Dumitru Hristov blog

22 September, 2023

If Android Studio is not showing previews for markdown files, do the following:

1. Go to menu Help -> Find Action(Ctrl+Shift+A) -> Choose Boot Time Java for the IDE -> and select JetBrains Runtime with JCEF

2. Restart the IDE:

3. Now the preview should be working:

21 September, 2023

I am starting to open source my old Android games.

The first one to bite the dust is : Crate Jump

12 August, 2023

Cat-a-log has a new release (3.1).

- Updated to Jetpack Compose 1.5 which brought performance improvements and nice new navigation animations.

- Some minor UI adjustments.

- Slightly decreased apk size - by about 1Mb.

04 August, 2023

What am I using as a reference when creating a new Android project from scratch:

   My primary reference is the source code for the Kodeko course "Real-World Android by Tutorials" (https://www.kodeco.com/books/real-world-android-by-tutorials, https://github.com/kodecocodes/adva-materials/tree/editions/2.0). This course follows a CLEAN Architecture approach and maintains a clear separation of layers. The course was last updated in August 2022 and relies on XML Views and RXJava, so I’m rewriting the code using Jetpack Compose and Kotlin Flows. I also make adjustments to naming conventions and packaging. My newly created project will have one module only but some packages might be moved to their own modules later if needed.

   For the Jetpack Compose part I use another Kodeko course, Jetpack Compose by Tutorials. Again, they use Material 2 and I am rewriting some parts using Material 3.

   As a companion to the above the book ‘Clean Architecture for Android’ by Eran Boudjnah has very nice diagrams, especially in the first part of the book.

   There's another notable source from 2021 - one of the famous CommonsWare’s books Exploring Android. It is quite simple in the sense that it doesn't have any domain layer, but it provides an excellent example of a Reactive Architecture implementation in Android. Unfortunately Mark Murphy is no longer updating CommonsWare books.

   These sources are my go-to references when starting a new Android project. The official docs from Google go without saying, of course.

29 July, 2023

Cat-a-log has a new release.

Tech stack: Kotlin, coroutines, Flow, Jetpack Compose, Hilt, Room, DataStore, Retrofit, Moshi, Mockito. The project source is using CLEAN Architecture principles and UDF.

You can find more apps here.

17 April, 2023

SpeakIt has a new maintenance release (6.4). Android 13 compatibility updates.

01 December, 2022

Tried to create AMP pages with Remix with no luck. Starting to look at next.js instead.

17 August, 2022

watchmis.com: implemented the Compare feature. If you find any issues please report them here. :-)

01 August, 2022

Finally a new version of watchmis.com happened. It's WIP and a huge list of features is waiting.

Re-wrote everything from Spring/MVC to remix-run / React / Tailwind.

Half of my daily unique users (about 300 per day at the time of writing) are from mobile platforms so a mobile-first design was given a priority.

Deployed on a Digital Ocean droplet, automatically running the process on every restart using pm2.

Also migrated all of the data from Postgres SQL to SQLite. After a trial period will uninstall Postgres SQL from the Digital Ocean droplet freeing resources. No more user access issues.

Note the pre-fetch feature - if you hover over a link then the page starts to load in the background. If you decide to visit the link after a while that page is already there :-)

remix-run is an excellent tool for the full-stack job! Love it!