wayne piekarski

Developer Advocate at Google - Android projects

2014-2023

Developer Advocate at Google - Android projects

I worked for Google as a Developer Advocate from 2014 to 2023. My work involved educating developers about new technologies, and also to advocate for developers within Google, ensuring developers have the right tools and information to support their work. I had to quickly understand new developer products, work on sample code and documentation, and give live presentations as well as record videos and publish blog posts. I also had to work with large engineering teams, product management, marketing, and legal to coordinate product announcements.

Fuchsia
Android Things and Internet of Things, Weave, and Brillo
Google Assistant and Actions on Google / Smart Home
Android Wear, Android TV, and Android Auto

I authored the lead blog post for the following product announcements:

Google and Android Developer Videos

Wear Screeninfo

Debug screen resolution and device information on phones, TVs, and wearables.

This is a utility that shows all kinds of useful information about the display on your Android and Wear OS devices.

Wear ScreenInfo can be run as a regular application on any device, but is also available as a watch face on Wear OS. This allows you to get a complete understanding of every aspect of the display as either an Activity, or a watch face service.

Some of the information presented includes the display resolution, density, physical size, resource qualifiers, insets, canvas size, and view size. Extra information about the hardware is also presented, such as processor, board, manufacturer, and firmware build id. See the screenshots below for examples of what the application looks like.

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.waynepiekarski.screeninfo

Source code, Apache v2 license: https://github.com/waynepiekarski/wear-screeninfo

Wear Sensors

This is a utility that shows all kinds of useful information about the sensors on your Android and Wear OS devices. Buttons are provided to cycle between all the available sensors. For each sensor, the id, type, vendor, range, accuracy, and latency are shown. The raw sensor values are shown in numeric form, as a bar graph, and as a plot over time. When used on Wear OS, the app is able to show updates even when the display is in ambient mode.

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.waynepiekarski.wearsensors

Source code, Apache v2 license: https://github.com/waynepiekarski/wear-sensors

Android Glider

Greetings Glider fans! Well, it is 2014, and I have ported my old Glider game from 1997 over to Android for you to play on your current devices! The game is basically the same as before, I wrote an ANSI terminal emulator for Android to run the game's original C code pretty much unmodified via the NDK. You can use the touch screen controls on a mobile or tablet to emulate the arrow keys, and touch in the center to select. On an Android Wear device, you can touch the display on the edges to emulate the arrow keys. The wearable also allows you to tilt the device to emulate the arrow keys. If you have a game controller or TV then the game supports those controls as well.

This is *really* old messy code that I wrote back when I was learning to program in C back in 1996. It was designed to run on text terminals over slow serial connections in my university Unix labs, which is why the graphics are the way they are! :)

Here are some links to the original game this is based on, written by John Calhoun back in 1990:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F3oUr2QPQ0
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glider/id482536700?mt=12
http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/glider.html

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.waynepiekarski.glider

Source code, GPLv3 license: https://github.com/waynepiekarski/android-glider

2014-2023