The handover that actually worked, and the four I botched first
A handover is not a document dump. The test is whether the team ships without you in week one.
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The rate conversation I kept getting wrong
Quoting a day rate invites a comparison to salary. Quoting against the outcome changes the question.
Four tools, four questions, and none of them answers another's
Layout Inspector, the compiler reports, Macrobenchmark and the system trace each answer a different question. Using the wrong one produces confident, wrong conclusions, and knowing the split is most of performance work.
Scope creep is a contract problem, not a communication problem
Being clearer about the scope does not stop it changing. A written change process does.
The fixed-price project that cost me three weeks of unpaid work
Fixed price transfers all estimation risk to you. Price it or change the contract shape.
Nine pillars have quietly been teaching you one optimisation
Reading a state value later — in a lambda rather than as a parameter — moves the invalidation from composition to layout or draw. It is the single highest-leverage Compose optimisation, and it has one shape.
I wrote 400 lines to avoid learning one SQL feature
Window functions replaced a hand-rolled grouping pass. The cost of not learning was paid in code.
The onboarding doc that doubled as a test of our own setup
If a new engineer cannot get running from the doc in a day, the doc is not the problem.
Baseline Profiles fix a problem recomposition counts can't see
Baseline Profiles ship a list of hot methods so ART compiles them at install time instead of interpreting them on first run. They typically cut startup and first-scroll jank by 20-30% and are unrelated to Compose recomposition.
The keyboard covered the field, and the fix was not imePadding
Insets, soft-input mode, scroll position and focus order are four systems, and three are configured outside Compose.
The bug was in the requirements, and three people implemented it faithfully
Correct code against a wrong spec passes every test.
A route is a string until you make it a type
String routes fail at runtime on a typo or a missing argument. Serializable types move both into the compiler.