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16 August 2019

The Hacker's Tribute Vol. 18: Circle CI vs. Bitrise, Android 95, and GlobalThis

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Sometimes, ideas clash – just as they do for Android development. The Cold War of CI is in full swing, and you’ve been given front row tickets!

Greetings, and salutations!

Hackers, there’s a competitive, and aggressive world out there. And, if you haven’t had the chance, then now’s the time to explore it.

From defiant Bulldogs, to International Number formatting, there is a multitude of solutions designed to unite us, and help us understand one another.

Sometimes, ideas clash – just as they do for Android development. The Cold War of CI is in full swing, and you’ve been given front row tickets!

Join us for a very heated issue, between the generic classic, and originally lovable, versus the new and shiny knight in chrome armour.

One thing is for sure – it’s going to get interesting!

Game on!

dan

Dan ‘the Man’ Kowalski

Editor-In-Chief, the Hacker’s Tribute

1. The Finals Digital Olympics

The Cold War pit the US & the USSR as two Olympic superpowers. Cold War, what Cold War? This is the ultimate clash of civilisations, right here! CircleCI and Bitrise now battling neck-&-neck in a deathmatch that’ll determine the alpha Continuous Integration tool. Each prime Olympian will compete in a decathlon of; Pricing, Performance, Ease of Use, Parallelism, UI Testing, and Google Play Deployment. Marks, Set, Read!

https://infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/bitrise-vs-circleci-for-android-in-a-head-to-head-battle

2. The World Record 5-Minute App

For those who have seen Black Hawk Down will agree; nothing takes 5 minutes. Today, I raise my hat, and humbly bow. Kotlin has come to the rescue (again), bringing with it a whimsical solution defying even the notorious New York minute. Kotlin Multiplatform is a fast-evolving platform leaving nothing but confusion in its wake. We have a guide here to bring you up to speed – hello best of both worlds!

https://medium.com/@ben_98270/two-apps-in-less-than-five-minutes-with-kotlin-multiplatform-bedf454a4a7b

3. Bully for Bulldog!

Its human nature to make things easy. Even as the world complicates, there those determined few, finding shortcuts and easy preferences. And nothing symbolises this so much like the Bulldog. This cyber symbol of defiance uses annotation processing and Kotlin-delegated properties, making reading and value storage swiftly, and simply. We can do this the easy way, or the easy way.

https://medium.com/@Sserra90/announcing-bulldog-never-use-sharedpreferences-anymore-92cd32249314

4. Alive in ’95

What a year! Microsoft launched its mildly-popular Windows 95, Oasis had released the equally-mildly-received Wonderwall, and the world was beginning to grasp the Internet. That became quite popular too. In a throwback to this heyday – Android produced an Easter Egg in its source code! It’s rumoured to be the first of many, so here’s one to get you started!

https://medium.com/@anoopss/you-thought-you-knew-android-e46a556d0773

5. Go Global – or Go Home!

For years, programmers faced a calamity of worldly proportions – Javascript, and its use in a global context. Frustrations grew, alongside the list of identifiers to check, and the number of environments. The globalthis proposal aims to quell this, with a unified mechanism used to access the global this, in any JavaScript environment, regardless of the script goal.

https://v8.dev/features/globalthis

6. More Than Just a Number

Remember, my European friends, not everyone measures in logical measurables of ten! The Intl.NumberFormat API is a thing of beauty, letting you create a reusable formatter instance that supports locale-aware number formatting. Enjoy units of measurements from Metres to Scandinavian Miles, Grams to Stones, or Celsius to Fahrenheit. King Henry’s legacy lives on, even in cyberspace!

https://v8.dev/features/intl-numberformat

Knowledge is free, and shared. We’re always on the lookout for new insights into the world of App Development. Get in touch with us, and we’ll give you a heads up on your next big idea.

We’ll be in touch with more news, as it happens!



Author

Hackers of the world dream to be him. And that’s an understatement. With methods decades ahead of cyberspace, he’s proceeded only by his own reputation. ‘The Man’ infamous for single-handedly causing the ’08 global financial meltdown, he dropped off-grid searching for purpose. He twice-dominated each of the Himalayan peaks, negotiated the rift valleys of Africa, and swam the Amazonian Basin end-to-end. It was in Siberia where we caught up to him – convincing him to work for the ‘good guys’. The veteran’s veteran of coding, now confidently within our ranks, is finally a force for good. Just don’t test him.