Adrian Hall

Adrian Hall

Microsoft Program Manager by day; Mobile Developer by night

Recent posts

Integrate Analytics into your Android applications with AWS Amplify

September 04, 2018  5 minute read  

I’ve become a big fan of Kotlin development for my Android apps. I also think that analytics should be integrated into every single app I write. I’ve covered integrating Amazon Pinpoint before via AWS Mobile Hub. Recently, AWS Amplify announced an updated CLI that provides support for native applications and bypasses the need to use the AWS web console for creating resources. Naturally, I wanted to try it out. Integrating analytics is now really easy. Here is how I do it: Start Local You do...

Build a GraphQL Service the easy way with AWS Amplify Model Transforms

August 29, 2018  8 minute read  

Creating a functional GraphQL API is hard. You have to create a GraphQL schema, decide on authentication and database structures, implement the schema in a GraphQL service, wire up the authentication, hook up the database sources, ensure the whole thing is scalable, worry about logging and monitoring, and then write your app. AWS AppSync helps you with everything except the GraphQL schema and the app. Now, AWS Amplify is helping you with the GraphQL schema by introducing model transforms. Th...

Native Android Development with AWS Amplify

August 27, 2018  5 minute read  

Up until this point, the experience for developing native iOS and Android apps with AWS has been a bit fragmented. There was AWS Mobile Hub; a web console that makes it easy to provision serverless cloud resources and get a configuration file back that describe the endpoints your app needs to communicate with. But because it is a web-based console, it requires the developer to switch back and forth between their local development machine and the browser. There is also the awsmobile CLI, but t...

How to deploy a GraphQL API on AWS with the Serverless Framework

August 14, 2018  8 minute read  

In previous posts, we’ve explored how to deploy a GraphQL service based on [AWS AppSync] and Amazon DynamoDB using [AWS CloudFormation]. The articles reinforce how automatic and repeatable deployments are central to moving towards a DevOps mindset.

Converting types with Room and Kotlin

August 08, 2018  5 minute read  

I’ve been working on a personal project, trying to get to grips with the various Android Architecture Components and Kotlin. One of the things I came up with was the requirement to deal with type conversion when using a SQLite database and the Room persistence library. Room is a nice abstraction to the internal SQLite database that converts models to tables within SQLite. It’s nice because it works alongside LiveData and RxJava to provide observable objects — when the database changes, the ob...