As an Informatics major, I have only taken a couple of programming and development classes. After attending a Cyber Security Conference in March of this year and hearing numerous stories from women in various STEM fields, I was determined to begin learning some things on my own. I wanted to being with Android Development. After doing some research I found a website that gave me some tutorials and beginner knowledge on the concept. I learned the basics very quickly due to my other courses I took as a Computer Science major, which helped thoroughly. These were all about code and also had activities to help the user perform actions on their own. After learning the basics, I decided to download the Android Developer program, Android Studio, to try my hand at it.

My first impression of the program was that it looked similar to other code editors. The only differences with these include: a display of how the app design will look on the right-hand side. It would also change simultaneously as you changed your code. I felt it looked cool and I was very excited to begin the beginner app designs that the website offered. But I was immediately hit with a couple issues on my own.

So in order to test you app there are two ways. One you can use an Android device OR run an Android Emulator. My CPU is not strong enough to handle the Android Development Emulator. The funny thing is, before I started this journey I did consider getting a new CPU. But now that I am enrolled in school, and not employed, this will have to take the back burner. My second issue is that I don’t own or have an Android Smartphone handy in order to do the testing manually. Although I may look into purchasing a cheap Android Tablet off of Amazon, I can’t really do anything else. These are just a couple issues but my biggest one is TIME. Now that I am back in school I have little to no time to dedicate towards this. My plate is kind of heavy this semester and I don’t know if I’ll have to wait for holiday breaks to dedicate more time towards this endeavor.

This was just a tiny update on how I’ve been doing with this task. I am not sure when I will be able to give you guys an update on this journey but hopefully I will get through these problems smoothly.

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Below I would like you all to comment your experience with Android Development and any tips/tricks I may need to know. Thank you all for reading!