Effective and efficient mobile engineering

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Effective and efﬁcient mobile engineering pratul kalia @prxtl uncommon.is

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Over the last 4 years…

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! 1. Contrasting with the Web 2. Product Design 3. The Platforms 4. Culture

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Contrasting with the Web

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Signiﬁcant reduction in speed. ➔ Tightly coupled UI ➔ Changes to the backend can cause signiﬁcant impact

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No dynamic updates! ➔ Closed “store” model ➔ React Native maintenance overhead

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Wait… how many versions? ➔ Multiple versions will be “live” ◆ Versioned APIs ◆ Remote kill-switch

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Product design

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Consistency is an expectation. ➔ Even from inexperienced users! ➔ Push from Google/Apple ◆ Back button exit conﬁrmation ◆ Slide to go back

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Low tolerance towards jank. ➔ Performance is important ➔ Perceived speed is important too

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Mobile devices have personal information. ➔ User privacy is critical ➔ Engineers are as responsible as the Product Designers

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The platforms

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Badly behaved apps have no place. ➔ Memory/CPU constraints ➔ Disk thrashing is real

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Constant learning is imperative. ➔ Play Services division ➔ RecyclerView prefetch ➔ Read SMS-OTP API

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Don’t fake optimise. ➔ Splash screen delays ➔ Protobuf and JSON

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Security theater is a concern. ➔ Certiﬁcate pinning ➔ Protecting API endpoints ➔ Client-side encryption

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Culture

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You cannot ﬁx with technology what is broken by culture. me.

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git is not Dropbox. ➔ Rollbacks ➔ Bisecting ➔ Hooks

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What is your bus factor? ➔ Documentation ➔ … Documentation ➔ … … Documentation

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Are you measuring the metrics? ➔ Data driven design much? ➔ Performance impact

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Effort does not mean progress. ➔ bugﬁx : feature ratio? ➔ The Mythical Man Month  Fred Brooks ➔ Peopleware — Productive Projects and Teams  Tom DeMarco & Tim Lister

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eof