Tuesday, November 25, 2014

AnDevCon SF 2014

I can't believe this is my fifth AnDevCon already! This time I am living in Colorado, so Burlingame is no longer local. But as luck would have it the GDE Summit is one the same week at the Google headquarters, and I got to combine the two trips. The flip side is that they overlap quite a bit, and I ended up only attending the last two days of AnDevCon, plus the fireside chat Wednesday evening.

Fireside chats

There were two fireside chats / panel discussions at this AnDevCon, both very informative and entertaining:

Sessions

I didn't go to many sessions, partly because I was only there for two days, but partly because each session is 75 minutes long. After subtracting time for keynotes and sponsor sessions, there was really only time for 3 to 4 sessions a day. Since I was giving two sessions myself, I ended up only going to 5 sessions.

My talks

My two talks were back-to-back on Friday morning. First I had Advanced Android TextView at 8:30am.

I gave the 40-minute talk at Øredev, but the audience reaction was quite different. Here I was among Android developers, and people jumped in with interesting questions pretty much right away. I loved that! I was having a great good discussion off stage afterwards as well, but had to cut it short since I needed to run to another room to give another talk.

My next talk, Fun with Android Shaders and Filters, was in the Regency ballroom. Quite a different experience to present from a stage.

The crowd was a bit larger, not sure if it was 10am vs 8:30am, or people were more interested in graphics. In any case, both talks went very well!

RxJava

RxJava is quite hot among in Android world, and I am very curious about it. I attended a talk at Droidcon London but didn't quite get what it is, so I tried again with a session at AnDevCon. Alas:

This time I got a bit further: I understood that RxJava builds on the concept of asynchronous sequences, and as a result you can apply many operations on them. That's why there were all these marble diagrams for map, filter etc. I think I should give up on trying to learn it by listening to a talk though, and instead get my hands dirty with tutorials:

Tips on building SDKs

AnDevCon ended on a great session from Ty Smith sharing his experience building the Fabric SDK, filled with tips and insights.

Check out the video for the full talk.

New speakers

I am very happy to see new speakers at AnDevCon, sharing their knowledge with everyone. Do you work on Android? If so, submit a talk!

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