Android Gradle build system is a very essential part of the android development process and understanding how to optimize your build for better performance cannot be over emphasized. The Gradle build has evolved in recent times with version catalogs but let’s first go back in history to understand certain limitations with past implementations of this key component. https://medium.com/media/bfbbcd4a5d3731ea8947a92c56b41650/href In the ancient age, the first implementation which came with your android studio setup was written in groovy. Let’s zoom in to find out the benefits and limitations ..read more

When I first saw async/await Swift code, I was amazed at how elegant and concise it was. In practice, however, I often found that I had to wrap asynchronous functions in a Taskto be able to cancel them. This meant keeping a reference to each individual task, which can quickly become tedious, especially since they involve generics. In this article I will explore ways to improve the ergonomics of task cancellation by leveraging Combine’s AnyCancellable. Cancellation in Swift concurrency Before we get into the weeds, let’s briefly recap how cancellation in Swift concurrency works. The Swift Prog ..read more

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash At Mobimeo, we see innovation and creativity as key ingredients in a recipe for success. Recently, we put these intentions into practice with a fully-remote hackathon. If you ever want to set up something similar and look for inspiration, here are our four things to consider when preparing and running a remote hackathon. Tap into creativity from diverse sources. To make the hackathon a success, preparation is everything. Make sure to get everyone on board and to include all ideas. In preparation for our hackathon, everyone was welcome to pit ..read more

Photo by Tim Arbaevon CanvaIntroduction On one of our projects, I use Moshi for JSON parsing with Retrofit. Moshi is a modern JSON library for Java and Kotlin. It makes it easy to parse JSON into Java and Kotlin classes. The real-life problem Recently I faced an issue where one of the API calls in the app has no API versioning. We get public transport ticketing data from a 3rd party partner API, keeping in mind the API response needs to be stored as BLOB (VmState) because we send the same unmodified response back to them when the user eventually decides to buy the ticket. https ..read more

Why I went NUTS — and you should, too! Well, at least if you are working as a data analyst in Europe or for the European market, you should consider it. I am of course neither speaking of my mental health nor some salty snacks, but the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics — or in short: NUTS. This standard introduced by the EU in 2003 turned out to be really valuable for my work in several projects already. It is a simple setup best explained by the GIF below. © eurostat There are four levels of regions 0 through 3, which divide all European Union member states into ..read more

How to make tests fast and reliable by using virtual time Time matters For code compilation and test execution speed is critical. The faster you receive feedback as a developer, the better. With a growing team an interesting question emerges: How many commits per hour does your CI system allow? In early 2020 that number for us was 4. And the reason? Before merging to the main branch all unit tests must run successfully on a feature branch. The feature branch also needs to be up to date, containing all the commits from the main branch. Compilation and execution time was nearly 15  ..read more

Designing a GTFS Business Rule Engine — Part 2 In the first part of this blog post series, we sketched basic ideas and proposed a simple design for a DSL describing a match/transform processing pipeline for GTFS files. This was the occasion to have a nice high-level overview of the domain under discussion in this series and allowed us to scope the problem we want to address. It is now time to get to the heart of the matter, and to dive into an implementation of the discussed concepts. In this post, we will present a nice functional way of implementing a business rule engine for the DSL de ..read more

Let’s face it, tech interviews can be stressful and difficult to prepare for. Should you prepare for back-of-the-envelope calculations? Should you prepare to explain Bayesian Hyperparameter Optimization like you would to a five year old? Should you wear sneakers? In this post, we’ll go through the Mobimeo recruiting process from submitting your application all the way to receiving an offer. Position seems cool, but do I have to stop procrastinating and write a cover letter? Cover letters aren’t necessary. Actually, you can even leave out the CV if you’d rather send us your LinkedIn ..read more

In Swift, we can make most types decodable by adding the Decodable protocol. While Swift’s default decoding is sufficient in most cases, it leads to issues if simple enumerations are extended later on. This article demonstrates different approaches how to work around this issue, and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. The Problem Let’s say we are working on an app that allows you to book and pay for different modes of transportation, and we would like to configure from the backend which transport modes and payment methods are shown, and in which order. We c ..read more

MobiTech — The technology podcast by Mobimeo “Welcome to MobiTech, I am Vini, Engineering Lead at Mobimeo.” That is what you will hear at the beginning of each episode. But how did we get there? Read below the story behind our show. The idea As an enthusiastic podcast listener myself, I have always dreamed of having my own. Actually, as a child, my dream was to work on the radio, but that is a topic for another post. The course of life brought me here to Berlin and at the beginning of 2020 I started working on my goals for the year with my lead and the idea of a podcast came up. At t ..read more