Today is my official 100 Days of Code! 

Why? 
This was a task from my Udacity: Android Basics Nanodegree program to encourage students to actively find at least 30 minutes in the day to code. This would help keep the content you learn active in your mind and help you inch closer to your project everyday.

What I'm working on now
I'm currently enrolled in the next android class, Udacity: Android Developer Nanodegree with the current lesson on Intents. I'm quite familiar with intents already based on previous android courses I've taken, but it'll be a good review before I move on to my next project.

Worth it?
The short answer is: yes. Not everyday was easy. Much of my time was spent reviewing lectures, scanning through documentation and  filtering through Stack Overflow - sometimes just to find out that clearing my cache and restarting the IDE was the solution. When I bring this up to my coworkers and developer friends they all tend to respond in the same tone of grief, "Yeah... that's going to happen a lot". It's usually followed by words of encouragement that I'm not expected to know everything off the top of my head and that it's just too much information to memorize. However, being familiar with the code/structure/logic and how to find the answer is just as important. 

As a side note, I do want to say my face looks more like this after 100 days of code - interrogating my code ​to find out why my app crashed. 

Quite a while since my last post. But here a couple things to mention...

I completed the Udemy course on Kotlin for Android.
https://www.udemy.com/certificate/UC-KDQSEPC0/

AND

I completed the Udacity: Android Basics Nanodegree - Java based.
https://confirm.udacity.com/NJNG2GDY

Over the past few years I've taken classes from Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, LinkedIn Learnings, and other online sources, but I have to say hands down, Udacity has been the best platform for learning for a few reasons:


1. The use of Slack already sets the precedence on how to use a highly used communication tool used throughout the tech industry. There are also Mentors who were previous students that have graduated and multiple official Udacity members that can assist on assignments or make announcements about live webinar sessions with recruiters or other engineers.

2. The online forums on Udacity are widely used and as a part of class work assignment. This opens communication to others outside of your program as well.

3. Multiple code reviewers; though this can be intimidating and may have produce different results each time your work is submitted, it is just like any other professional code review process. You will get personal suggestions and feedback from these code reviewers that are beneficial for technical growth and confidence. 

4. It is co-created by companies in the industry - my course was co-created by Google. I believe this is why the course content is approached differently. Coursera is often taught by professors from various universities so the class itself is presented with a very academic approach. Udemy is often taught by professionals in the industry who have the passion and drive to teach others - the course is guided by this particular individual which is shaped only to this individuals view point of the field and industry. Udacity is guided by the co-creator company and how they use their tech stack. The content is built by a team and not just by an individual in the field, and course work applies to companies want their next candidate to already know.

At this moment, I am waiting for the new Android Developer Nanodegree program to start. Until then, I think I'm going to stick around the current free courses on git and flutter on Udacity. 

When performing blackbox testing on mobile devices, it can be difficult describing the issues you come across to developers. This is where screenshots and video recordings can help convey that message more clearly. Sometimes a bug happens so quickly a screenshot can be difficult to time in order to capture the error. There are other services and apps out there that help you accomplish this, but below are instructions on how you can do this with existing tools you may already have - so let's review how we can do video recordings on iOS and Android (via Mac)! 

iOS

1. Be sure you are running Yosemite or later (10.10) and update Quicktime Player
2. Plug in your trusted iOS device to your Mac
3. Open up Quicktime Player and start a new movie recording (COMMAND + OPTION + N)
4. Click on the drop down menu next to the recording button and select your iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch)
5. Click on the Record button when you are ready
6. Click on the Stop when you are complete - don't forget to save the file.

Anddddd done! You have now recorded the actions made on your iOS device! A quick note - this will work for devices on iOS 8 or higher.

Android

1. Be sure to set your .bash_profile with the paths to your android sdk tools
   1. Leave a comment if you aren't sure how to do this!
2. Plug in your trusted Android device to your Mac and be sure the device has USB Debugging enabled
   1. Usually found in Settings > General > Developer Options
3. Open your terminal
4. Type: adb shell screenrecord /sdcard/test.mp4
5. Press CTRL + C to stop recording
   1. Your video is now saved in /sdcard/test.mp4 on the device
   2. If you are getting an error this means you may not have set up your .bash_profile correctly
6. Type: adb pull /sdcard/test.mp4 ~/Desktop
   1. This will pull the video from the sdcard to your Desktop.
7. [Optional]
   1. Type: adb shell rm -r /sdcard/test.mp4
      1. ​This will remove the file from your device so you won't have too many videos hogging your memory
   2. Type: adb shell --bit-rate 6000000 /sdcard/test.mp4
      1. ​This will set your video quality to record at 6 Mpbs.
      2. Default quality is 4 Mbps

Boom! You have now recorded your actions from the physical device through the Terminal. 

This will hopefully save you a significant amount of time on how you used to make recordings and help you convey your bugs better to developers! Let me know what you think!