Zac Sweers

It's Nothing

Nothing is a special type in Kotlin often used for errors. Is that all it's useful for though?

Butterfly Effects

I like learning new things. That's a sufficiently vague claim, but it's intentionally broad. There's different conduits for learning: open source libraries, side projects, any sort of learning pursuit outside of your day-to-day work. I'm a big believer that these pursuits, however trivial, usually

Life

How to Take a Six Month Sabbatical

There's a saying someone told me this summer - there's three pillars in life: health, time, and money. At any given moment, most people have at most two. If you're

Dagger Party Tricks

Dagger Party Tricks: Refactoring

Techniques for refactoring Dagger code with ease.

Dagger Party Tricks

Dagger Party Tricks: Private Dependencies

Leveraging Dagger qualifiers to hide intermediate dependencies.

Dagger Party Tricks

Dagger Party Tricks: Deferred OkHttp Initialization

Leveraging Dagger to defer OkHttp's initialization to a background thread and buy back precious startup time.

Moshi

A Closer Look At Moshi 1.9

Moshi 1.9 is here! It's been in the oven for a year and excited to have it out there. This post takes a closer look at its changes.

Kotlin

@JvmDefault: More Useful Than You Think

@JvmDefault is an annotation + compiler flag in Kotlin to enable using Java 8 default interface methods. It does more than it leads on though! This post explores some other bytecode optimizations you can gain with it as well as some hidden behaviors you should be aware of.

Announcements

New blog!

Welcome to my new blog! I've been thinking about this awhile for a few reasons. Medium's increasingly heavy-handed and frankly annoying monetization strategies.Wanting something a bit more personable. Here I can have a speaking page with past talks, (eventually) projects, and link my

API Design

API Design Case Studies: Intersection Types

My team recently cleaned up an API in an internal storage library. While it’s a simple case, it covers a couple interesting language tools and tradeoffs. Let’s dig

Renderscript

Detecting Blurriness with Renderscript

About three years ago, I worked on a project at Uber to try to detect when photos taken client-side were blurry. The goal was to be able to fail fast, ask the user to retake them if necessary, and save the cycle of waiting

AutoDispose

Announcing AutoDispose 1.0

About two years ago, just after migrating my CatchUp side project to RxJava 2, I started a branch called “boundObservers” to try out an idea I had for RxLifecycle-style automatic

RxJava

RxAndroid's New Async API

“RxAndroid meets VSYNC rubber” — Icon used with permission from Ray WenderlichRxAndroid 2.1.0 has a new APIAndroidSchedulers#from(Looper looper, boolean async) This new async parameter affects Android APIs 16 and newer, and can significantly improve UI performance when set to true if

Moshi

Moshi Kotlin Code Gen: An Open Source Story

For context — see the previous post I wrote about Moshi’s new Kotlin code gen support. This blog is a somewhat technical, mostly personal account of how it came to be. OriginsMoshi’s Kotlin code gen has an interesting backstory. It started as a

Moshi

Exploring Moshi’s Kotlin Code Gen

Moshi’s namesake: a Frenchie named MoshiIntroductionMoshi 1.6 was recently released with a brand new Kotlin code gen artifact. It’s an alternative to the existing reflection-based artifact, and in my opinion one of the most interesting recent evolutions in Kotlin’s open

Fitness

An update on the weight loss and fitness work!

Face before/afterIn rather classic fashion, after being sick this weekend I’ve started focusing on another weight cut to get toward my previous new goal of 155. Today marks the first time since 2010 that I’ve been under 160lbs, and entry to

Health

Journey from 205 to 165

Between December 2017 and February 2018, I lost 40lbs (~18kg).

CatchUp

Catching Up on CatchUp: API Quirks

I also wanted to do some practice with using different APIs. This blog is an account of how each one’s special in its own way. There’s no real overarching technical takeaway here other than some neat clever solutions along the way.

Reflection

Year in Review — 2017

This is my first time writing one of these, bear with me. 2017 was a very different year for me, yet in a way sort of getting back to myself. 2017 was a year where I started doing things for myself again. 2017 requires

CatchUp

Catching Up on CatchUp: A Dagger-powered Plugin System

For context — see the introduction post. This is part of a series of technical deep dives into different things I’ve learned along the way. This post assumes some prior knowledge of Dagger. In CatchUp, the principle architecture is that you have a set

CatchUp

Catching up on CatchUp: Introduction

TL;DR I wrote an app called CatchUp for personal use and now I’m releasing/open sourcing it. Learned a ton along the way, gonna blog about the things

travel

A mostly incomplete list of personal recommendations for a trip to Austin

I’ve verbally said this blog to lots of friends over the past few years going to Austin for a trip, and decided it was time I write it down. I’m going to call this mostly incomplete because there’s no way I