Articles by Trudy Firestone

Android has supported autoBackup for apps by default since Android 6, enabling users to backup app data automatically to Google Drive. Configuration for this backup could be added with backup rules, or it could be turned off entirely with autoBackup=false. This also allowed apps to configure device-to-device transfer (D2D transfer),…

Mismanaging resources is one of the easiest ways to bring down a production system. In a development environment, it’s easy to ignore open streams and temporary files, but at production scale, they can have a hugely negative impact. Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to overlook these issues while developing, even…

Error handling is important for many common operations—from dealing with user input to making network requests. An application shouldn’t crash just because a user enters invalid data or a web service returns a 500. Users expect software to gracefully handle errors, either in the background or with a user-friendly and…

I recently finished a project which required me to modify an annotation macro for Scala using the Scala Macros Paradise project. Because I was extensively modifying a macro that we were already using, I wanted to write tests to prevent breaking our current workflow and to check that the new…

When I was tasked with creating a presentation to share with my co-workers at our weekly tech talk, I chose to use LaTeX. While I briefly considered other tools, like Google Slides or PowerPoint, using LaTeX allowed me to easily separate the styling from my content and create my own…