Hello folks, it’s that time of the year (or maybe a little late) where I am supposed to reflect on my past year and make some new year resolution goals. Since I couldn’t write the year in review for the previous year 2019, so this article is going to about that. Next week, I will write the year in review of the year 2020, which has been a lot challenging for everyone around the globe due to Covid-19 pandemic.

I created the outline of this review and planned it about a year ago back in January 2020. But its been…

😍 Howdy people! Welcome to the 6th edition of Wajahat Karim — Bits & Bytes.

Today’s edition is a very special one for me as I got featured by Google for their #AndroidDevJourney series. As part of this series, Google will share my life story of how I got into Android development and how it has changed my life over the years until the point of becoming Pakistan’s 1st Google Developers Expert in Android.

✍ Articles

I am slowly getting back to my usual once-a-week writing flow. A big thanks to you amazing folks for reading my words and sending feedback my…

NOTE: The Jetpack Compose team doesn’t recommend passing Parcelable in the navigation composable routes. Instead the route structure in Navigation Compose has the best analog with a restful web service so developers should use bookDetails/{bookid} not bookDetails/{a whole set of fields representing a book} which is essentially what passing a Parcelable is doing. There’s a new issue created to update the official Google Docs to explain the best practices for passing complex arguments like Parcelable in the composable routes. You can see it on this Issue Tracker link.

While trying to create a simple demo UI of a books app…

It was evening. And I was trying to fix a runtime crash for an Android project at work. I was fully focused in the debugging and was going through breakpoints line by line. As a developer, you can understand that this is a very sensitive moment where need to observe bunch of variable values and figure out what’s happening with those values.

I was fully invested in these random lines that suddenly my 2 year toddler baby grabbed my hand on computer mouse and tried to get me somewhere. …

A major result of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the rapid widespread adoption of telehealth technologies. Usage of apps like Zocdoc have grown dramatically, and have allowed patients to connect with their doctors virtually through text chat and audio/video calls. The demand for these and similar services has skyrocketed, with no indication it will slow down, even after the pandemic is over.

As an indie Android developer, advanced chat features like read receipts or push notifications in your healthcare app can be tricky and therefore time-consuming to implement which is why I look to CometChat.

CometChat is a flexible developer…

Update — 11th February 2021

To better support the community in this migration, JFrog has extended the JCenter new package versions submission deadline through March 31st 2021. This means that open source library creators who have libraries hosted on JCenter through Bintray can add more versions till March 31st 2021.

For normal Android app developers, the JCenter repository will keep serving packages for 12 months until February 1st 2022. Only the JCenter REST API and UI will be sunsetted on May 1st 2021. This means that if your app uses jcenter maven for any third-party libraries, then your app can…

Every year on 1st January, people around the world celebrate new year. But for me, it’s been different for 2 years. My 2 year old son was born on 1st January, 2019. What a coincidence that maybe, but its been really amazing.

Before this little beautiful bundle of joy, aka a “top class toddler”, I would have never imagined the things I witnessed, feelings I observed, and days I enjoyed. I realized that a baby in the house changes the whole dynamic of the house and its culture.

A new baby is like the beginning of all things — wonder…

For the past year, me and my partner Danish Amjad have been running FlutterPub publication on the side with our lives. Although this year 2020 have been very hard and challenging due to Covid-19, but we are happy with the progress FlutterPub have made.

With over 13,000 followers and more than 12,000 views a day, this publication has got hundreds of awesome articles on Flutter by amazing writers around the world. But as time passed away, we realized that when there are more active publications about Flutter such as Flutter Community etc. then it doesn’t make sense to have other…