With a new year comes a new start. At Novoda we are always learning but the new year is a great milestone for starting a new project. What are some of our engineers up to in 2018?

2017 was an amazing year, we spoke publicly about our Novoda Craft University course for new starters. We started exploring data science, machine learning and IoT with AndroidThings. We’ve been to a total of fifty four conferences. Also, we released a bunch of awesome apps working with Channel 4, Immoscout, CCleaner, News UK, Schindler and YourMD. Let’s see what happens in 2018.

Google Assistant has received several new features during 2017, and it can now enable companies to do so many new things that weren’t even conceivable in the past. From easy interactions to complex conversation flows, we can now create great voice and text assistant-based products to enrich users experience.

I’ll take on the challenge to experiment with Dialogflow and Google Assistant in order to cover every edge case, provide help to other developers and run code labs at as many events as possible. I will also release some tutorials and libraries for Assistant to help fellow developers onboard the paradigm and API in a better and more productive way.

Dialog Flow - Getting Started

I’ve been very guarded about Kotlin in 2017, wondering about the maturity and the adoption rate, but judging by the amount of online material that is appearing in blogs etc, even if I do think Java 8 is the way forward, 2018 is where I am going to concentrate on learning Kotlin paradigms.

I’ll do this through making sure any side projects I create will be 100% Kotlin. My blog posts I write this year will have Kotlin examples. For online resources I will start with the Kotlin koans and progress from there.

Kotlin Koans

In 2017 I was mostly focusing on applying Behaviour Driven Development into project that I'm currently on. I believe it's a great approach to align business requirements with what the development team delivers. It's also a great way of working to gain a common understanding of the product within cross-platform teams.

I will try to do this by helping my team to understand the main concepts of the BDD and apply them into our day-to-day work.

What's more, to make sure that what we deliver to users is working correctly, I will focus on applying automated tests driven by Cucumberish framework for our iOS application.

Cucumberish test automation framework for BDD

Machine Learning, AI and Augmented Reality were the main focuses of WWDC 2017 for Apple, launching new tools that make it super straightforward and easy to use for iOS developers in a native way using Swift.

For 2018 I want to continue taking on the challenge of understanding how these frameworks work and how we can add them seamlessly to any project. >

Core ML: Machine Learning for IOS

Build your first ARKit Demo

2017 was an interesting year for Firebase, launching a lot of new products which integrate seamlessly into the whole ecosystem. With the release of Cloud Functions for Firebase, Firestore database, Analytics predictions and easy A/B testing, I see Firebase as being a great toolset to have in your skillsbox as an engineer.

In 2018 I will continue improving my Cloud Functions knowledge by experimenting with different serverless setups. Moreover, I would like to research and slowly adopt in some of our projects Data Driven Development by making use of the A/B testing framework and Analytics Predictions feature that Firebase provides.

Cloud Functions for Firebase

Firebase Predictions

2017 at Novoda has given me the opportunity to explore many new technologies. One of the most interesting to me has been Flutter, a new and refreshing approach to cross platform development using Dart, which I have been learning as part of the Novoda Craftsmanship University.

In 2018, I am looking forward to exploring Flutter and Dart further, and investigating its viability for large scale projects. Its ease to pick up, and speed compared to other cross platform solutions has piqued my interest and I am certainly curious to see if it gains traction in the developer community in the coming months.

Google codelab on Flutter

What are you going to learn in 2018?