Chicago Roboto 2019
Another Chicago Roboto has come and gone, this one just as great as the last time I attended. I was sad to miss last year’s and was glad to be able to attend and speak at this one. I always enjoy my time with the community and connecting over the great selection of talks. This year, and last, the Android conference was located at Chez Chicago right by the Magnificent Mile, the perfect location!
Great Talks
There was a great talk selection covering things both old and new. For the last two years Chicago Roboto has been a single track conference, meaning you don’t have to make the hard decisions between what talk to attend! You can see them all. And you want to too because the line up is spectacular.
This year held everything from the newest, shiniest libraries like WorkManager that we learned about from Adnan A M in Putting Work Manager To Work, and Navigation Architecture Components with Eric Maxwell in Going Deep w/ Navigation; to some history learning about the ever present Themes with Mark Allison in his talk Theme On and more insightful learnings in A History of Android Launchers with Kevin Barry. Sean McQuillan covered both ends by looking at where coroutines came from and where we are now in his talk Launching into Coroutines.
I also learned a great deal about animations from both Jossi Wolf with Exploring MotionLayout and Saket Narayen in Behind The Scenes of Building a Gesture Driven Reddit App. Definitely included some tips I want to bring back to work with me. Automate the Small Things from Nate Ebel included some ways to automate some everyday tasks that I want to bring back to make our workflows smoother.
While all the talks were great, I think the day two keynote was my favorite of the two keynotes. Jordan Beck shared The Engineer’s lifecycle: onCreate to onDestroy (and all the stuff in between) that brought a lot of perspective about what an engineer’s “lifecycle” might look like. I especially liked the idea around celebrating the maker path.
I was also excited to share a new talk of mine: Getting Started with AndroidX Test. In it I cover the new AndroidX Test libraries which have some exciting new things for Android testing, as well as some existing libraries brought under the new namespace. I’ll be revamping it after Google I/O in a few days, and I can’t wait to bring it to the next conference or meetup. 😉
Be sure to keep your eye out for the recordings!
Edit: Here are the recordings!
Community
I can never talk about Chicago Roboto without talking about the community focus. It’s one of my favorite things about it. Not only is the community of attendees amazing to get to meet and catch up with, but it shows that the organizers care about the community. You know they listen to the attendees and want to make it the best experience possible.
The conference is also great at giving back to the community. For example, instead of having a catered lunch at the venue, we had lunch vouchers to get out into the city and support some local restaurants. It’s a great way to get us out of the venue to see a little more of the city and give back to the locals.
Speaking of community, we were able to share the family friendly space with some of our Chicagoans who got to tour the space with their kids. Maybe someday Chicago Roboto will provide childcare for an even more inclusive space. hint hint, wink wink!
Thanks Sponsors
I’d also like to give a huge thanks to the sponsors who made this event possible.
Without them, this great event wouldn’t happen:
Until next year! 👋
