March 9, 2026 • 11 min read
ZeroMQ on Android: Bridging a Linux Service with PUB SUB
ZeroMQ on Android: Bridging a Linux Service with PUB SUB In a recent project, we had a deceptively simple requirement. We needed reliable, low latency…
The engineering notebook
Notes from the work.
Android development, architecture, performance, security and the experience of building software.
64 articles · Page 2 of 6
February 16, 2026 • 13 min read
Breaking and Defending HTTPS on Android: A Hands-On Certificate Pinning Lab
Breaking and Defending HTTPS on Android: A Hands-On Certificate Pinning Lab HTTPS is no longer a nice to have in Android apps. It is the baseline…
February 11, 2026 • 10 min read
Building a Reliable Control Handoff with the Wear OS Data Layer
Building a Reliable Control Handoff with the Wear OS Data Layer When One Feature Has Two Masters Modern Android experiences rarely live on a single screen…
January 19, 2026 • 9 min read
Stop Using PlayerView in Compose: Media3 PlayerSurface Done Right
Stop Using PlayerView in Compose: Media3 PlayerSurface Done Right Modern Android development moves fast, especially around media playback. Libraries…
January 14, 2026 • 16 min read
Goodbye AndroidView: A Real CameraX QR Scanner in Compose
Goodbye AndroidView: A Real CameraX QR Scanner in Compose In a recent project, we needed to add a QR scanner that allows users to quickly connect to a…
July 25, 2025 • 13 min read
Contribute, Struggle, Adjust, Repeat: Finding Work-Life Balance as a Dev
Contribute, Struggle, Adjust, Repeat: Finding Work-Life Balance as a Dev I’m a developer. I’m also a husband, father of 2 active boys, a freelance…
July 25, 2025 • 8 min read
One Repo to Rule Them All: Android Modules with Git Submodules
One Repo to Rule Them All: Android Modules with Git Submodules I was working on a project recently when I noticed something interesting. Another developer…
July 2, 2025 • 8 min read
How I Built Seamless Watch ↔ Phone Handover in Wear OS
How I Built Seamless Watch ↔ Phone Handover in Wear OS I recently worked on extending an existing Android app to include a Wear OS counterpart. The goal…
June 25, 2025 • 12 min read
Two Sides of 200+ Android Interviews
Two Sides of 200+ Android Interviews Interviews Suck, But Here We Are I’ve been through hundreds of interviews. I’ve given around 40 myself. I’ve seen it…
May 9, 2025 • 5 min read
Fast Feedback: Winning Back 60% of Our CI Time
Fast Feedback: Winning Back 60% of Our CI Time Speeding up your build pipeline isn’t just about faster Gradle builds, though that’s a great place to…
April 14, 2025 • 8 min read
How I Tackled Parsing XML on Android When JAXB Just Wouldn’t Play Nice
How I Tackled Parsing XML on Android When JAXB Just Wouldn’t Play Nice If you’ve ever tried using JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding) on Android, you…
April 7, 2025 • 8 min read
How I Cut My Gradle Build Time by 50%
How I Cut My Gradle Build Time by 50% Android developers are no strangers to the occasional long build time. As projects grow in complexity, waiting on…