The best Droidcon lectures according to #TeamSpeednet
Droidcon is a series of one of the most popular conferences for the Android Developers community. This year one of the Droidcon conferences took place in Lisbon, consisted of more than 45 technical lectures, and was attended by more than 450 developers and professionals from all over Europe. Our team couldn’t pass up such an opportunity to gain new knowledge and broaden contacts in the industry, so at the end of April 7 of us went to Lisbon!
The Droidcon was a great opportunity to learn about the latest trends in app development for Android devices. We went there with the desire to deepen our knowledge on Kotlin Multiplatform, Flutter, Jetpack Compose, and testing. The expertise gained at the conference strengthened our belief that multiplatform programming on mobile should be widely used wherever it’s applicable and possible.
A couple of lectures were especially memorable for us and are worth mentioning:
1. Practical Modularisation for Android Developers – Jordan Terry
The topic of detailed modularisation of a project was discussed with examples, diagrams, and figures. For us geeks, it was a great illustration of the fact that dividing a project into small modules significantly reduces the time to build it and compile it. A great to-the-point conclusion of the issue was a comparison of the pending time for a project take off to the amount of money the company spends during this period. The cost was expressed in the number of new Macbooks, which was surprisingly high!
2. Functional Programming in Kotlin for AndroidDevs – Hari Vignesh Jayapalan
The presentation about functional programming was heavily based on examples from algebra which certainly was very appealing to the scientific minds. The idea of functional programming is as unique as it is difficult to implement in real life. However, it is worth following this path so that our code is readable, reusable and the results of our work are error-free.
3. Building a Kotlin Multiplatform library – Magnum Rocha
The topic of this presentation was the creation of a library to determine the Internet connection, using the SDK platform thanks to Kotlin and its expect/actual.
4. Take a look at Jetpack Glance – Piotr Prus
The most interesting presentation was on Jetpack Compose. It concerned home screen widgets – the speaker presented his approach to their creation, state management, and synchronization.
5. Writing bulletproof code with property-based testing – Sergio Sastre Florez
Property testing is a term that we will certainly remember for a very long time. Thanks to this kind of testing we can cover all the edge cases of our program and take better care of the code quality. The speaker showed two interesting frameworks for testing as well as their pros and cons.
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Presentations covering the topics of Kotlin Multiplatform, Flutter or React Native had a clear message – common multiplatform code is easier to maintain, mitigates the differences in business logic between systems, and is simply cheaper for the customer, which makes these solutions more attractive.
It confirmed our conviction to lean towards multiplatform programming, especially using KMP and Flutter. At the same time, the conference allowed us to gain valuable knowledge supported by the experience of developers working on large projects for well-known global brands. The expertise and know-how about increasing the efficiency of the application development process and proper testing is something that we will definitely use in our everyday work.
We have an excellent opinion about the Droidcon conference – first of all, we had the opportunity to listen to many interesting lectures, and at the same time meet leaders from the Android world and talk to developers from all over Europe. Naturally, the conference in Lisbon had many other advantages beyond the work-related topics – we didn’t miss a chance to visit iconic places of the city or to try delicious Portuguese food 😉 We absolutely recommend the Droidcon conference!
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