisler
  • Mohsen Mirhoseini
  • Muriel Kamgang Mabou
  • Niall Scott
  • Nicole Terc
  • Romain Guy
  • Scott Alexander-Bown
  • Sergio Sastre
  • Zac Sweers
  • Zachary Powell

What you get

A short, free read made for Android developers

The goal is simple: a free digital book you can open immediately, finish without effort, and share with other Android developers who have seen enough production incidents to appreciate the joke.

If you have ever come back from a conference dinner with a story that should probably never be repeated in a postmortem, this book is for you.

It works as a quick personal read, a lightweight gift for another Android developer, or a link worth passing around when everyone on the team needs a reminder that software chaos is universal.

Disclaimer

This book is an independent work and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google, Android, AWS, Jenkins, Jetbrains or any other company or organization mentioned.

All product names, trademarks, and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Some stories are inspired by real events, though details may have been altered for storytelling purposes.

The Android robot (“Bugdroid”) is reproduced or modified from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License. Android is a trademark of Google LLC. fun code() is an independent publication by Marc Reichelt and contributors. Kodee is used under CC BY 4.0 (© JetBrains s.r.o.).