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:

The upcoming Jack and Jill compiler in Android: http://t.co/OA6bBP1z0S (mentioned in #AnDevCon Fireside Chat) #AndroidDev

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 20, 2014

Q: What is the advantage of Android Studio over Eclipse? A: You can open XML files without taking a coffee break - @ErikHellman at #AnDevCon

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 20, 2014

When you outsource support, you lose the stories, where you learn a lot of unexpected lessons. - @MikeFHines at #AnDevCon

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 21, 2014

How to get your designers to understand Android? Buy them Android phones to use. Android phones. Not Samsung. - @JakeWharton at #AnDevCon

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 21, 2014

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!

My best sessions @AnDevCon? Rx with @colinmlee and text+shaders with @chiuki. Thanks for sharing!

— Mimmo Grottoli (@mimmogrottoli) November 22, 2014

@chiuki gave one of the best talks I've seen at @AnDevCon!

— Richard Thai (@ThaiBreaker) November 21, 2014

So @chiuki just had two of the most informative sessions I've seen at #AnDevCon. Super insightful.

— Jonathan Maltz (@maltzj) November 21, 2014

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:

2nd time a RxJava talk shower me with marble charts from the get go. I wish they explain the basic async sequence logic first. #AnDevCon

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 21, 2014

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:

Resources from @Dorvaryn at #DroidconUK: https://t.co/NpagwZ54Np https://t.co/gFJL1Agw3j http://t.co/mC0O2rwvRF (RxJava workshop)

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) October 31, 2014

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.

Fabric takes an AAR & expands it into a library project behind the scene to work w/ Eclipse. - @tsmith at #AnDevCon Open source please?

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 21, 2014

Use the fluent pattern so your constructor don't need to take 5 parameters. - @tsmith at #AnDevCon pic.twitter.com/ghspxPNa0a

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 21, 2014

Require minimum permission in your SDK. Add more functionality if there are extra permissions. - @tsmith at #AnDevCon pic.twitter.com/wtmMqSNPV0

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 22, 2014

An API is like a baby. Very fun to make, but takes 18 years to support. - @tsmith at #AnDevCon

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 22, 2014

Your sample code needs to be of production quality, because people will copy and paste it into production. - @tsmith at #AnDevCon

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) November 22, 2014

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!