Weather, Programming, and Covid - The Birth of an Android App

Part One: The Perfect Storm

 The perfect storm to cause someone to branch out had arrived... A pandemic sweeping the globe causing widespread lockdowns, forcing me indoors and limiting activities outside the house. Looking for ideas to put the recently aquired extra time, I noticed that the National Weather Service (NWS) did not have a mobile app for their weather. There was also the nonstop tiresome ads forced upon me by other apps such as Weather.com's, as well as the abundance of bloat not pertaining to weather that affects me, or just about weather whatsoever. Nobody wants to have to click out of an ad to simply close the radar and go back to the main page of the app. So I did what any programmer would do in the situation, started to research the public API that the NWS exposes to access their weather data.

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 A Naive programmer with broad Java knowledge fell face first into the trap that is "Barelling towards a final product, without regard for potential complexity, or iterations needed to fix those issues which go overlooked". But I would never do that, I have worked on many coding projects for fun, and at work I deal with a massive web application with multiple backend services... Of course I did exactly what I thought I wouldn't. Created an android app with fatal programming mistakes at nearly every corner. By the time I had gotten through to having a partially functional app that could take in a location and show the weather forecast, the app was crashing from the mismanaged data handling, and synchronous data fetching. Not to mention the non-existant research done into the Android Programming Language meant that the perks of Android that Java did not have went unnoticed.

 Android, while a language built off Java initially, has grown into a behemoth. Google - which owns Android, has banked on Kotlin (A pragmatic programming language designed for the JVM), for its future. To this day, I have been feeling the effects of both not learning Kotlin, and not adopting it over Java... But I will talk more on that later, as the greatest pain I experienced stems from it.

 Oh, what do you know... I seem to have run into an unforseen memory limit when the app is paused and resumed. Silly me didn't look into the best practices for when the app is loaded/resumed, and has reached the limit causing the app to crash immediately. This limit, is 1MB, to which my multiple bitmaps (A way of storing images) easily surpassed.