Posts about Software Engineering

The Problem Ok, straight up; I have a real bugbear with Utils classes. To me, they’re a real code smell. Like month old milk kinda smell. I gag a little. And like old milk, it only gets worse over time. Let’s back up a bit; what do I mean by a Utils class? They can…

Like most Android projects, our UI tests use the Espresso framework to perform interactions on our test app, check an element is on the page, check the text of an element etc. Although our tests worked they were quite hard to read and it would take a bit of time for someone who hadn’t seen…

Searching for properties is one of the pillars on which our portal is built. What we used to understand as search before May 2018 was a set of rules to describe a binary logic – a given property either matches a user’s search or it doesn’t. As simple as that. But there’s much more to…

As software developers, we often want to talk to services over the internet, usually using HTTP.  However, it’s now very common to see online services using HTTPS – an extension of HTTP which enables secure communications over a network.  This move has made life more interesting for developers who want to interact with these services. …