The importance of developer conferences

Visiting conferences is important for a developer’s professional growth. Nothing does a better job at breaking the everyday routine, meeting experts in the field and getting fresh ideas like conferences. That’s why visiting conferences is essential for staying on top of our profession.

Droidcon is a global developer conference series and a network focusing on the best of Android. Recently, we attended Droidcon Krakow 2016. It was a blast and we already can’t wait for the next big community event.

Why visit a global conference?

You will be surrounded by developers. They are people that share the same interests and write code to solve the same problems as you. Given the state of the mobile industry today, things change fast. New features keep popping up, and this leads to new problems waiting for you to solve. Developers around you might have already invested their time into solving a specific problem you just encountered. You don’t want to go through the same process all over again. As an engineer, you want to be efficient. You want to talk to other developers and share ideas. The next day, you’ll probably end up somewhere between being pointed in the right direction and solving the problem effortlessly. Some developers have great solutions to common problems and are willing to speak about them in front of the audience. They are referred to as speakers, but they are just developers with microphones. As a community, we define the standards and best practices that make us solve common problems effortlessly. Visiting a conference and socialising with other developers is a great way to embrace these ideas.

Main takeaways

Events like these really boost your arsenal. They open your perspective so that the next day you have so many new ideas to attack your problems with. For me, here are the main takeaways from Droidcon Krakow 2016:

1. Testing was the main focus of this conference: “Robust unit testing in Android”, “Writing truly testable code”, “Unit testing without Robolectric” and many other sessions, really showed that the community cares about testing these days. Despite Android’s slow build time and other limitations, many speakers talked about finding ways to work around these issues with the clean architecture approach: placing business logic into separate, Android-agnostic modules makes it possible to unit test them and develop with the TDD methodology. We picked up some fresh ideas to implement on our own projects, which will improve the automatic testing process.

2. Even though it’s been some time since Kotlin was introduced, it was surprising to see so many people raising hands when asked if they are using it in production. Multiple speakers confirmed using it too. There was a talk with all code examples in Kotlin instead of Java, even though the talk was not related to Kotlin. It seems that Kotlin adoption is taking a swing and we should definitely give it a try to see if it works for us.

3. A different approach to architecture: MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), a talk about utilising Android’s data binding library for application architecture. Even though I am very happy with MVP approach, it’s always good to know alternatives — there might be a time when a different approach works better.

4. A different approach to DI: Toothpick. Being satisfied with Dagger and Dagger2, and also knowing the giants standing behind it, it was very surprising to see someone tackle the dependency injection problem all over again with yet another library. However, Toothpick seems simpler than Dagger2 while bringing some fresh ideas and I’ll be sure to give it a try in some of the new projects. As for current projects, I don’t see a great benefit in migrating them to Toothpick. Dagger2 does the job.

5. Even though we should seek no further than Jake Wharton’s talk as an introduction to RxJava2, the speakers gave their unique perspectives given the unique problems they’ve encountered. Updating from RxJava to RxJava2 brings core ideas in a polished, more effective way while also providing additional functionalities. This is something I can’t wait to adopt in all projects.

6. Additionally, there were other really interesting topics like building overlay SDKs while focusing on making it simple to integrate, using RxJava for orchestrating animations, hacking Android apps and many other which may find its application soon.

Conclusion

After seeing many new technologies swiftly adopted, my main takeaway is to stop being too theoretical. It is in our nature to analyse things and accumulate too much ideas. People think about writing a book, learning a new language or having a certain conversation and they never do. I read and thought a lot about Kotlin and never tried it. Sometimes, a few baby steps are better than a whole lot of theory.

Thanks to Sinisa Cvahte for the design.

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Undabot and Trikoder are partner organisations. We analyze, strategize, design, code and develop native mobile apps and complex web systems.