Tymit attend Droidcon London
This year the Android team attended Droidcon London, one of the biggest Android conferences of the year. With more conferences starting up again after a few years break, it was great to see the community coming together to talk and share ideas about everything Android - all within Droidcon London’s spiritual home at The Business Design Centre in Angel.
This was a special occasion for the Tymit team. It was the first time we were all together in person since I joined the company, giving us an opportunity to get to know each other better face to face. It also gave me the chance to give the team a small look into London life and the experience of an authentic British pub. 🍻
Talk Highlights
This years talks were of very high quality and variety. Ranging from popular topics such as Jetpack Compose to more advanced concepts like Augmented Reality. Each speaker clearly knew their area of expertise and the team left the conference feeling inspired and filled with ideas to consider for our own work here at Tymit. 💳
Some of the talks that stood out to me were:
🤖 Challenges, failures and lessons in 15 years of building on top of Android — Carl-Gustaf Harroch
The Keynote talk and an appearance from a Droidcon London superstar! Carl started Droidcon London in the early days and also created Novoda, a Mobile Product Engineering Company recognised across the world. Carl shares his 15 years of experience working with Android and what he’s learnt when it comes to building high performing teams and engaged communities.
🏗️ Building Compose APIs — Jossi Wolf
Jossi Wolf from Google talks about how to build Modifier & Composable APIs right, through lessons learned building the AnchoredDraggable API. Interesting ideas include working out whether your API works best as a Composable or a Modifier, making sure the signature of your API is simple for developers to use, and not being afraid to iterate on your API over time.
🔎 Mobile Observability at scale — Josef Raksa
Josef from Glovo’s platform team talks about observability for mobile. He explains what Mobile Observability is, why it is important, and how it helps companies to better understand what is happening in their mobile apps and platform. This becomes especially useful when SLA’s / SLO’s are involved.
🎆 Easy screenshot testing with Compose — Jose Alcérreca
Screenshot tests are a great way to verify your UI is laid out as expected using Jetpack Compose. Jose from Google explains how easy they are to implement, why it’s useful Roboelectric Native Graphics enables screenshot tests to run on the JVM, and finally gives a preview of what Google are working on to make screenshot testing even easier using Jetpack Compose Previews.
In Conclusion
Droidcon London 2023 was a great experience and contained the energy, excitement and friendliness you expect from a developer conference. For the team it was a great opportunity for us to meet in person for the first time and also to learn more about each other. We hope to be back next year!
Written by Darryl Bayliss, Senior Android Engineer