Underground Kingz - Super Tight Album Cover Hear me out. I know, cheesy title to say the least, but it’s what came to mind when I decided I wanted to write about this quandry of mine.

Front(end) Back(end), or Side to Side?

That quandry is this (if you haven’t figured it out from the title by now): What stack to work with? Honestly? I don’t know. I really enjoy backend development where I’m working on API’s, database integrations, and the like. I really do. I find it to be an interesting set of problems to solve, but I often wonder if I pidgeonholed myself into thinking that I had to be a backend developer because I’m not an artist or designer. Of course all the devs I know are back end developers, but does that mean I have to be one? Of course it doesn’t, but I’m sure it does mean something. I mean, I really like solving logic puzzles as opposed to converting designs into usable code, but at the same time, I sure do like seeing a project through from start to finish.

What’s a boy to do?

I wonder if there’s a middle ground? Maybe working as a full stack developer? I dunno. I don’t really like writing HTML/CSS and I have a preconceived notion that Javascript was written by the devil himself. I mean seriously, have you watched Wat? If you haven’t, I’ll wait. Well worth the 4m 17s of your life. Promise. Yes, even if you don’t write code, it’s quite hilarious. Gary Bernhardt has just a great presentation sense about him.

Back to the point. Full stack is mainly considered someone who works on the front and back end of a web app. From what I’ve seen, this has become mainly a Javascript world. One language to rule them all, right? What could go wrong? I’m sure a 1000 different things, but that’s not the point here. I have a horrible preconceived notion of hating on Javascript and would rather not write any more of it than I have to. So, what’s a boy to do…?

Side-to-Side Mobile Development

I don’t know if I’ve decided, but I’m toying around the idea of getting back into mobile dev. Specifically on Android. “Back into you say? You’ve done mobile development before? Why Android?” Yes, I’ve done some mobile dev work in the past. I created an Android app for the Blackberry Playbook back when Blackberry was trying to rework it’s mobile offering. They had a runtime added to it’s BB OS that could run Android apps. While this was an interesting forray into the 21st century, it didn’t play out well for RIM.

Blackberry Playbook tablet

Anyway, I wrote an app to get a free tablet because free tablet, duh? I learned a lot doing so, even though it ended up being pretty simple. Basically I digested an RSS feed for a WebComic I was binging at the time and then pulled the image from the webcomic, placed it into an ImageView. It also pulled the subtitle, similar to XKCD and placed it on the bottom of the image. You could flip through all available strips that were published. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot of fun and was my first experience going from scratch to published with a piece of software.

With all that said, that leaves one question unanswered: Why Android? Sure, I could easily say I have some experience in it, therefore it’s the logical choice. Or I could say that I’ve been an Android enthusiast for quite some time. I even developed off an Android tablet for a few years for goodness sake. But in reaility, it’s because I just like their development workflow better. I’ve played around with Apple’s setup. Swift is a great language, much better than working in Java, but Kotlin seems to be pretty good, too. While I don’t have more than a couple of hours of experience writing it, I’d say it’s a suitable replacement for Java. Here’s hoping I can avoid getters and setters. We’ll see. I’m not that far into my journey.

If you’d like to follow along I’ll be posting my code on GitHub and will be blogging about it here.

Until next time!