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SPEAKER: Welcome back.
Our final guest of the day is Chet Haase,
whom you already know if you're an Android developer.
Though you might not know that he's also
the author of "Round and Holy--
An Homage to Donuts."
Chet, welcome to the show.
CHET HAASE: Thanks.
SPEAKER: So we already talked with Dan Galpin
about all the announcements that were in the keynote.
CHET HAASE: OK.
SPEAKER: So I'm hoping that we can go more big picture.
Is that OK?
CHET HAASE: You're saying, fast forward.
Don't talk about that stuff.
We already heard it.
You're boring me.
That's what I'm hearing.
SPEAKER: I mean, I wouldn't have put it that way.
CHET HAASE: OK.
SPEAKER: Anyway, Kotlin First.
CHET HAASE: Kotlin First.
SPEAKER: What does that mean?
And sort of like, how do we get here?
And what does it mean for developers moving forward?
CHET HAASE: Sure.
SPEAKER: So big picture.
CHET HAASE: Big picture.
So the big picture is we announced Kotlin
a couple of years ago.
It turns out, people really like it.
A lot of developers really liked it at that time, anyway.
What we announced was, we understand you like it,
and we're going to support it as an official language.
So it's a good thing.
So people continued to use it more and more.
We agree with everyone.
They should be using it more and more.
And now, we want to invest in it more and more
and offer more capabilities for them to use it more and more.
You like that phrase?
I like it a lot.
I'm using it a lot.
So let me give you a couple of examples.
SPEAKER: Yeah.
CHET HAASE: So we have this set of APIs called Jetpack.
And increasingly, a lot of the stuff
that we're doing in Jetpack, including
some of the stuff that's coming out at I/O,
is going to be coming out first with Kotlin capabilities,
things like coroutine integration into room,
also coroutine deep integration into life cycle
and live data to make things easier.
Kotlin First library is like the new Jetpack Compose
that we just announced we're going to be developing
in the open today.
So we're going to be doing much more Kotlin
stuff for Kotlin developers outside of Android as well.
We're also investing in more training and docs and sample
code.
Things like, let's see, with JetBrains, we're
doing Kotlin Everywhere.
It's this global series of events,
conference-type educational events.
There's also a new Udacity course.
I think it's Developing Android Applications with Kotlin.
Just launched all of those episodes in that course.
So just a lot more training in general to help people
learn and use Kotlin more, because we think
they should be doing that.
SPEAKER: I think one of the interesting discoveries
I made the other day is that there are developers now
that started as Kotlin Android developers.
CHET HAASE: That blows my mind.
SPEAKER: Right?
Which is, anyway, that's cool.
You've been on Android for a while now.
CHET HAASE: Oh, I was supposed to fill that in.
So I joined actually nine years ago this month.
SPEAKER: Nine years.
CHET HAASE: Yeah, 2010.
SPEAKER: Sometime.
In that time, you've, I'm sure, had a really unique perspective
on everything that's happened in the developer
space for Android.
So here's two relatively specific questions for you.
One, what's something that's super exceptional that you
didn't expect when you started working on Android?
And what's something that you still
want to make better after all this time?
CHET HAASE: So super exceptional,
there's a bunch of things to choose from.
There's all kinds of interesting features.
And development software is cool,
because new stuff happens all the time.
I'm going to pick Jetpack, because I
feel very close to this because a lot of that work
was coming out of the team that I was working with,
the tool kit team, where we had all these capabilities
in Support Library.
Worst thing about Support Library,
we called it Support Library, but it was actually
a plural set of libraries.
So even the naming of it was messed up, right?
So we had AppCompat, and then we had specific utilities.
SPEAKER: Yeah.
CHET HAASE: Recycler View was in there,
all these different things.
SPEAKER: It was a lot of stuff.
CHET HAASE: It was a sandbox of stuff, all very useful.
What we're doing with Jetpack is putting it together
into cohesive parts, right?
So there are these modules that you can use either together
or separately.
We're shipping it in a more robust and predictable manner.
We made sense out of the APIs.
We refactored it with a namespace that made sense.
We took a lot of the capabilities that we had,
and we put it into a more sensible form that
solves one of the biggest problems with Android
for developers, which is, how do I
develop for multiple versions of Android?
Because that is the developer reality.
Right?
So the ability to actually write to a single API
and have it work on releases all the way back to API 14
right now, I think is huge.
And for us to be able to do that in a way
where they can make sense out of those APIs
and the documentation and the Maven artifacts
that they have to get, I think is really huge.
What was the other question?
SPEAKER: Something that you still want to make better.
CHET HAASE: Everything.
I want to make everything better.
This is software.
We have bugs.
We have features we want to work on.
We have APIs that we regret, because that's how APIs work.
SPEAKER: Yeah.
CHET HAASE: So honestly, everything
can get better all the time.
I feel good about where we're at, especially given
where we were coming from.
But I also feel like we have a lot further to go.
SPEAKER: OK.
That's fair.
All right, so your Twitter profile,
which I looked at recently--
CHET HAASE: It must be the truth.
SPEAKER: --on research for this interview.
It says you're the lead for the Android UI toolkit.
CHET HAASE: Yes.
SPEAKER: So what's that like?
CHET HAASE: So the first thing that
tells me is that I need to go update my Twitter profile.
SPEAKER: This is my subtle way of saying that.
CHET HAASE: Yes.
It is out of date.
So I was the lead for the Android UI toolkit team.
So when I joined in 2010, I joined the UI toolkit team.
I worked on animations and graphics and performance and UI
stuff and eventually managed the team for about the last five
years as the team was growing, doing things
like Jetpack and architecture components and all
the normal platform toolkit stuff.
And then about three months ago, I made a change and moved to--
it's a team called Developer Relations.
I don't know if you know what that is.
SPEAKER: I've heard of them.
CHET HAASE: Yeah.
SPEAKER: Sure.
CHET HAASE: So I made that switch,
dropped all my management responsibilities on the floor.
And I'm now a developer advocate in Dev Rel.
SPEAKER: Well, that's great.
CHET HAASE: I think so.
SPEAKER: Welcome to the light side or dark side?
CHET HAASE: I consider it the light side,
because you know what?
New jobs always look better.
And then, they become old jobs.
SPEAKER: Well, let's hope this one stays
the light side for some time.
CHET HAASE: No.
I'm excited about it.
So the way I look at the job change
is, I now get to do my hobby as my real job.
I was doing Dev Rel stuff.
I was doing a bunch of outreach.
SPEAKER: Don't say that on camera.
Don't tell them.
CHET HAASE: Why?
My bosses won't watch it.
It doesn't matter.
But I've been doing Dev Rel since I got here, right?
I really love doing the outreach stuff with developers,
but I always felt guilty about that
because that wasn't actually my day job.
And now it is.
SPEAKER: Now it is.
You're welcome, world.
OK.
Something else that you do that I want to mention
is the ADB podcast, the Android Developers Backstage.
CHET HAASE: Yes.
SPEAKER: So for the handful of people watching
that haven't subscribed to that podcast--
CHET HAASE: Wait.
What?
SPEAKER: There could be a couple.
What episode is your favorite that they should start with?
CHET HAASE: OK, I'm going to start by saying,
they are all my children, and there
is no favorite among them.
But if I had to pick, I would go way back in the archives
to back when our audio quality, frankly, was very poor.
So you're going to have to suffer through it.
It's going to sound like one of those 1930s
just pass the talky transition movies.
But we talked to Anwar, who was, at that time,
managing the art team.
We talked to him about how garbage collectors work,
and it was so fascinating.
So my favorite thing about doing ADB is we
get to learn how stuff works.
We are not talking to people about stuff that we know.
We're talking about stuff that we don't by definition.
Oh, I'd like to learn more about [INAUDIBLE] or art or Android
Studio or performance or whatever.
We grab people on the team that know more about that stuff,
and we have a conversation with them.
So we had a conversation with Anwar.
And we were so interested that our little 45-minute episode
stretched onto an hour and a half
before we ran out of words.
And we cut it into two episodes.
So probably my favorite because it best represents
the, oh my gosh, do we get into the details part.
SPEAKER: OK.
The art episodes.
CHET HAASE: Art episodes.
There's two.
It's like 30s, somewhere in the 30s.
And we're now at 112.
SPEAKER: OK.
CHET HAASE: All right.
SPEAKER: Thanks for joining us, Chet.
CHET HAASE: Thank you.
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