You’d think I’d do more with a prestigious domain name like andydyer.org than post a list of my favorite albums once a year. Someday, perhaps.

This year I included several albums from 2022. I listened to them so many times that it felt weird to exclude them solely based on their release date.

1. DoMi & JD Beck - NOT TiGHT (2022) Instant favorite. So good! The classic jazz influences are woven throughout. Does that arpeggio sound like something from Coltrane? Giant Steps-like for sure. Did Herbie Hancock inspire that track? Probably, he’s playing on it! They combine virtuosity with a nod to the past while sounding entirely unique.
2. La Colonie de Vacances - ECHT (2022) Four bands at the same time! The chaos is surprisingly organized. After listening to it loudly, enough times to get past the initial shock, I came appreciate what they’re doing. Undoubtedly, sitting in the middle of these bands in a live setting would be the best way to hear this.
3. Billy Woods & Kenny Segal - Maps Rich lyrics anchor this album from the MC who values his privacy. Make sure the Mike’s right like Phil Jackson in ‘96.
4. Czarface - Czarmageddon (2022)/Czartificial Intelligence (2023) Comic book rap from Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck & friends. A perfect skateboard video/pickup basketball game/chill soundtrack.
5. Osees - Intercepted Message They evolve their sound despite it seeming impossible to continue doing so after all this time. Whether they are covering hold music or evoking the best of Devo, I will dutifully add every one of their albums to my end-of-year lists.
6. GOAT - Medicine Check out this live set for a taste of their psych-rock magic.
7. MJ Lenderman - Boat Songs (2022)/And the Wind (Live and Loose, 2023) Catchy throwback indie rock from the Wednesday guitar player. I gave this several listens on a Midwestern road trip over the summer. It felt right among the cornfields.
8. Feeble Little Horse - Girl with Fish They evoke the fuzzy loud/quiet/loud 90s indie rock sound I love (a perennial theme, I know).
9. Wednesday - Rat Saw God - Shoegaze plus a steel guitar and slice of life lyrics.
10. Nat Myers - Yellow Peril To the blues what Charley Crockett is to country, although that’s an oversimplification. I was a fan as soon as I heard his voice on top of the guitar. Also successfully road trip/ramblin’ tested.

Here’s a playlist with a song from each of the above albums:

This year’s top albums list is a mix of chill & aggressive, ranging from folky Americana, to psych rock, and even punk. While past favorites Kendrick Lamar & Earl Sweatshirt both released long-awaited albums, I did not find myself returning to them the way I did with their previous releases.

This list is probably the first that has included a new mix of an album that was released in a different year (The Beatles - Revolver), but I think it sounds so modern, its inclusion is defensible. And it’s my list, so my rules, right?

This year I said farewell to Berlin, road tripped around southern Germany, and moved to sunny Colorado. Here’s my list of favorite albums that soundtracked it all:

1. Mdou Moctar - Afrique Victime My first concert in over a year and a half, Mdou Moctar did not disappoint. While the guitar playing is undoubtedly the feature, be sure to appreciate the skill of the drummer as well.
2. Night Beats - Outlaw RnB I’ve been a Night Beats fan for years but until this album, I was convinced I preferred the psych rock of their first couple albums over their more recent soul/R&B sound. This one grew on me more with each listen. They also released a great album of acoustic versions of these tracks and did a Levitation Sessions. I included a track from the latter on the playlist below.
3. Fuzz - Levitation Sessions Just about any Levitation Sessions release makes for a great listen; most definitely this one. There was also a nice Part II of the OSees Levitation Sessions released this year, but I resisted the urge to include it after having three of their albums on last year’s list.
4. Fruit Bats - Siamese Dream Siamese Dream is one of my all-time favorite albums. This cover album chills everything out and does every track well.
5. Buck Meek - Two Saviors I surprised myself by how often I kept coming back to the Big Thief guitar player’s second solo album. There’s so much detail in the lyrics and the melodies are catchy enough to hum to yourself once they infect your subconscious.
6. Floatie - Voyage Out Floatie immediately reminded me of Palm, another math-rock favorite of mine. I’ve praised their label, Exploding in Sound Records, more than once over the years and Floatie is another good example of the kind of sound I like to have exploding in my vicinity.
7. Meatbodies - 333 Does this sound an awful lot like Fuzz? Yes, and that’s precisely why I like it.
8. Na$ty - The Rodez Tapes While we patiently await new Kendrick & Earl Sweatshirt albums, Na$ty was a new discovery for me that scratches a similar hip-hop itch. Boasts like “So ahead of my time I wrote this rhyme last week” flow effortlessly over laid-back lo-fi beats. Dig it.
9. Charley Crockett - 10 for Slim & Music City USA This year gave us a couple batches of new-but-retro-sounding country songs from Mr. Crockett. I’d love to see him live, but tickets are over $100 each! Maybe I’ll get a copy of each on vinyl and some good whiskey for a night in instead.
10. Wednesday - Twin Plague There’s always something shoegazey on this list and Wednesday fills that role this year. Droning, swooping, fuzzed out guitars alternating in a loud/quiet dynamic. Yep, this’ll do nicely.

Here’s a playlist with a song from each of the above albums:

Intro

As promised in my last post, it’s time to use our family tree DSL to spoil the plot of Netflix’s Dark series! 😈

To quickly recap, we have a small but functional (my puns are always intended) DSL for building a family tree in Kotlin:

The Dark family trees in code

The family trees are of course the focus of the series as they are revealed to us piecemeal; episode by episode, season by season. After watching it, I was overwhelmed with all the details and quickly gave up trying to fit it all together. Sure, I remembered some of the bigger points, but it makes a lot more sense after stepping through the Dark website to build the family trees below:

Originally published on ProAndroidDev

Why build a DSL?

Ever since first getting into Kotlin, I’ve known it has a few things that makes building domain-specific languages (DSLs) easier. I’ve read the mind-expanding type-safe builders guide for building a DSL for HTML, but until recently I hadn’t found a good use case for building a DSL of my own.

My team at Zalando maintains server-driven UI libraries for Android & iOS that power completely dynamic screens such as home, brand homes, collections, and various landing pages in the Zalando fashion store apps. Often, we need to build mock responses during development for new features that don’t have a backend implementation yet or models for unit tests. In the past, we’d grab chunks of JSON from API responses and edit them, but navigating a wall of text is tedious and editing JSON is far less fun than writing code.

Originally published on the Zalando Engineering Blog

Introduction

The CSS Flexible Box Layout specification (AKA flexbox) is a useful abstraction for describing layouts in a platform agnostic way. For this reason, it is widely used on the web and even on mobile. Readers familiar with ConstraintLayout can think of flexbox as conceptually similar to the Flow virtual layout it supports. This type of layout is ideal for grids or other groups of views with varying sizes.

This year was full of unexpected surprises, disappointments, and more for everyone, but music was here to comfort us throughout. Here’s my list of favorite albums for the year:

1. Hum - Inlet Anyone who’s talked music with me long enough has heard me express my adoration for Hum. They were the first/one of the first bands I’ve seen live. Their particular brand of space rock/shoegaze/whatever-you-want-to-call-it has always been one of my favorites. It’s been a long couple decades since their last release, Downward Is Heavenward, so I was skeptical whether this year’s surprise new album would greet these old ears the same as their earlier releases. It took a few listens for me to warm up to it, but this album is certainly one of my top picks for the year.
2. OSees - Protean Threat Their name has yet another new spelling and the kraut/prog rock evolution of their sound continues. Longsuffering readers of my top albums lists will recall my love of this band, so no surprise to see them on this year’s list again (although I did not include all of the albums they released this year). This one works so well as an end-to-end listen that I listened to it a second time in a row on more than one occasion.
3. OSees - Levitation Sessions Until this year, every summer in Berlin meant an OSees tour stop and a guaranteed great night out. Luckily, the band shared this live recording that serves as a decent surrogate, but you probably won’t be showered by thrown beers in your living room.
4. OSees - Metamorphosed Oh, the audacity of including a third album from the same band on a top 10 list! You may not be surprised to learn that there’s a Hard Times article poking fun at the frequency of their album releases. This one is some leftover tracks from last year’s Face Stabber double album; a couple short ones and a couple extended jams doing what they do best.
5. Run the Jewels - RTJ4 Listening to the hard-hitting lyrics of this album, it’s easy to forget that it was penned before the Black Lives Matter protests erupted earlier this year. That’s because systemic racism is nothing new as Mike & El-P so eloquently convey on track after track. Have you ever taken a moment to “look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar”? It’s pretty messed up when you think about it. Meanwhile, the EU has bridges on their currency as a symbol of connection, ju$t saying. RTJ also did a live stream of their performance of the entire album. Mike’s acapella verse at the end of Walking in the Snow is intense!
6. Fuzz - III While there was no new Ty Segall album this year, the third release from his Fuzz side project gives us a chance to hear him play drums and sing. This time there’s a bit of Thin Lizzy-esque guitar harmonies and other new sonic elements to add some color to the Sabbath sludge they so effortlessly conjure.
7. Charley Crockett - Welcome to Hard Times “Do you like sinnin’? Well, you will before you go.” is all the invitation I needed to enter Charley’s classic country time machine. The Davy Crockett descendant croons about love and heartbreak while reminding us that the telephone used to play a central role in the game.
8. Khruangbin - Mordecai The Houston trio has continued to explore the funk elements of their sound, which adds some swagger to any walk or cleaning session. I love the quirky adventurousness of the Time (You and I) video. And since Christmas Time Is Here, check out their version of the Vince Guaraldi song from A Charlie Brown Christmas.
9. Kurt Vile - Speed, Sound, Lonely KV After enjoying 2018’s “Bottle It In” and seeing his show here in Berlin last year, I was happy to see a new EP from Kurt Vile this fall. After several listens, I learned from the All Songs Considered podcast that there are a couple John Prine songs on it, including a thought-provoking duet with Prine on “How Lucky”, which recalls a visit to places of our past and what we are lucky enough to remember (or forget). If you are not very familiar with the late great John Prine, the original versions of these two songs are a great place to start.
10. Jimi Hendrix - Live in Maui As evidenced by numerous other choices on the list, I clearly needed fuzzy guitars and extended jams in high doses this year. I’ll end with yet another glimpse into the mastery of Jimi Hendrix. This release covers a pair of concerts the rock legend performed on the side of a dormant volcano in 1970. Watch some of the video to see Jimi make guitar wrangling look easy and timelessly cool. Also, laugh at the tripping hippies waving their hands in front of their far out faces.

Here’s a playlist with a song from each album, but I assure you there are many more you really should hear. Let me know if you find a new favorite or have something else to recommend!

As previously outlined in my talk at Mobius Conference in Saint Petersburg last year, our team at Zalando is building a server-driven UI platform we call AppCraft. AppCraft allows us to add or update screens in our app with only server changes instead of the normal app release constrained way of doing things.

On the client side, we are building every screen the same way: fetch layout & data from the server, parse it, and render it.

Time files and it turns out it’s been several years since I last shared my favorite albums of the year. Despite the lack of posts, I still keep a list every year and decided it’s time once again to highlight some of the albums I’ve enjoyed most:

1. Oh Sees - Face Stabber Any year that includes an Oh Sees release will find it in my top albums list, so here it is. I also see them anytime their tour comes through town. Again, no exception this year. The band continues its exploration of prog rock while still retaining just enough of their psych rock foundation to sound unmistakably like themselves.
2. Chris Staples - Holy Moly Not to be confused with the much more country-fied Chris Stapleton, Chris Staples is a new discovery for me this year. I’d describe him as indie singer/songwriter with a strong Wilco sensibility. I’m looking forward to seeing him here in Berlin next month.
3. Ty Segall - Deforming Lobes (Live), First Taste Similar to the Oh Sees guarantee above, Ty Segall always makes the year’s top albums list as well. This year, the prolific psych rocker gave me two albums to love; a live album and the notably guitarless “First Taste” (although it’s hard to believe some of these sounds aren’t guitars).
4. Wilco - Ode to Joy Wilco is another perennial favorite of mine. Jeff Tweedy’s songwriting is as strong as ever and this album is one that deepens a bit with each listen.
5. Versing - 10000 A wonderful recreation of that Pavement and Built to Spill slacker rock sound with a dash of Nirvana style grunge. All the ingredients for a good album.
6. Spoon - Everything Hits at Once (Best Of) Spoon is another of my favorites that makes any year’s top albums list. This is a “best of” spanning most of their albums, with the disappointing absence of a killer track or two from “Series of Sneaks”. Nevertheless, the track order is great and this collection should serve as a solid introduction for anyone as yet unfamiliar with their greatness.
7. Khruangbin - Hasta El Cielo Painfully known to me as the band I missed seeing last year due to a calendar time zone mixup, Khruangbin released a dub version of their wonderful “Con Todo El Mundo” album. I love how the different style further mellows what was already a pretty laid back sound. Perfect for a rainy Sunday morning.
8. Ari Roar - Best Behavior Bouncy guitar and bass lines that remind me of bands like Pinback or Palm paired with breezy vocals. Soundtrack a windows-down-stereo-up car ride with this.
9. (Sandy) Alex G - House of Sugar Introspective and at times haunting lyrics softened with acoustic guitar & a sprinkle of lo-fi wooze.
10. Dead Soft - Big Blue I’m a sucker for 90s guitar rock like early Weezer or Matthew Sweet. Dead Soft does this well.

Here’s a playlist with one of my favorite songs from each album. Enjoy!

It was a pleasure speaking at Mobius Conference in Saint Petersburg this past May. I never got around to finishing the transcript of the talk I intended to write, but you can find the slides on Speaker Deck and the video on YouTube: