fractalwrench

The main interest I've seen in OTel from Android engineers has been driven by concerns around vendor lock-in. Backend/devops in their organisations are typically using OTel tooling already & want to see all telemetry in one place.

From this perspective it doesn't matter if the OTel SDK comes bundled with a bunch of unnecessary code or version conflicts as is suggested in the article. The whole point is to regain control over telemetry & avoid paying $$$ to an ambivalent vendor.

FWIW, I don't think the OTel implementation for mobile is perfect - a lot of the code was originally written with backend JVM apps in mind & that can cause friction. However, I'm fairly optimistic those pain points will get fixed as more folks converge on this standard.

Disclaimer: I work at a Sentry competitor

Taking 3 years to move from my first job, as I was underpaid and didn't realise how much until getting an offer.

Nope, although I'd say that a STEM degree does help.

My observation is that around half the people I've worked with in this industry have a CS degree, and most of the rest have an engineering/maths/physics degree. There are a few people who don't have typical qualifications (myself included) or no degree at all, but as a general rule I would say it's less common.

If you don't have a degree, it doesn't matter - but you will still need to demonstrate that you can do the work. Having 1-2 substantial Github projects in your portfolio is a good way of achieving this, along with studying online courses such as CS50 so that you know basic data structures/algorithms.

Bath, UK is a pretty great place to live (and cheap by Bay Area standards). Stunning architecture, right next to the countryside, and the city regularly makes it into the list of top safest/best places to live in the world.

There's a decent tech scene in both Bath/Bristol, and London is only 90 minutes away by train. Fire me a message if you have any questions.

Have you looked into error reporting solutions? These can automatically capture uncaught Java exceptions within an application and send a crash report with relevant metadata (stacktrace, user actions, request info, etc).

Disclaimer: I work for Bugsnag, who offer such a solution

The most important part of my routine is calorie tracking everything I eat, and walking out of the office to get a healthy lunch. In terms of exercise, I try and fit in 3-4 runs (30-60 mins) a week, and one long bike ride at the weekend (2-3 hours).

The Isle of Wight test facility is free to visit, it's worth a look if you're in the area. There isn't a massive amount left - just the concrete structure and a lot of rabbits grazing the cliffs below.

However, there's enough left to make you slightly sad that the space race didn't end up in colonisation (yet). There are also a bunch of other features within less than a mile (an old military battery, The Needles, great views over The Solent, the colored sands of Alum Bay). Definitely underrated.

Around £500k to live a frugal existence, and £2m to live it large, assuming the majority of the money was invested in the stock market. It probably wouldn't be very fun never working again though, as you'd miss out on social interactions with colleagues and the rush of trying to achieve some goal.

I'm pretty much starting out in my career though, so the true number may end up being much higher, and my enthusiasm may wane after doing this for a decade.

IntelliJ. It has some great keyboard shortcuts for refactoring code, allows searching by symbol names, and has a wide selection of plugins. Surprisingly it's quite a consistent experience when editing across different languages, such as Java/Objective-C, which leads to less mental overhead with the tools (at least in my experience)

HCOL areas probably make this viewpoint more common than it otherwise would be. It's hard enough living in Bath as a couple on the median wage, and having children makes things very difficult financially.

Choosing between living in a really nice city and having kids is a difficult choice.

Android Apps targeting Android 6.0+ need to handle grant/revocation of permissions at runtime. Previous versions of Android would simply ask for the same permissions upfront when a user installed an app.