WHY STOCK/SHARES ISN'T A SUBSTITUE FOR SALARY

There’s been an increasing trend in Stock/Share Options, RSUs, and employee share purchase schemes, some of which are hyped up to give the impression that they’re worth more than your base salary. While, in some cases, this is true, there are as many examples of where it definitely is not. When you join the companies who use these schemes as part of your compensation package you are usually given a monetary value of shares which gets converted into an actual number of shares around when you get your first pay packet.

ANDROID T DEVELOPER PREVIEW 1 AND THE AOSP

Google recently release Android 13 (T) Developer Preview 1, and, while there are times when a lot of noise is made about Android being “Open Source”, what gets pushed to the Android Open Source Project for developer previews gives us some signals on how this is mostly an afterthought rather than a core part of Androids development. I’ve tried building the Developer Previews of 12 (S) and 13 (T) and both were pretty much unusable.

THE UK EV INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS A LOT OF WORK

After an attempt to do a 170 mile round trip in my Nissan Leaf, it has now been consigned to a life of “less than 100-mile total distance” trips only. The first leg was fine up until the charge point. The initially selected InstaVolt charger was “temporarily out of service”, and a nearby ChargeYourCar charger was unfathomable to get working as the “Pay by Phone” phone number on the unit wasn’t working.

SO I DECIDED TO GET AN EV

After driving traditional combustion engine cars for more years that I care to mention I decided to take the plunge into the world of EVs. Given the moral positives and government encouragement I thought it’d be an easy switch; Go to a garage, trade my car in, arrange a wallbox installation, wait, profit. Unfortunately I was very wrong about how consumer friendly the process of switching is. This wasn’t a spur of the moment thing.

DISAPPOINTED WITH THE PIXEL 6

Having been a mobile ‘phone owner for more than a couple of decades, and recently “upgrading” to a Pixel 6 due to my old Pixel 3 going out of the security update support, I have to say I’m disappointed with where we’re at with Android phones. I’ve been writing code for Android since its public release. I owned a G1, I’ve owned companies which helped device manufacturers, so I understand some of the challenges.

WHY YOU SHOULDN'T AUTO-INCREMENT YOUR DEPENDENCIES

Recently I saw this tweet which advocates for something I consider a dangerous development practice; Not fixing your builds to a version of its dependencies. There are three main reasons why I consider this dangerous; Supply chain attacks (e.g. 5 in https://dni.gov/files/NCSC/documents/supplychain/Software_Supply_Chain_Attacks.pdf) It breaks the Reproducible Builds principle (Tag X won’t build the code shipped to users after any new library release) It could cause unexpected build breakages unrelated to code changes.

ANDROID AUTOMOTIVE OS S

As part of my work at Snapp Automotive I’ve been helping create tools and process to make Android Automotive OS development easier. The tools and processes we have allowed us to create an Android Automotive OS version ‘S’ emulator in less than a day once Google had released the Android ‘S’ source code. Here are some screenshots showing the previous release (R, on the left), and the new version (S, on the right);

WHAT IS "LEVEL WORTHY"?

Over the weekend Gergely Orosz tweeted about “Promotion Driven Development”, which is a problem in many large tech companies, and is tightly coupled with one of my least favourite concepts from my time in large tech; Whether everything you do is “Level Worthy”, and how that shapes your work even if you’re not looking to be promoted. What are levels? For those of you who haven’t experienced large companies, they tend to grade people based on specified skill levels (the various levels are sometimes called a “Career Ladder”).

ADB BACKUP REMOVAL

Today I’ve submitted a patch to the AOSP to continue something which was probably, externally, one of the least popular things I did while I was at Google; Start eradicating adb backup support from Android devices. Why? The reason is I think it’s dangerous. Not for everyone, certainly not for a majority of folk, but for a small number of people there is a use case which I see as having potentially very serious consequences; Whistle-blowers, dissidents, and potentially even journalists reporting from less than friendly countries.

WORKING WITH ANDROID FIRMWARE

Occasionally I get asked “How do I make my own Android build?”. In this post I’m going to give you some tips and information which will hopefully give you a better idea of what’s needed. Step 1: Check your setup First off you’re going to need a machine capable of running Linux and has at least 500 GB of disk space and 16 GB of RAM. I’ve written a post before about what type of hardware is ideal, but, if you want to just test the water, you can use any machine with those specs.