Annyce Davis

ones and zeros

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.

 

Speaking

I had the honor of delivering the opening Keynote for the Conference. This was my first time doing so. I spent weeks preparing my talk. The title was “First Do No Harm”. My goal? Use the principles behind the Hippocratic Oath to motivate Software Developers. I wanted to show that we can continue learning and honing our skills in a way similar to how physicians perfect their crafts. To get everyone in that frame of mind, I even wore a lab coat on stage. I think the talk went really well, and I can’t wait until I have the opportunity to deliver it again!

 

 

Takeaways

There were so many awesome speakers and talks at DroidCon Boston. Here are just some takeaways from a few talks that I attended. First, I went to the “Practical RxJava with an Air Cannon” talk. In it, Nick DiPatri, showed an example of converting some code that had endless callbacks to code that used RxJava. It was useful to see the side-by-side comparison and learn about the various operators he used to achieve a more comprehensive solution.
 

 

I also attended the talk, “Building Debug Features” by Sam Edwards. In his talk, Sam shared some sample scenarios where developers might want to consider adding debug features. For example, if you need to change the base URL of the API for QA Testing, then that’s a great item to have as a debug feature.

 

He showed several examples of how you could add the “debug” functionality to your application. The most straightforward way was by means of a new Activity class in your debug build variant. I’ve been meaning to add some debug functionality to my current application for a while now. Seeing how easy it can be, has moved it higher up in my todo list.

 


I had a great time at DroidCon Boston and would jump at the chance to attend again. I was able to reconnect with a few of my online friends as well as meet new ones! As I’ve said before, the people are truly the highlight of any conference I’ve attended.

 

Speaker Party
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