In this post we'll discuss scheduling notifications in Android using JobIntentService & BroadcastReceiver.

For context, we'll be scheduling these notifications for records - contacts with a name, phone number, and email address - stored in the app via Room. We will set a start date and time, as well as a recurrence frequency for the notifications. The notifications will also carry intents, so that when clicked they launch an activity (phone call) with contextual information from the associated contact (their phone number).

If you've ever tried to do things, chances are you've wanted to do them. I'm going to talk a bit about habits, mindsets, and tips & tricks that have helped me stay motivated in moving towards large & difficult goals over time.

In this post we'll explore enabling users to select from a list of their android phone contacts & importing data from them into your own application. We'll be using Room to store contacts, Recyclerviews with LiveData to display both a list of contacts from the phone to select for import and display contacts that have been imported, and databinding.

In my limited experience enjoying dance as a beginner, I've had a few eye-opening moments which really helped me improve & understand just what the heck dance is about. I've collected few of these observations into this short post for the enjoyment of other beginning dancers out there wondering what they don't know they don't know.

Like many of us, I work at a desk staring at a computer. Also like many of us, I spend a bunch of my free time staring at a screen I hold in my hand. If you're anything like me & the aforementioned "many of us", years of these habits have not been great for your posture.

As someone for whom both a screen-centric career and physicall wellness are very important, I decided to finally take this seriously and do something about it this year. In doing this, I learned a couple things which I've put into this short post for anyone who might also benefit.

This post contains some tips & thoughts on the exercise portion of fitness that I've picked up in my own life. These points focus on our nature as human beings with bodies and minds, and what I've found to be helpful notes on working on fitness as humans, with all the limitations and benefits that entails. This is geared towards newcomers and those that don't already have effective workout programs they have yielded gains from.

Disclaimer - I have no official fitness qualifications or training. I only have my own experience, and my own track record of being a fit person who loves fitness and has set out & achieved many of their own fitness goals. In the twelve odd years of my fitness journey, from cross country to calisthenics & yoga, I've run a marathon, held a hand stand for 60 seconds, & held a full planche for 15 seconds - I'm working on flexibility with the goal of being able to do the front splits next. With that out of the way, here are a few tips & observations that have helped me in the formative stage of my own fitness journey.

Going from an idea in your head to a working application can be an overwhelming project, especially if you've never done it before or are navigating unfamiliar technologies.

This post is aimed at those who have ideas, at least some basic programming ability, and are trying to turn all of that into a usable application. It is based on the road I took and lessons I learned en route to creating my first hobby project application - Owl.  If you've built and shipped apps yourself before or if you're trying to build an app to make money from, this probably isn't the article for you. If you're rolling up your sleeves to work on your first (or even second or third) hobby or portfolio project, especially in an unfamiliar technology, then you're in the right place.

Mental well-being and analytics aren't talked about together very often, unless we're talking about data on mental health from some population. That's not what we'll be talking about here. Instead I'm going to describe how a couple of data visualization techniques can help frame challenges in mental wellness, from anxiety to satisfaction with life, and give us helpful tools for tackling them.

If you've worked with ASP.NET MVC (or similar stack) web applications, you've likely noticed that it's very common to see some sort of sidebar widget with supplemental information. If you've got a page and want to display some handy summary information, like statistics for the site, doing so is basically the easiest thing in the world. We're going to walk through the different pieces in a sample setup of this which I've used in this very blog to get the site stats widget you see over there to the right.

In my data travels there are a couple SQL functions which have come in so singularly handily that I've decided to dedicate a blog post to them. Those functions are RANK and DENSE_RANK. In this post I'm going to talk about one particular class of use cases where these functions can come to the rescue.