Vivid Seats at Google I/O 2019
Google I/O is Google’s annual developer conference. Google announces the latest developer products along with various updates to its existing apps and services. This year, I/O was held from May 7th to May 9th at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California and two engineers from Vivid Seats attended the conference. The outdoor event space hosted Googlers and developers from around the globe. The conference kicks off with a keynote featuring Google Executives and leaders. Following the keynote, Google I/O continues with a series of sessions running across the three days.
The Google I/O agenda is packed with rich technical content. There are variety of events including technical sessions, Office Hours, App Reviews, Codelabs centered around Android apps, accessibility, software, and more. There is an opportunity to talk directly with Google engineers throughout the Sandbox space, an area that features multiple product demos. Combined with app review sessions and office hours, there is no better opportunity to talk directly with the engineers at Google about the problems you face in your development. The Google engineers available in those sessions are looking for feedback and ready to answer any questions. Apart from the sessions and Codelabs, there is the Keynote Session that targets a broader audience and includes announcements about Google’s latest products and services.
Big Announcements at the Keynote
The Google I/O 2019 keynote was jam-packed with news. CEO Sundar Pichai kicked things off by saying company’s mission is shifting from a company that “helps you find answers” to one that “helps you get things done.” From there, the big announcements kept coming.
Historically I/O is typically focused on software, but Google made several hardware announcements this year. They announced the new Google’s Pixel 3A and 3A XL and also unveiled the Nest Hub Max, Google’s latest smart home display.
There were also announcements on the next version of Android, Android Q, and the release of Beta 3, which offers dark theme, smart reply, and a new gesture navigation. Google also announced that Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first. Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin along with some updates coming to the Google Assistant and other Google apps.
Notable Session Takeaways
Declarative UI patterns
Romain Guy, Adam Powell and Jim Sproch from Google unveiled the Jetpack Compose project this year at Google I/O. Jetpack Compose is a declarative UI toolkit built for Android and is inspired by frameworks like React, Litho, Vue.js, Flutter but written fully in Kotlin and compatible with existing Android view system. It aims to simplify the way you write code by making your Android view hierarchies more declarative. With Compose, your UI is defined as a function which transforms data into view hierarchy. Compose is a completely new set of widgets and toolkit APIs built on top of composable functions. It is also a Kotlin compiler plugin, which makes it possible to define your own composable widgets. They also established that it is not ready to ship yet, but you can look at the source code here to see the examples and it runs on a special version of Android studio that let you play with it.
Build a Modular Android App Architecture
This session by Florina Muntenescu and Yigit Boyar covers best practices and patterns you can apply to build an extensible Android architecture centered around the right modularization strategy. They talk about the benefits of modularizing the app including faster compilation, faster CI and isolated feature testing. The session includes the comparison of the two modularization strategies — dynamic feature modules and layer modules. What’s most interesting is that the dynamic feature modules can be used in on-demand loading via dynamic delivery which allows users to download and install dynamic features on demand. On the other hand, layer modularization allows you to isolate third-party dependencies or the layers to bring structure in to your app. This talk is really helpful in finding the right architecture which is a fairly complicated task. Watch the session here for more information.
Learning at Vivid Seats goes above and beyond
Vivid Seats gives employees the opportunities to learn and grow. We trust our engineers to be smart, competent and motivated. This year, we were able to send two engineers to attend Google I/O to get the most out of it and to share their knowledge and experience with other employees.
Google I/O Session videos and recap notes are available online for anyone to watch. However, there are experiences that you simply can’t get by just watching the videos. Opportunities to speak with expert Google Engineers, a chance to see product demos, and getting to try new gadgets and technologies are what the conference is all about.
Additionally, Vivid Seats is actively hiring for several roles on our engineering team. If you’re interested to learn more about open positions, check out our careers page at vividseats.com/careers for more information.
