Coming from a background in Java/Android development, I’m fairly familiar with working in RxJava and the reactive style of programming. Without getting into the details of said style, there’s a particular operator you can use called Observable.just(), which allows you to wrap a single value in …
Articles by William Brawner
Mission Failed
In December of last year, I decided to commit to publishing a blog post once per month for all of 2019. Looking back through the archives for my blog, you can see that I published at least once per month all the way up until September, but no posts went …
Is it Safe to Store your google-services.json in a Public Git Repo?
I maintain an open source app called Simple Markdown. One of the things I've been working on for it lately is getting some CI server setup to be able to automate the testing and packaging of the app. I'll still handle the publishing myself but I'd like to speed up …
Cross Platform Apps the Hard Way - Part 2: The Architecture
In my previous post where I outlined the goals for this project of mine, I briefly mentioned my thoughts on how to structure the code in order for it to work on as many platforms as possible. In this post, I intend to dive in a little deeper on the …
Cross Platform Apps the Hard Way - Part 1: The Idea
Nowadays, there are many different ways to build a cross-platform app, including React Native, Xamarin, and Flutter, to name a few. These each come with their own pros and cons, but they all serve the same purpose: allowing you to create "native" cross-platform apps relatively painlessly and cheaper than building …
Simple Markdown Goes Dark
Version 0.7.0 for Simple Markdown brings some major changes to the app. Most notably, and likely most requested, is DARK MODE. With Android Q's built-in implementation coming soon, I figured it's about time to finally get to it. It's something that's been on the roadmap for a while …
Reflecting on my Career
This month, I've started a new position as an Android Engineer at American Express, and I found myself reflecting on how I got here. I have no college degree, and didn't participate in any coding bootcamp or anything like that, so I figured I'd share my story in case it's …
View Your Repositories Remotely with GitWeb
If you've been following my blog, you probably saw the post where I outlined my personal git server setup. In it, I showed off the
lscommand that I've configured for quickly viewing my repositories remotely. This is quite limited though, in that it only shows me the names of …A Simple Self-Hosted Git Server
If you're writing code for any purpose, I sincerely hope you are using some kind of source control. I personally am only really familiar with Git, and as such it is my go-to tool for keeping track of my code. Nowadays, there are plenty of hosts for pushing your code …
Spring Boot Config Priorities
Recently, while working on a job, I ran into an interesting problem with Spring Boot: the configuration files I had defined using the
@PropertySourceannotation were being overridden by theapplication.propertiesfile, which I had also defined with a@PropertySourceannotation. Why wasn't Spring prioritizing my configuration files correctly …
