I created the Marverenic GitHub profile in February 2015 to host Jockey back when I was a freshman in college. The goal was to create a unique brand name for the profile while retaining some anonymity.

A lot of things have changed since November 2014, which is when I wrote the first lines of code that would eventually become Jockey. I’ve since graduated with a degree in computer science and I’ve been working at Big Nerd Ranch full-time for a year and a half after working there twice over the summers before.

The original goal of creating the Marverenic profile was to create a separation between my personal life and my side projects. But this barrier no longer makes sense — and in hindsight it probably didn’t really make sense in the first place. It only added complexity to the two identities, and the professional side bore the brunt of the awkwardness.

So starting now, I am sunsetting the name Marverenic. From now on, I am just going to be Andrew Bailey.

Names aside, here’s what’s going to happen to the code that currently lives on the Marverenic GitHub page.

What’s next for Jockey

Jockey is by far the most popular open source project I’ve created, and I’m not ready to abandon it. I’ve been working on and off on a complete rewrite of Jockey since October. There are a lot of major architecture decisions that I wanted to rethink, and rewriting Jockey is easier than trying to refactor it.

This rewrite is going to be called Jockey/Encore. I will have more details to share about it later this year.

When Jockey/Encore is published, it will be hosted in a new repository under my personal GitHub profile. When Jockey/Encore launches on the Play Store, the legacy codebase will be deprecated. Eventually, Marverenic’s Jockey repository will be archived completely.

I’m deprecating HeterogeneousAdapter, Colors, and Options

I’m officially deprecating all three libraries owned by Marverenic; HeterogeneousAdapter, Colors, and Options; effective immediately.

I haven’t updated these libraries since mid-2017, so this deprecation is more of a formality at this point. If you use one of these libraries in your app, you can continue to use it. This deprecation isn’t going to cause any of these libraries to stop working as of today, it just means that I’m officially no longer providing support for them.

If you’re using one of these libraries, I’d recommend migrating to another library. Here are some recommendations:

Alternative libraries

HeterogeneousAdapter: I would highly recommend airbnb/epoxy as a good replacement. It serves an identical purpose to HeterogeneousAdapter, but is significantly more powerful and is actively being supported by Airbnb.

Options: Google provides a preferences library as part of Android Jetpack. This is an official recommendation that I feel comfortable leaning on. Although Options originally set out to address shortcomings with the support library’s preferences UI, there have been several years of updates Jetpack’s preferences library. Though I have not used it yet, I highly expect that updates to Jetpack’s Preference library have made Options obsolete.

Colors: garretyoder/Colorful seems to be a good replacement for Colors. It provides an extremely similar implementation with a bit more flexibility around customization. You should be able to migrate very easily from Colors to Colorful.

I’m archiving Paper

Paper is an RSS reader that integrates with Feedly. I haven’t touched Paper since October 2017, and I doubt that will change any time soon given the amount of time I can dedicate to it (i.e. none).

Given that Paper is not widely known, I’m archiving it. That means it will officially be read-only, but I don’t think there’s a reason to officially deprecate it since the code itself is feasible and it shouldn’t have any consumers.

URLs are staying (mostly) the same

Even with all of this shuffling and renaming, I don’t expect any GitHub URLs are going to change. if you’re forking or cloning the existing Jockey repository, you can continue to do so with no effort but you will not see Jockey/Encore code. You’ll have to manually update your remote if you want to use Jockey/Encore’s code, but keep in mind that it will be a completely different repository with no shared history.

The biggest change for URLs is that Jockey/Encore is going to have a new listing in the Play Store. This means that you will be able to have both the legacy version of Jockey as well as Jockey/Encore installed at the same time on a single device. However, it also means that you’ll have to manually download Jockey/Encore when it’s published.

Finally, marverenic.com will start redirecting to andrewbailey.dev. I expect this to go mostly unnoticed since marverenic.com never had that much content on it.

That’s all for now!

Thanks for your attention! I’ve been thinking about this decision for a while. Although I know these kinds of changes can be a huge pain for everyone it affects, I hope that it’s as seamless as possible.

Check back in a couple of months for an update about Jockey/Encore! 👋

Signing off one last time,
Marverenic. (Andrew Bailey)