Android Event Bus

We've used Otto for event notification. If you're not familiar with this, it allows your application to subscribe to events and other parts of your application to listed for when those events are fired. Otto was okay for awhile, and still is. It comes with one major caveat - new Android developers don't realize they need to unregister() off the bus when the lifecycle of the view is over - this creates a memory leaks on apps with more than one Activity or Fragment, which causes apps to eventually crash.

One of the items I've been waiting for is either the ability for Otto to get a bit smarter and allow the user to register as a weak reference. A new library, EventBus (also boasting faster performance) has emerged, and one of the outstanding feature requests is to enable this very feature. Hasn't been implemented yet, but something I've subscribed to and am interested in seeing implemented.

Realm.io - Android/iOS Database

Coworker pointed out Realm, a mobile database for Android and iOS. Offers increased performance vs native SQLite databases, on both iOS & Android. In addition, there is a plugin for Stetho so you can view your database inside Chrome dev tools (Stetho is absolutely one of the most useful Android tools I've come across in awhile).

Chuck Norris Quick API

Came across a quick URL to testing hitting up an API (well aware there are roughly over a million of these already).

GET http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random

{"type": "success","value": {"id": 466,"joke": "Chuck Norris doesn't do Burn Down charts, he does Smack Down charts.","categories": ["nerdy"]}}

Recommended Podcasts

After having being recently asked some of my favorite podcasts, what better place to record than here. In no particular order.

1. This American Life
2. Radio Diaries
3. Love + Radio
4. 99% Invisible
5. The Memory Palace
6. HBR IdeaCast (nerdy, I know)
7. StoryCorps
8. Death, Sex & Money
9. The Moth Podcast
10. StartUp Podcast
11. Serial 
12. Reply All
13. Planet Money
14. Invisibilia
15. Freakonomics Radio
16. Criminal
17. Radiolab from WNYC
18. Criminal
19. Every Little Thing
20. Hidden Brain
21. My Favorite Murder
22. Revisionist History
23. Science Friday
24. Science Vs
25. The Daily Show 
26. The Kevin Rose Show
27. The Pitch
28. The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
29. Tribe of Mentors
30. Uncivil
31. Without Fail