Review of 2023

The first week of 2024 is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the previous year and set goals for the upcoming one. The 2023 was pretty challenging for me in multiple areas of my life, like mental state and content creation. I’d like to share a concise recap of last year and share plans for 2024 in this article. 

I want to start with activities which helped me to improve my mental state:

1. Morning reading
2. Mental walks (no music & podcasts)
3. Journalling
4. No phone first 2 hours of the day

Articles

In 2023, I published 8 articles:

• New Logcat: 5 Features for Effective Android App Debugging
• Jetpack Compose: DropDown Menu
• How to test Android App Shortcuts
• Jetpack Compose: Switch
• Get access to string resources in UiAutomator
• Regional Preferences in Android 14
• Jetpack Compose: Pull to Refresh
• Not all UI tests are the same

The alexzh.com received over 150k page views 🎉. (Last year, the yearly result was around 112k).

Android Development and Testing Tips

In 2023, I continued to post tips about Android development and testing on X (Twitter), LinkedIn and Mastodon.

Here are 3 most popular tips:

Do you want to sort your dependencies alphabetically or variables inside the class?

Here's the simple solution:
1. Select multiple lines.
2. Click "Edit/Sort Lines".
3. Enjoy the result.#AndroidDev #AndroidStudio #IntelliJIDEATips pic.twitter.com/Sa0cU2E6zP

— Alex Zhukovich (@Alex_Zhukovich) November 8, 2023

Jetpack Compose Tip:

Make use of the "ContentAlpha" object to easily access default alpha levels for Material components. It includes:
• high (text in a selected TextField)
• medium (placeholder text)
• disabled (disabled components)#AndroidDev #JetpackCompose pic.twitter.com/NfQxC0g9o4

— Alex Zhukovich (@Alex_Zhukovich) August 25, 2023

Jetpack Compose Tip:

Did you know that you can combine multiple preview annotations and use a single annotation to generate multiple previews?#JetpackCompose #AndroidDev pic.twitter.com/X04RQY37Rh

— Alex Zhukovich (@Alex_Zhukovich) August 10, 2023

Public speaking

This year I gave workshops and talks about UI testing:

• Full-day Workshop: Modern Android UI Testing @ AppDevCon (slides, project)
• Common Mistakes in UI Testing @ AppDevCon (slides)
• 4h workshop: UI Testing of Jetpack Compose Apps @ Droidcon Italy
• UI Testing of Jetpack Compose Apps @ Droidcon Italy (slides)

Plans for 2024

Previous year was pretty chaotic for me and I want to make this year much more consistent. My focus for 2024 is writing and I want to deliver more high-quality content on my blog and in social media. 

Here are my main goals:

• Publish a book
• Release 15+ articles
• Publish 10 videos

Follow my X (Twitter), LinkedIn and Mastodon accounts if you want to get more content about mobile development and testing.