Don’t forget about documentation

Amy3 Comments

As part of my final year project at university I had to create a web application allowing students to register for university. The requirements of this project had us write a minimum of 80 pages of documentation regarding the application, and it was honestly one of the most boring things I’ve ever had to expend energy producing. I wrote page after page of what is the biggest pile of tripe-masqueraded-as-documentation that I’ve ever produced. I didn’t want to invest my time in it. I would’ve much preferred to spend my time coding.

Fast-forward five months and I was working for a startup on their documentation team. Almost two and a half years later, I’m still working here and I love it. I love writing docs, I love exploring new products and new APIs and helping other people use them to create awesome things.

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Creating a Left ToolbarItem in Xamarin.Forms

Amy24 Comments

TL;DR: If you’re looking for just the code, you can jump straight to it here.

I’ve been winding down 2015 by focusing on learning new subjects and improving my existing skills. Most of December was occupied with writing my first-ever app and I’ve been using Xamarin.Forms to create my UI. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Xamarin.Forms is a cross-platform toolkit for creating native user interfaces for iOS, Andriod, and Windows Phone apps. The native part is important here; simply put, I can code one UI, and Xamarin.Forms will do the heavy lifting for me, mapping my control as the equivalent control on each platform. If you are interested in how Xamarin.Forms works, I highly suggest reading the documentation, including Charles Petzold’s new book ‘Creating Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Forms‘.

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