Droidcon Berlin 2022
Babbel Office - July 5th
If you are looking to learn new languages, much like many engineers from the tech community who have moved to Berlin, Babbel is a great place to start. Apart from offering a great solution for learning new languages, they also hosted us for a pre-conference speaker party. We were greeted by many familiar faces from the Android community!
Manuel Vivo, Tahsin Dane, Sagar Viradiya and I in the Droidcon speaker party!
Conferences are fun and full of energy, and if you are short of it, Ben Kadel, Senior Android Engineer at Babbel has some in store for you. Speaker parties also help in connecting people and preparing for the sessions. Since it’s Droidcon, the Android DevRel team often takes the center stage in many conversations. If you ever want to know what it’s like to DevRel and move from Berlin to London, ask Florina Muntenescu from the Jetpack Compose team. Don’t be surprised if Nick Butcher walks up to you for a quick chat about your work and experience as an Android developer. Keeping up with the ever-changing trends in Android app architecture is a task of its own, but Manuel Vivo from the Jetpack team focusing on architecture guidelines, will not shy away from sharing his views on the subject.
The Android community is one of the best developer communities in the world with a diverse range of opinions and perspectives. After sharing pictures of her cats, Karin-Aleksandra Monoid will often guide you with her views on the state of pure functional programming in Android.
You can use various open-source libraries to build your projects, much like Koin, the dependency injection framework and you will discover just how passionate Arnaud Giuliani is when he speaks about deploying new updates for the project.
Droidcon Berlin 2022 - Speaker Party
Speaker parties play a crucial role in building up the energy and momentum for the upcoming sessions.
Day One - July 6th
Keynote
Keynotes set the tone for the entire conference. This year’s keynote for Droidcon Berlin was delivered by the Android team on modern Android development. It was presented by Florina Muntenescu, Jose Alcérreca, and Wojtek Kaliciński.
Now in Modern Android with the Android DevRel team
The keynote speakers take us through Now in Android a project focused on modern app development using Jetpack Compose, Material 3 and best architecture practices.
Team Delivery Hero at Droidcon
Pioneering modern Android tech and strategies, Delivery Hero is leading the way with our tech on our mobile apps. You will find several engineers from our consumer and logistics teams participating in event activities. This year our company had three speakers sharing their ideas on stage.
Crash-reporting taken to next-level
Tahsin Dane and Sevan Acemoglu take us through the art of navigating a sea of information on app crashes and using custom techniques and dashboards to help us understand crash reports much easier than off-the-shelf market tools available to us. If you want to learn the art of preparing for your talks, Tahsin has some quick tips you can benefit from.
Delivery Hero Logistics team on stage!
A complete journey of Android Modularization
Sinan Kozak from our logistics team explores the journey of modularization of an Android app. He explains correct techniques when modularizing a monolith application and the key to building the foundation of your codebase.
Sinan Kozak speaks about app modularization
Team Delivery Hero was shining from the very first day of our community event and behind it was Eda Arslan keeping us all together at our booth during the event. Kudos Eda!. Delivery Hero participates in many tech events and we often act as key sponsors enabling conversations and events in tech.
If you do happen to visit our booth at one of the events, do come and say hi! We will always have some interesting challenges for you to solve.
Android devs brainstorm on code challenges at the Delivery Hero booth
Also our teams are looking for talented engineers like yourself! Come work with us, visit Careers at Delivery Hero for more information.
Inside the .git folder - Explore the mysterious depths…
We often end up looking for answers on StackOverFlow when working with Git. Ben Kadel makes our lives easier by exploring the hidden depths of the .git folder. With a dash of energy on stage and brilliant presentation skills he shows a real knack for keeping the audience engaged. We discover how git internally maintains our code changes and generates various hashes.
Ben Kadel speaks at Droidcon about Git
The Google Booth
Sponsors drive a lot of activities at tech conferences. You will find companies sharing their knowledge, innovation, and resources. Also, it’s a great place if you are in the search for cool laptop stickers!
With a center-stage booth at the event, Google’s presence at the event was hard to miss. You will find several engineers from the Android team surrounded by folks from the community, engrossed in conversations about tech. This year they showcased a tablet and a foldable device to demonstrate the power of APIs from Jetpack compose in building apps with adaptive user interfaces. Apart from all the tech, it was also the only place which served the best coffee, keeping us all awake!
A chat with the Android team at the Google Booth
Reach out to Florina if you want a quick primer on making top-notch animations for tech presentations, I was humbled when she asked me to take out my laptop for helping me with my slides. Google’s Material design is also paving the way for modern design guidelines and personalized UI’s with Material You. Gurupreet Singh from the Material design team will greet you with a smile on his face to answer your questions on Material 3 or building apps with Compose.
Modern Android development panel
Conversations with developers are central to community events, especially panels which allow developers to ask questions. Towards the end of day one, the Android DevRel team took up questions on app development, some of the hot topics were building apps with Jetpack compose, scalable app architectures, and various questions related to API usage from Jetpack.
From left to right - Jose Alcérreca, Wojtek Kaliciński, Nick Butcher, Florina Muntenescu and Manuel Vivo.
Do checkout the panel discussion once videos are shared by Droidcon.com.
Day 2 - July 7th
Conference days when you have to speak are a challenge, being a speaker you miss several conversations that happen parallel to your talk, and being at a big event like Droidcon you want to attend as much as possible. If Material You, the internals of the Android OS, and color science are topics that interest you, do check my talk at Droidcon.
A ride through AOSP’s new colors
Super excited for sharing ideas with developers around the world, you will find me talking about the dynamic color system of Material 3, System-UI, and internals of compose-m3 APIs.
Talk on the color science behind Material design and the Android framework
You can read more about my experience here. It is amazing to find people after your talk wanting to discuss their views with you and ask questions. It’s great when you find your ideas match with real-world applications, an engineer from Paradox Cat, a company invested in building Android for cars, discussed about using the dynamic color system on the dashboard of a car UI and its built-in applications.
Community Interviews
A community built by amazing people!
At the heart of the Android community, you will find Matt McKenna and Madona Syombua speaking to everyone about their experiences at Droidcon. Their sheer energy and passion for bringing people together are an inspiration to the entire community.
I and Sagar Viradiya discussed our tech at Delivery Hero and spoke about our experience at Droidcon. It was a pleasure meeting both of them in person. Madona is an empowering force for many of us from the community, she is a Women Techmakers Ambassador, do listen to her experience with the community on Youtube, and stay tuned for the community interview videos!
Open source at Droidcon
Android is undoubtedly open-source and you will find several discussions about working with Android and contributing to open-source. Do meet James Gatt, who speaks fondly about the open-source nature of Android and building the operating system for multiple devices.
Discussions on open-source and embedded Android
Lazy Layouts, Large Screens, and Adaptive UIs
Foldables and adaptive layouts are not a thing of the future, they are happening right now! We saw more of this with a variety of talks on building responsive UIs. Paul Lammertsma and Simona Stojanovic from the DevRel team were geared up for their presentations. They take us through building modern UIs with the APIs available from Jetpack and address some do’s and don’ts setting a long-term vision and guideline for us all.
| Lazy layouts with Simona Stojanovic | Building apps for large screens with Paul Lammertsma |
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Paul shows a demo at the Google Booth with a foldable device and demonstrates how an adaptive layout works on different screen sizes. You’ll find it super informative watching Simona navigate the attendees through questions about Compose Navigation.
Day 3 - July 8th
Taking a break is essential, and with a comedy talk in the morning by Ben Kadel and Victor Stojanov, we head towards the community-nominated talks of the conference. Community-nominated talks give a great opportunity for speakers to present their ideas at such conferences.
Reviving Linux On Android
Zachary Powell shares what it took to revive a 10-year-old project Linux On Android. We go through the history of the project and discuss key challenges in maintaining long-running projects.
Zachary Powell shares his journey with LinuxOnAndroid
The curious case of Android Gesture Animation
Animations and gestures with Compose are super easy. Kinnera, with an example of a stretchy square and its drag gestures, carefully explained how she recreated a cool animation using the Compose APIs.
Kinnera teaches us how to build cool animations with Jetpack Compose
That’s all folks!
Conferences like Droidcon go a long way in building tech communities and bringing developers together. They are vital for the tech industry in facilitating larger conversations and are a celebration of the best of the Android ecosystem.
You will learn a lot by attending such events and they are great fun as you find your set of people to experience it together with.
The best of Droidcon Berlin 2022
We had such a great time participating in Droidcon. If you find me at the next event do come around and say hi. Till next time!
Attributions
- Droidcon for photos from the event.