Ten years ago today, I published my first blog post. There’s something special about looking back an entire decade at an achievement like that. A chance to reflect on what my life was like then, the motivations that got me into writing, and where I am today as a result.

It has been an honor to learn in public over these last ten years, whether that be here on AndroidEssence, on Twitch, on YouTube, at Droidcon, or the countless number of meetups, hackathons, and other events that have enabled me to connect with the amazing Android community.

I started AndroidEssence with a simple goal - share what I’ve learned. I learned Android by hiding in a nook in my university’s engineering center and consuming every Coursera and Udemy video I could find. I would engage on StackOverflow and other blogging sites to grow my domain knowledge however possible. Just about everything I learned came from another individual developer learning and sharing in the open to help others, which has been the beauty of the Android community ever since it’s inception.

Today, my goals for content creation are slightly different. I don’t just want to share what I’ve learned, but I want to simplify it. I want to make Android content digestible and accessible to all skill levels. Looking back on the ten years of posts, I haven’t always hit this mark, but it’s my guiding principle every time I sit down to write a post or presentation.

When I sat down to reflect on an entire decade of blogs, presentations, live streams, and workshops, I realized that trimming that down into a short digestible post was going to be the hardest one yet. I could explain dependency injection to a child, but how do I summarize what already feels like a lifetime of content?

The answer, I eventually realized, is no different than any other piece of content I’ve created: share what I’ve learned.

The Community Advances Together

What I have always appreciated, and continue to appreciate, about the Android community is exactly that – the community. When I started out, I learned far more from other individual developers sharing their knowledge than I could imagine from any official documentation. In recent years, the Android developer relations team has released exceptional resources, with architecture docs, an incredible YouTube channel, podcasts, and more.

Despite the rise of official guidelines and recommendations, it never changed the community driven aspect. We still have a thriving Droidcon community, meetups all over the globe, and a team at Google who actively engages with us, from office hours at conferences, to accepting community feedback on libraries in early development cycles.

Android has never been developed in a silo. It has been shaped, from the very beginning, by all of us.

Knowledge Share != Content Creation

I used to feel that sharing my knowledge, with the intention of helping others grow, required me to put myself out there. To blog, to get on stage, or to get behind a camera, and inspire others to do the same. Of course, content creation is not for everyone, and those who don’t want to put themselves out there can still engage in the impactful knowledge share that drives our industry forward.

Helping your fellow engineers can be as simple as posting an interesting blog post in your team’s Slack channel. It’s reposting a video you saw online so it can reach a broader audience. It’s a thorough code review where you take time to really address a solution instead of a passive LGTM (Looks Good To Me) because the change is just good enough. It can even be as small as a casual conversation between two engineers in passing between meetings or in the hallways at a conference.

You don’t have to step out of your comfort zone to share your knowledge, and you don’t have to share it with a large number of people for it to be impactful. Every time you show someone what you’ve learned, through whatever medium, you are part of the ripple effect that powers or community.

Looking Forward

There’s countless other lessons I’ve learned, but I chose to reflect on these two as my new guiding principles for how I put myself out there. Every time I engage with the Android community, it’s with the purpose of helping us all move forward together. I also hope to put less pressure on myself about how I chose to share in public, knowing that every interaction with another Android engineer is an impactful and meaningful connection.

Thank You

Thank you for reading this far. It’s not just you, the audience, that I’d like to thank.

To the people who helped me write and publish my first blog post,
To everyone who has proofread a post or watched a dry-run of a presentation,
To the conferences that gave me an opportunity to share with their communities,
To my friends and family that have lifted me up every step of the way,

Thank you.