Adrian Hall

Adrian Hall

Microsoft Program Manager by day; Mobile Developer by night

Recent posts

Tailwind Photos: The Splash Screen

August 15, 2019  11 minute read  

I’m building a demo Android app that is sort of like Instagram, but with some new cloud features (which I will mention as I go along) and a different design to make it different. I plan to build this with the latest architecture for Android, in Kotlin, and learning a bunch of Android dev tricks along the way. As with everything, there is a start, and this is that post. I’m not going to tell you how to build your first Android app - there are plenty of tutorials on that. I’m just going to ...

Building an efficient Logger in TypeScript

June 30, 2019  6 minute read  

Just about every project needs a logging system. In the early days of development, you need to output data to the console so you aren’t setting breakpoints in your code all over the place (or you are running the code in the browser, where breakpoints are more difficult). Later on, you want logging to let you know where people are spending their time, or how much usage a particular feature gets. It also helps with diagnosing problems early so that you can get ahead of the issues. There are...

Documenting open-source projects

February 12, 2019  6 minute read  

Over the last 25 years, I’ve contributed to and written a lot of technical documentation, whether it is in the form of official documentation, blogs, tutorials, or books. Tech writers, who have nothing but access to engineers to work with, turn conversations into a guide that is equally suitable for a complete beginner and an expert. If you are an engineer, you definitely need to institute a “Tech Writer Appreciation Day”. That being said, learning research is rooted in psychology. The way w...

Where do you start with GraphQL? I asked four engineers

February 06, 2019  6 minute read  

There has been a lot of discussion on GraphQL. In time, it may rank up there alongside REST as a defining protocol for client-server computing. It is at least trending that way right now. REST has got longevity going for it — years of top engineers thinking about the best ways to structure a REST-based API and thoughts on how to handle it. GraphQL hasn’t got the longevity. It does, however, have senior professional developers who constantly think about APIs and development in order to answer ...

What AWS service should you use to publish a web site?

January 31, 2019  4 minute read  

There are at least five different services you can use to publish a web site on AWS: Amazon S3 + Amazon Cloudfront AWS Amplify Console Amazon Lightsail AWS Elastic Beanstalk Do-it-yourself compute / storage / network stack Which one of these do you choose? Well, “it depends” is a great answer to this question, but I hope that this article will demystify the strengths of each choice and give you a roadmap to make a choice. This article is not designed for the person who knows a ...