AnDevCon Boston

Last week I was in Boston, attending AnDevCon Boston. Previous AnDevCon happens in the SF Bay Area, but it is branching out, alternating between east west coasts every six months. Very smart move to bring Android goodness to more people!

Glass Galore

One thing that jumped out at this AnDevCon was the prominence of the Glass Explorers. Quite a few attendees were wearing Google Glass, with a circle of people around them, asking questions, borrowing them for a test drive. Here is my friend Corey trying Glass:

Session highlights

There were so many interesting topics at AnDevCon that often they were scheduled at the same time, which meant I had to pick one at any given time. Fortunately many people were live tweeting, so there was a treasure grove of information to explore afterwards. Here are some highlights:

ViewConfiguration.java has a lot of convenience methods for MotionEvents.Use these methods to have uniform event handling.#andevcon

— James Baca (@desertjim) May 30, 2013

Picasso has memory & disk caches, with a debug mode showing where the images are loaded from. - @jessewilson at #AnDevCon

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) May 30, 2013

Extensive examples for #AndroidDev continuous integration and testing: bit.ly/19sR9vq - @simpligility at #AnDevCon

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) May 31, 2013

Good app with source code for playing with SQLCipher is play.google.com/store/apps/det… #AnDevCon

— Joe Sacher (@sacherjj) May 31, 2013

Learn more about protecting your apk with "Practicing Safe Dex" by @timstrazz bit.ly/15oPDr4 - @godfreynolan at #AnDevCon

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) May 31, 2013

Tips for hunting leaks: set your image sample size to 128 (be like 5 pixels), then use MAT, that makes the problems more visible #AnDevCon

— Travis Himes (@lawngnomehitman) May 31, 2013

My sessions

I gave the same talks as AnDevCon IV: Beautiful Android on a Shoestring and Android Custom Components. They were scheduled back to back, at the last slots of the last day. I was very disappointed when I saw the program. My favorite part of speaking at conferences is talking to people, which often happens at lunch and coffee breaks. People who came to my talk spot me in the crowd, and we'd chat about my session and swap some coding stories. No chance to do that when my sessions happen at the end of the conference!

I was also worried that people would go home early, and no one would be around to come to my sessions. Fortunately that wasn't the case. Both of my talks were quite well attended, and people stayed behind a little bit to chat. Still, next time I would check the conference schedule as soon as it is published, and try to move my talk earlier. That way I get more time to hang out with people afterwards.

Hanging out

As always, I love hanging out with fellow Android developers at AnDevCon. Here is a group of us enjoying some seafood.

The next AnDevCon is back in Burlingame, from November 12 to 15. Hope to see you there!