Sketch Notes: DroidCon Berlin 2016
In April 2016 I took part in a workshop in Sketching by Fabian Fabian at Ubilabs in Hamburg. 2 months after, in June, I finally got to try real sketchnoting at the DroidCon conference in Berlin. Since I am an Android developer, it made a lot of sense for me to take sketch notes for the talks there. That way I could also share them with others who might like a summary of these talks. Since then, I posted all my sketch notes on my twitter profile. I now opened this publication on Medium to share all my sketch notes in a central place. I hope you can make sense of them and enjoy reading!
Wednesday, June 15
DroidCon Berlin 2016 was from June 15 to 17. At the first day, we attended the DroidCon Barcamp. The first talk I saw there was about Dependency Injection and Toothpick by Daniel Molinero Reguera.
Next up was a talk by Danny Preussler: 15 tips to improve your unit tests. They are quite universal, so you can apply them even now in Kotlin era.
Taking sketch notes, finishing them up and running to the next talk can be quite a rush. And if there’s less content, two talks can fit on one page. In this case, I just took a picture after the second talk was over: RxJava and MVVM by Florina Muntenescu, and Android Studio Productivity by Marko Arsić.
The next talk was by Selim Salman about Android and IoT. It fit together on one page with Raphael Michel’s talk about User Testing.
Thursday, June 16
The next day started with a keynote by Corey Latislaw who talked about Android as the World Phone and how people use apps so much different from what we are used to.
Then Hannes Dorfmann talked about Refactoring the Plaid App with Reactive MVP. A very insightful talk for anyone interested in Android app architecture.
I somehow managed to get into the overcrowded room where Chris Banes gave a talk about Themes and Styles demystified. While the topic was extremely interesting (don’t we all regularly struggle with themes and styles?), it was quite hard to follow while sketching. But I did use these sketches afterwards, especially the parts about button styles.
Then, Thanos Karpouzis and Frederico Gouçalves told us about Modular Android Development. By then I had developed kind of a scheme when to use which color and shape. Can you guess it? (I will talk about this in another article.)
Next up was a great talk by Brenda Cook who showed us how to measure and optimize UI Performance. There are a lot of tools already coming with Android Studio, and many things have a greater influence on performance than we think.
Sticking with UI, I went to see the talk about Material Design and Custom Views by Said Tahsin Dane, who shed some light into the topics of Material themes and the usage of attrs.
The next topic was Scaling Android Apps by Serj Lotutovici, who was showing us their workflow to scale their app on the one hand, and also the development process in a rather large team on the other hand.
So, Are You Coordinating Already? CoordinatorLayout isn’t exactly trivial, and Matthias gave us some insight into its features and usages.
My last talk for the day was Effective Android Development by Sergii Zhuk, which had a lot of useful hints and tools suggestions for building, tracking and testing.
After these talks I needed to spend some time to finish the sketches. When I need to be fast, I just write text and draw shapes with my black pen. The coloring I add afterwards. But even then it is sometimes quite a race against time, and if I have to get to the next talk quickly, I often find myself in a rush. This can get stressful at times. But then I got so many reactions on Twitter and saw that people are actually enjoying my sketches so much, it felt really rewarding.
Friday, June 17
On Friday, the first talk I picked to take my sketch notes was about Bluetooth LE. At that time, I was working on an Android project where we needed to connect to a Bluetooth device via the Serial Port Profile, so I was hoping to get some insights by the talk Bluetooth Low Energy by Erik Hellman. I did, and for the first time almost ran out of space on my page.
The year before, I had already seen GDE Hasan Hosgel talking about performance in Android, and were very curious to see his talk #PERFMATTERS for Android at DroidCon Berlin.
I’m always interested in talks about Android architectures, so I picked Dmitry Voronkevich’s talk called Half Way to Clean Architecture next. If you were wondering how I never make mistakes when I sketch, be assured, I do. In this one I did. Can you spot it?
Another topic that I am a big fan of is Testing. While I already knew the “Why” by experiencing the pain of not having tests, and would answer the “When” with “whenever possible”, I was especially curious about the “How” in Tomek Polański’s talk Testing — Why? When? How? This is what I took from it:
Next came another architectural talk: Let it flow — Unidirectional data flow architecture on Android by Benjamin Augustin. A very inspirational talk about a concept I hadn’t seen in the MVP/MVVM world so far.
The last talk I saw this day was Recipes in RxJava, a talk by Sasa Sekulic that promised some insights into this complex topic. I was quite curious and happy about seeing some code examples. For sketchnoting though, I found it rather hard to follow, and ended up filling only a bit more than half a page.
I remember I met many friends and made new ones in between the talks, for the lunch and coffee breaks, and at the party at c-base afterwards. From the topics, I think I would have forgotten so much by the time I came back to work, I was really glad I had my notes. I could even show them to my colleagues and discuss some architecture decisions with them to improve our apps and make our lives as developers easier.
My thanks goes out to all the speakers that gave these great talks, to all the awesome people I met, and to everyone who appreciated my sketches on twitter by liking or resharing! This was a great experience for me — the first time I did sketchnotes and published them on Twitter. I hope they helped some person or the other to get some insights for their Android development. And for a better documentation of these talks, I hope this Medium post is appropriate. Give me some claps if you liked it and leave your comment below! I’d be happy to post my sketch notes of some more conferences in the future.
