Annyce Davis

Helping you write beautiful code

DroidCon Boston 2017 Recap

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This was the first year for the DroidCon Boston Conference. I put together a few highlights of the event below:

Venue

It took place at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston, MA. It was such a cool space. It’s typically used for theater performances, so the rooms were lush and vibrant in color. As a speaker you felt like a Shakespearean actor about to break into soliloquy. It was absolutely awesome! There was great music playing in the background and live entertainment as well. This conference hit all the high notes that one would expect from a first-class event.

 

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Write/Speak/Code 2016 Recap

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This was my first time attending Write/Speak/Code and it was an amazing experience. Not only did I learn useful information for advancing my career I delivered my first Keynote talk. I put together a few highlights of the event below:

Overview

The event took place at The Chicago School of Psychology in Chicago, Illinois. It was my second time in Chicago and I forgot how amazing the food was, so yes I ate well. The conference was split into two tracks: First-Timers and Alumna. All attendees were together for the morning/evening Keynotes and lunch. Then we split into our two tracks and attended “workshop-style” sessions in various areas surrounding writing, speaking and coding. 

Android ladies at #wsc2016conf Come say hi if you’re @WriteSpeakCode pic.twitter.com/UHuXRSYH52

— Yash Prabhu (@yashvprabhu) June 15, 2016

Attendees

The conference is open to all who identify as women. Their mission is to empower women developers to become thought leaders, conference speakers, and open source contributors. So the experience level was across the spectrum, many women were just entering the field and others were very experienced developers. So it was great getting to interact with such a diverse group of talented people.

Who came the farthest to #wsc2016conf? Woman from Alaska is the winner!! pic.twitter.com/jUOlQpI5du

— WriteSpeakCode (@WriteSpeakCode) June 15, 2016

Takeaways

So there were a few sessions that I derived a ton of value from, one was about “Ask vs. Guess Culture Communication”. This talk discussed the nuances of the different communication styles, as well as strategies for bridging the gap between the two. During the discussion phase we talked about being successful when pair programming with someone who may have a different communication style from you and I really appreciated the following suggestions:

  • Do a Pairing Retrospective
  • Include lots of “I” statements
  • Establish a baseline for why you’re pairing
  • Use a Timer ~10 minutes for the “driver”
  • Swap writing tests and code

Then during the “Project Discovery Workshop” I was blown away by the many helpful strategies provided by Annie Passanisi. For instance, when you’re working on a technical blog post and you would like feedback how should you approach it? Well, here are some of the suggestions she offered:

  • Only ask people you trust to review your work
  • Send them the request with a list of questions to answer, like:
  • Did it answer all of your questions?
  • How can I provide more value?
  • What new questions came up for you?
  • What was your favorite part?
I also really enjoyed the information shared during the “Salary Negotiation” talk. Ashley Powell showed how men and women often negotiate differently and that leads to men consistently making more money than women even though they have the same experience. So it was great to see ideas for how to negotiate when you’re job hunting as well as when you’re looking for a raise. One thing that really stuck with me was that you don’t have to be “aggressive” to negotiate, just go with what works with your personality. Whatever you do, it doesn’t hurt to just ask!

Exactly what to say when negotiating from @AshleyPQPQP, I find this so challenging to do. Great advice! #wsc2016conf pic.twitter.com/qVAHTsAi2C

— Annyce Davis (@brwngrldev) June 18, 2016


 With all the information that was being shared during the conference, I appreciated the fact that I still had time to step away and grab some ice cream with a good friend.

Taking a break from #wsc2016conf to enjoy some ice cream with @brwngrldev pic.twitter.com/88Vu1P1pmA

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) June 17, 2016


This was my first time attending an all women conference and it was just as many have said before a transformative experience. I left feeling empowered to do even more great things and to be okay with doing nothing at all. 

Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with my Speaking Adventures. Until next time…

Google I/O 2016 Recap

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This was my second time attending Google I/O and it was once again a great experience. I put together a few highlights of the event below:

Venue

So the event took place at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. It was my first time in Mountain View and it’s such a beautiful city. On Day 1 of the conference it was a bit “toasty” outside so that proved to be challenging, but eventually the remaining days were pleasant and breezy. The majority of the talks took place inside tents and there tended to be a lot of interest on the part of attendees.

Attendees

For me one of the best parts of attending I/O this year was getting to meet so many of the people that I have interacted with online. Most of them were really cool people and managed to keep their spirits up despite putting up with the heat and long lines.

Takeaways

I was completely impressed with the updates to Android Studio. Some of the things that I felt would be nice to haves, like showing Gradle dependencies clearly or having the Espresso Test Recorder were released. Definitely one of the major highlights for me.
 

 

Something that surprised me though was how Firebase has become the de facto standard of all things mobile for Google. In fact, several products were renamed “Firebase X, Y, Z”. The following tweet summarizes it best:


 

Also there were several talks on developing applications for emerging markets. I especially enjoyed the one titled, “Building for Billions”. The speakers talked about the best strategies for making sure your application is always interactive and responsive for users regardless of network and memory conditions.

All in all, I am very thankful I was able to attend; I know that everyone doesn’t get this opportunity. I learned a lot, I drank a lot of coffee, and I met some awesome folks.



Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with my Android Adventures. Until next year…