Bolaji Alabi’s Post

Days 99 and 100 of #100daysofcode This post is coming a little late. On the final days of my #100daysofcode challenge, I spent a lot of time reading SDK documentations and working on implementing the functionality from the SDK. It's still a work in progress but I've learnt a lot more about the EMV process. It's still somewhat surreal to realize I've gotten to the end of this challenge. It seems like just yesterday, my mentor Wilson Ahanmisi was encouraging me to start this challenge. I'll make a separate post about my experience.

Day 98 of #100daysofcode So, after weeks of debugging and almost going crazy trying to figure out what I was doing wrong with the pin block generation process, it turns out the keys were just invalid. I got a new set of encryption keys today and after switching them out, all transactions were successful. To think I was beginning to consider switching careers 😂 Mini mental breakdown aside, this entire thing pushed me to learn exactly what goes into generating a pin block and using logic gates in a real life scenario. Also today I had an interesting 30 mins when I tried to figure out how to convert a string representation of a byte array (e.g "9F 00 96 21") into a Byte Array. String.toByteArray() didn't work because it was trying to convert the values into bytes again instead of just parsing them

Day 97 of #100daysofcode Started a new project today. Working on integrating the SDK of a new POS OEM. It's going well so far as a lot of the methods are familiar. Also started looking into using Flutter to build Desktop apps, for a project I'll be starting soon.

Days 95 and 96 of #100daysofcode Was without my laptop for most of yesterday so I couldn't do much. While I was trying to share a build for a project I was working on, I noticed the apk size was almost 200mb. When I analyzed the apk, the different ABIs in the libs folder were taking up the most space. So, I used the code snippet below to build a separate apk for the ABI of the device it was going to be tested on. That brought the apk size down to about 70mb. Building the release variant further reduced the apk size to about 30mb, which was a little surprising since I didn't have minifyEnabled or shrinkResources set to "true" for the release variant.

Day 94 of #100daysofcode An app I maintain at work was crashing and I planned to fix the bug today. It was supposed to be a pretty straightforward fix but took a bit more time because I forgot to commit the last time I worked on the project. Basically it was a "Here come the consequences of my actions" situation 😂. Normally it's not an issue if I forget to commit because I'm using the same laptop that has the changes stored locally. Unfortunately, I switched laptops because my other laptop is still being fixed. So yeah, I had to remember all the changes I made and redo them before fixing the bug. At least this will help me remember to always commit. #android #androiddev #kotlin #git

Days 91, 92 and 93 of #100daysofcode It's weird that I'm struggling with posting consistently now that I'm almost at the end of this journey. For the past few days, I've been focused on testing and debugging and trying to close out a feature. I haven't made a lot of progress because there's been a bug I've been unable to fix

Day 90 of #100daysofcode Today was productive and unproductive at the same time. Productive because I was able to gain clarity on a major task and make progress but unproductive because most of that progress was in the form of new error responses 😂

Days 86, 87 and 89 of #100daysofcode Forget to post over the past few days. I've been doing a lot of debugging and research

Day 85 of #100daysofcode Today, I decided to tackle learning exactly "how to build a pin block from a pan and a pin". I worked with hexadecimals, converting from hexadecimal to binary and using the XOR logic gate. It was an interesting way to apply concepts I only had theoretical knowledge about (such as XOR). I was able to manually generate a pin block. The next step is to encrypt the pin block.