In-depth guides on Android, Kotlin Multiplatform, iOS, Rust, AI/ML, software architecture, and engineering careers. Written by David Cruz Anaya, a senior mobile engineer based in London (Android & Kotlin Multiplatform) and author of You Are Not That Important.
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A code-backed walkthrough of Paglipat’s production AI concierge: typed tools, fail-safe routing, bounded memory, privacy controls, token accounting, prompt caching, and the operational runbook behind the chat UI.
Part 8 of the Rust + NDK on Android series: stop Rust panics from killing your app. Install a logcat panic hook, firewall the JNI boundary with catch_unwind, and map Result errors to typed Kotlin exceptions by hand or with UniFFI.
Part 7 of the Rust + NDK on Android series: hold Rust state across JNI calls with the Box::into_raw handle pattern, tie its lifetime to a Kotlin AutoCloseable, keep local and global references under control, and find the native leaks LeakCanary cannot see.
Paglipat used to be Next.js, Ktor, and Kotlin Multiplatform. The live product is a static Astro site, two Go services, and a Flutter app on Android and iOS. This is that architecture: what I ran into with Compose Multiplatform on mobile and with Ktor, why I prefer Astro, Go, and Flutter for this product, and the end-to-end work the stack still shows.
Part 6 of the Rust + NDK on Android series: the three ways to move bytes across JNI, the rules that make each one safe, the modified UTF-8 string trap, and how to design APIs that cross the boundary rarely.
Part 5 of the Rust + NDK on Android series: lock an Android Bitmap's pixels from Rust, run grayscale and box blur filters in place over the raw buffer, and set up a benchmark against idiomatic Kotlin that you can trust.
Part 4 of the Rust + NDK on Android series: make one Gradle command compile your Rust crates with cargo-ndk, map cargo profiles onto Android build types, and ship four ABIs while every user downloads exactly one.
The opening post of the From Mobile to AI/ML series: why I'm moving from 12 years of production mobile engineering into machine learning, why my background is an asset rather than a restart, and the honest six-phase roadmap I'm following, foundations first. No pretending I have always known this.
Part 3 of the Rust + NDK on Android series: annotate a Rust crate with UniFFI proc macros, generate typed Kotlin bindings inside the Gradle build, and judge when hand-written JNI is still the better tool.
Part 2 of the Rust + NDK on Android series: how JNI connects Kotlin's external fun to a Rust function, explained token by token. After reading you can write, export, and verify your own Rust JNI functions passing primitives, strings, and booleans.
Churust brings Ktor's approachable developer experience to Rust: a familiar routing DSL, installable plugins, typed handlers, secure defaults, and a complete feature set built on tokio, hyper, and rustls.
Part 1 of the Rust + NDK on Android series: install rustup, the four Android targets and cargo-ndk, build a Rust .so into an APK, call it from Kotlin, and verify the library with llvm-nm and llvm-readelf.
A practical guide to Rust on Android: wiring a Rust core into your app with cargo-ndk, JNI and UniFFI, debugging it with logcat, ndk-stack and LLDB, and the verified numbers behind why Google now lands more new native code in Rust than in C++.
What a senior Android engineer actually looks for in a code review, in priority order: correctness first, then architecture, runtime behaviour, tests, and whether the pull request is even reviewable. Small reviews, under about 400 lines, catch 70 to 90 percent of the defects.
Probation runs both ways. If you join a company and find a toxic or bad-fit culture, leaving early is a smart move, and often the right one. How to read the signs, build a runway, and get out before the damage.
One-on-ones are the dedicated, employee-centric check-ins where engineering managers drive growth, clear blockers, and build trust. Here is what the research says and how to run them well.
A practical guide to Kotlin's inline, crossinline, noinline, reified, and where keywords, with code examples showing when each one matters and how they fit together.
A practical guide to deciding when C++ belongs in an Android app. Learn the real use cases (audio, games, heavy compute, cross-platform cores), the hidden costs of the NDK and JNI, and a simple decision framework so you reach for native code only when it actually pays off.
After a redundancy or stalled senior-level job hunt, repeated rejections turn impostor reading into learned helplessness. The chain, the science, and the climb out for software developers.
Introducing Klarinet, an open-source Kotlin Multiplatform audio SDK that provides low-latency playback, recording, 16 built-in effects, and file I/O across Android and Apple platforms with a single API.
Learn how modern C++ features like constexpr, std::atomic, std::span, and RAII patterns work together with Google Oboe library to build real-time, low-latency audio apps on Android.
Master the art of building production-grade Kotlin Multiplatform applications with shared business logic across Android, iOS, and Next.js while maintaining native UI fidelity on each platform
Master the different Job types in Kotlin Coroutines and learn when to use Job, SupervisorJob, CompletableJob, and NonCancellable for building robust asynchronous applications
An Android developer's journey building a travel platform with Kotlin Multiplatform for shared business logic, Ktor for backend APIs, Supabase for auth/data, and Next.js for web including why Compose Multiplatform for Web was quickly discarded
How combining Rust's computational power with SwiftUI's elegance creates a blazing-fast financial charting app
Real-world case study: Achieving 6–80x speedups on technical indicators with Rust native code
Call C++ directly from Swift on iOS and tvOS with no Objective-C++ bridge. Here is the module map, the one build setting, and a working SwiftUI example.
Picture this: a 10-year veteran engineer, respected by peers, known for shipping complex systems… who suddenly tanks a technical interview.
The "Add Two Numbers" problem on LeetCode is a classic linked list manipulation problem that comes up a lot in job interviews. This problem…
This problem is considered a Medium difficulty level.
Kotlin Multiplatform supports tvOS as a Kotlin/Native target, so you can share business logic with Apple TV. Here is how it fits together, with a sample repo.
Hey, fellow devs! Are you interviewing for a Flutter developer? Dart? and/or perhaps are on the brink of embarking on a new Flutter project…
If you are reading these lines is because you already know Kotlin and you are already or are expecting to face an interview in this field…
In 2014 I had the huge privilege of starting my career in software development as a Junior Game Developer coming from a ZERO commercial…
Converting build.gradle (Groovy) to build.gradle.kts (Kotlin DSL) is mostly mechanical: parentheses, double quotes, and equals signs. Here is the conversion by example, plus what changed by 2026.
ConstraintLayout works in Jetpack Compose through the constraintlayout-compose library. Here is how to translate your XML skills to createRefs, constrainAs, and linkTo, and when it is actually worth reaching for in 2026.
Picture-in-Picture keeps your video playing in a floating window after users leave the app. Here is a five-step Kotlin implementation, updated for the Android 12 auto-enter approach.
IntentService and JobIntentService are both deprecated. Here is what actually runs your Android background work in 2026, and how to migrate cleanly to WorkManager.
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