This blog post has been long overdue. We appreciate all of you, our readers and long-time fans, who regularly visit our website, are a student in our University or a subscriber on YouTube. But it's time to be open and honest.
In short, we will not regularly publish technical Android tutorials anymore. Before you delete futurestud.io off your history, please allow us to give some background information and possibly motivate you to stay with us in the future.
Looking Back
We started publishing Android tutorials in August 2014. One of the first tutorials, how to debug Android apps over WiFi is still one of our most popular tutorials. In December 2014, we went to a weekly schedule, publishing at least one tutorial a week. After starting the Future Studio University, we additionally published premium tutorials. Overall, we have published and maintained 228 Android tutorials so far. Let's spell that out: two hundred twenty eight. If you'd read them all in one sitting, it'd take you around 25 hours. We also have published 48 free high-quality Android videos in 4k resolution on YouTube.
This is a lot of content, which took us years to create. Initially, both Marcus and me (Norman) wrote Android tutorials. Marcus moved his passion to Node.js web frameworks, specifically, hapi. Thus, we split the content on Future Studio into two parts: the Android side (Norman) and Node.js/hapi side (Marcus).
Future Studio is not our day job. We share our knowledge on our beloved systems on evenings and weekends. It takes a lot of time and effort to write concise tutorials that are easy to understand and helpful to you. For a long time, this has not been a problem as the content we create aligns with our day job. However, I left my job as a professional Android developer at the end of 2015.
I still created new Android content for the last two and a half years as I do love the framework, but it's getting harder and harder for me. To create new tutorials, I recently had to learn the things myself from zero to in-depth first and then extract the knowledge in small bits for tutorials.
This unfortunately is no longer manageable for me. This doesn't mean I won't create any tutorials on Android anymore, but it won't be regularly every (other) week. I also intend to keep our existing content up to date. For example, our Retrofit series should get an update once Retrofit 3.0 is released.
Looking Forward
Having that said, I will continue to write regular tutorials on Future Studio with a different topic. I believe the new, upcoming content will be just as interesting to you.
Possibly even more so, because I won't just discuss a particular library or tip that solves a specific problem, but have a more general focus: how to become a better programmer. I believe this new focus will be interesting and helpful to all kinds of developers: Android developers (no matter if you're using Retrofit or not), hapi developers, or scientists working with Python.
The reason for this change in focus is that it aligns with my day job again: for the last two years I've been researching how programmers understand code and how programmer expertise grows. My goal is to share this insight in small, actionable packages so that you as a developer can learn how to get better.
For the first time in the last year, I'm really excited to write tutorials again. I hope you'll stick with us and read the upcoming series: how to become a better developer. The first tutorial was already released today!
Let us know what you think on Twitter @futurestud_io or leave a comment below.
Enjoy coding & make it rock!
Mentioned Resources
- Tutorial on how to debug Android apps over WiFi
- Future Studio University for premium content
- List with all our Android tutorials
- 48 free high-quality Android videos on YouTube
- hapi web framework tutorial series
- Retrofit tutorial series
- New tutorial series on how to become a better developer