Android Development: The Fail

So back in October I started the process of learning to do development for to android. Sadly, I am here today to admit that went poorly. This is my reflection on why it went badly and how I expect to better next time.

Problem 1: Me. Yup, that is right. The first problem I ran into was me. I have a lot of ideas for applications for Android and in general. The problem isn’t that I jumped right into development, it was when I jumped I landed in a spot that was over my head and that made me instantly frustrated. With in days of installing the tools and SDK my drive had died. I just got over whelmed with all the new that I didn’t take the time to learn.

Solution: While I hate doing the typical “Hello World” type apps, it is a necessary evil. It is the steps needed to ramp up understanding of the environmental. What I was trying to do was not hard but because I didn’t know the basics of Android development, it was difficult to find help. The process isn’t hard and takes a bit of time but ramping up is needed to keep from being overwhelmed.

Problem 2: Holy cow, embedded application development is slow. Let me be clear, development isn’t slow but getting you application to run via emulator or on a device is painful. When it takes a few minute for my application to run, this just kills the fun and drive to continue. Especially when learning. When I was waiting, it was so easy to get side tracked.

Solution: I hear the sdk and emulators are getting better and faster. I am also in needed of a new PC which is pushing 5 years old or at least an upgrade or 2. Other than that, I am not sure what else I can do.

So the biggest problem was me. Once I can get through them, it should be pretty easy to continue. I plan on starting this again as I think there is some positive applications I could contribute to the community. However this is on hold for the moment. Need to get caught up on technologies related to my job, mainly ASP.NET MVC

Written by Tony Gemoll. Shorter opinions found on twitter