I/O 2018
Sitting in S. Francisco’s airport, with such a long trip ahead of me, that I am not even able to calculate its length, I think it is a good opportunity to write down some of my first impressions of this week.
Let’s start with the summary: WOW!
This has been an amazing week, where I got a bunch of different new perspectives. I got to know a lot of new people and feel so inspired right now that I don’t even know which idea or project I should start with!
You have the talks online in youtube, so you can go ahead and spend some time diving in whatever is more interesting for you.
Nevertheless, I can give you my overall impression about what has been going on in this three days around the Shoreline Amphitheater Mountain View.
Welcome to the future
This was my first I/O and I am not sure if this is every year like this, but definitely it didn’t feel that way to me when I followed it remotely. Getting your hands and eyes on the new technologies and hearing the announcements directly from the stage made me feel like lots of things are about to change.
It all started riding besides self driving cars from Waymo in the road to the venue, this already got me in the mood of innovation. And once the keynote started, it was clear that the wave of AI is invading every aspect of technology you can think of. Meaning, everyone! The possibilities are limitless: Health, accessibility, mail, photos, news… Can’t wait to see what is yet to come.
My personal highlights
I will be probably missing tons of interesting things, because there was so much information around that I still need some time to digest everything. At first glance, this is what caught my attention and what I am planning to take a deeper look into in the following days:
- Android App Bundle: The new way of making your apks radically smaller.
- Jetpack: This had a lot of focus on the Android world, it is the set of different things to help you to create common infrastructures to many apps. Including navigation, paging, slices and much more.
- Android actions and slices: New ways of exposing your app and make it easier for the user to interact with it.
- ML kit: SDK that should make machine learning more accessible to every iOS and Android developer.
- Flutter: I took the time to step by the code labs and get started experimenting with Flutter and I have to say it was fun and interesting! I will keep on investigating a bit about it.
Among the talks that I most enjoyed so far (I still have some to see) are Modern Android development and Protips: a fresh look at advanced topics for Android experts.
My experience
From my point of view, the main gain is inspiration. You get to meet really smart people that are focused on driving things forward, you encounter signs like “make good things together” or “dream big” along the way. So my advice would be to follow those signs! Apart from that I found the conference to be really smooth, you can find your own balance among exploring tents with prototypes such as smart projector built with Android things, or Android Auto, talking to Google engineers about any problem during the office hours, or attending any talk you are interested in.
If I were to give you some piece of advice for you to take, if you ever get the chance of living this nice experience that would be:
- It is a good idea to put some thoughts before the conference on what you are currently working on and you would like to know more about or discuss any aspects of it This way, you can take the chance to get your questions answered.
- Also, try to attend some day zero events, they are a good point to get you in the mood. I was able to attend the Netflix and Intel parties and had some fun over there.
- Enjoy it! Get to know people and don’t worry too much if you are missing things, it can become a bit stressful trying to attend every single event/talk, so plan your schedule the best you can and focus on the joy.
Overall experience was amazing, having things that I expected:
… and others that surprised me:
That’s all from my first I/O experience, I hope you enjoyed and I will try to write some more tech related posts in the upcoming weeks, stay tuned!
Thanks for reading.
