I’m happy to share some projects and highlights from the dev community that I found interesting. We’ll take a look at an awesome example Android app, how to use the :has() CSS selector, technical interview questions to ask a prospective employer, and a great read about battling GitHub’s copilot.
Pokedex Android app example
If you’re and Android developer and looking for inspiration or guidelines on modern Android development. The project is maintained by skydoves and is gathering quite a bit of interest and traction on GitHub at the moment.
The Pokedex repo demonstrates modern Android development with Hilt, Material Motion, Coroutines, Flow, Jetpack (Room, ViewModel) based on MVVM architecture. At the time of writing, the project has 5.7k GitHub stars and has just published version 1.1.0.
Read Emery Berger on coping with copilot
GitHub’s AI-based Copilot tool went public this summer. It’s an amazing tool for software developers. But students armed with it will be bringing Uzis to a knife fight.
Emery Berger is Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has has written about how difficult it is to fight plagiarism in computer science assignments given the quality and ease of use of AI tools like GitHub’s copilot.
Their blog post is a great read on how effective copilot is at completing CS assignments and different ways computer science courses will have to adjust to a post-copilot world.
Using :has() as a CSS parent selector
This post from Jen Simmons takes a hands-on look at what web developers can do with the :has() pseudo-class.
figure:has(figcaption) {
background: white;
padding: 0.6rem;
}
maybe we want to apply different styles to a form depending on the state of one of its input fields. How about giving a sidebar one background color if there’s a certain component in that sidebar, and a different background color if that component is not present?
For a detailed overview of ways to use :has() in CSS, see Jen Simmons’ post on webkit.org and this post on MDN.
InterviewThis questions for employers
InterviewThis is an open source list of developer questions to ask prospective employers during the hiring process. The repo is a nice reference if you’re interviewing for a technical role and looking for some inspiration on what to ask during interviews. Here’s an excerpt from the repo:
## Developer Coordination / Team Interactions
- How is your team structured?
- How many developers do you currently have?
- How large are your team groups?
- Vertical slices or Horizontal?
- Are teams seated together?
- Do teams have isolated areas from the rest of the staff / other teams?
- How frequently do team members find themselves in meetings?
- Do your developers pair program on a regular basis?
...
Wrap up
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, drop them below.
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