If you want to stay in touch with the latest news in Android Development, Droidcon talks are a right choice! They are a great source of learning and I am usually trying not to miss any of those on YouTube. This time it was different! As Android Developer at fleka, I got an opportunity to attend Droidcon Italy 2017. It was my first Droidcon ever! I just got back from Italy and I decided to write about it while my impressions are still fresh! Before listing my favorite talks, I must tell you something:

“It is not all about talks!”

Don’t misunderstand me, talks were great! However, socializing was great part of Droidcon, too! It’s nice event to meet people, share knowledges and hear about their experiences.

Some really nice people from GDG Italy :)

For example, from the members of GDG Italy I got good instructions on how to start local meetups and how to attract people to participate in them; Zeljko Plesac , the speaker from Infinum, told me a lot about the Android development in his company, how they developed Prince of Versions library and why they needed it. etc. etc. I don’t want to list all my conversations from Droidcon. :D I just want to advise you that if you are going to some of the following Droidcon, definitely use the opportunity to socialize! Please, don’t be shy!

Android stroopwafels! I really like one with pizza and yes, I am sorry for eating them! :D

Between sessions, I had time to meet representatives of some of the really cool companies at their stands and enjoy the networking opportunities. It is always nice to hear what other developers do and what are their products!

Sessions!? The only bad thing about this is, you cannot attend all of them! :( There were a lot of interesting talks scheduled at the same time. There are some videos posted online already and I will update this post as soon as new videos appear. To watch videos, just click on titles below:

The buzziest term in Android World this year is Android Things, of course! Wayne Piekarski gave us an overview of the latest news in AndroidThings . Now it has a Bluetooth support and you can connect your app to communicate with USB devices! You can find more here. Also, I have posted one slide that I liked the most. It shows difference between Android and AndroidThings such as: AndroidThings does not have Content Providers, Soft Keyboard, Notifications etc.

Difference between AndroidThings architecture and Android architecture

2. Kotlin: A Retrospective by Christina Lee (Pinterest)

I hope that you have already heard about Kotlin. In short, it is very similar to Swift ( and you must heard about Swift! :D ). Moreover, if you started learning about it, you have probably already know Christina Lee from this nice video. Guys from Pinterest have been using Kotlin for some time now and Christina Lee gave the retrospective about their experience with it. They decreased number of null exceptions with Kotlin, cause Kotlin is null safety language! She told us about analysis that showed that Pinterest had over half a million null exceptions for 6 years period! :O However, a lot of people are still sceptical about Kotlin cause Google still doesn’t implement it in their projects. View more here.

Before anything, take a look at this eye candy:

In his speech, Ty Smith talked about the best practices in implementation of deep linking. I found this talk really useful and diagrams used in presentation helped me a lot to understand it better.

4. Grokking the ConstraintLayout by Wolfram Rittmeyer

Almost one year passed since Google introduced us with ConstraintLayout. Still, not lot of people are using it in their projects because it is so different from what were used to. If you are using last Android Studio version, you could have seen that ConstraintLayout is default one. Wolfram Rittmeyer (probably known to you from his blog.) was talking about the constraints, which type of chains you can use and how to make ConstraintLayout programmatically. He gave us a really nice comparison of Android’s ConstraintLayout and iOS’s AutoLayout! Check it out here!

5. Write once, ship multiple times by Zeljko Plesac (Infinum)

Do you know what is White Label system? Have you ever heard about Fat clients term? Check out his presentation to learn how to prepare your app for white label system.

6. RxJava 2 for the rest of us by Hugo Visser (Little robots)

If you still did not migrate your app to RxJava 2, please do it ! ( Of course, apply Return on Investment calculation first! ). RxJava will not be supported soon and RxJava 2 has really good improvments. However, if you have never used RxJava, Hugo Visser made a similar presentation for RxJava 1 too.

7. Testing Android apps based on Dagger and RxJava by Fabio Collini ( Nana Bianca)

The best for the end! At fleka we are trying to do tests as much as possible, and last months I spent some time to learn how to do tests with RxJava 2. Fabio Collini helped me with his blog posts already and now that I had a chance to listen to him live, it made an even bigger impression on me. Check out his presentation here. There is also a demo available on GitHub.

At Droidcon you will meet a lot of nice people!

That is it from me! I can’t wait to watch other lectures on YouTube and catch up on everything I missed because of schedule!

What I really enjoyed about Droidcon?

Do not be afraid, Droidcon is not only for Android ninjas. Even if you are just the beginner, you will find a lot of good speeches to learn from.

Will I be there next year?!

For sure! Droidcon Italy was a great experience.