A YPlanner’s visit to Droidcon UK 2015

Taking advantage of YPlan’s generous yearly conference budget, I have spent two of the last days of October at Droidcon UK. While the experience is so much more than can be captured in a blog post, I wanted to share some of my highlights from this great conference.

This is now my 3rd year as a participant, and I am very glad to say that so far every year has been even better than the previous one. Better structure, fantastic speakers, more quality content than ever before. In particular I felt that this year the introductory talks were well complemented by more in-depth talks, so that everyone could find something they would benefit from.

I’m not going to mention all the talks that I went to, but I’ll just list a few of my highlights from the two days.

First off, the conference was opened Thursday morning by Sandro Mancuso, a well known software craftsman and speaker based in London, who talked about what it means to plan and build a career (as opposed to just getting jobs). Though this is not the first time I’ve heard Sandro speak about this topic, I thought it was a good presentation and one definitely not restricted to Android developers. A quote that really resonated with me was:

Don’t say ‘I’m an Android developer’. That’s limiting. I’m a software developer, currently working with this technology.

Etienne Studer, VP of Product Tooling at Gradleware, talked about what’s new and upcoming in Gradle. It’s very exciting to see what the team has in plan, particularly with regards to improving build performance and speed. I can’t find any link to video or slides, but will update once some get posted.

The conference program reflected what Material Design has done in terms of pushing animations to the front stage, so I can recommend two very good talks showing what is possible today with the frameworks and how to achieve some really wonderful effects in apps with very little effort.
First was from Luis G. Valle (slides here, talk here) and the second was from Nick Butcher and Benjamin Weiss from the Android Developer Relations team (slides and sample apps/code 1 and 2). I strongly recommend you check these out, whether you’re new to animations or have been doing them for a while. For newbies, it’s amazing to see how easy it can be and for the experienced animators, make sure you’re checking out some of the newer tools and make your life easier.

Also related to this, but focusing specifically on vector graphics is “Vector all the things” from Mark Allison. Where are the slides you ask? Well, Mark doesn’t do slides in the traditional sense… But this is probably what you’re looking for.

Finally, one of my personal favourites was from Nabil Hachicha about “Advanced techniques for concurrency & memory management” (slides).
I can pretty much guarantee there is something new to you in that presentation, especially if when you hear about GC and memory leaks you want to run for the woods. It’s also refreshing when someone is not afraid to come up and do a talk (including running live code!) about low-level concepts.

The expo part of Droidcon is also not something to be neglected. Droidcon has never been “just about phones”, but with the Android world moving forward so fast, I will admit that I was wondering if the conference will manage to keep up. Those fears were dispelled as soon as you entered the main hall. From VR and wearables, to an Android Auto enabled SUV, one could find anything they wanted and more in terms of the latest Android hardware out there.

All in all, it’s been yet another fabulous Droidcon. Met some wonderful people, old friends and new, learned many things at the talks, saw a glimpse of the future in the exposition. It’s hard to do the conference any justice, with so many talks going on in parallel, but you can find many more videos of the talks up on the website and hopefully more to come soon.

As always, it was great to see everyone, and can’t wait for next year!