One of the street art in Paris

Android Makers & Droidcon Paris 2023

I’m continuing the visited conferences recap. Stay tuned.

The connection to Paris is super easy from Amsterdam: the three hours plus train with the acceptable connection and nice restaurant. I also have a romantic feeling about Paris — it was my first big European city we discovered with my wife many years ago. This time weather was also like the one I love — a slight drizzle on the first day and a sunny one on the last day.

I also preferred walking over taking public transport and enjoyed the different corners of the city — small shops, cafes and gorgeous parks.

Anyway, Droidcon collaborated with Android Makers, and it was reborn of the event in Paris.

I felt pleased with the quality of the talks, and the networking was productive, even above my expectations. That was a combination of my spirit to socialize as much as possible with the generous support of my old and new Android friends (Special thanks to the 🇫🇷 — 💚). I also connected with quite many people from other countries. And in addition, I was able to form a small Ukrainian team to share the event, experience and thoughts. However, I was shy to speak to the speaker starts, and I hope next time I will be able to at least personally thank you for your influence and addition to my professional path.

The improvement would be — providing lunch on the venue and following time more strictly.

The funniest feeling was re-filling the water bottle that reminded me of my childhood in my grandma’s village where I was taking water from the deep hole in earth.

Talks I attended with my comments:

• The keynote “Android Graphics”, was from Romain Guy and Chet Haase. The bar was set high — the history of the UI Android toolkit (some bits overlap with Chet’s book). And. I was surprised by how powerful is graphics API from Android version 1 was. The slides were also lovely.
• “Demystifying the test pyramid” by Xavier F Gouchet. An excellent overview and personal thoughts about the testing approaches and what fundamental questions to ask before writing any first test. The news for me was that DataDog has some E2E test solution.
• “Staying passionate about your craft” by Jeroen Mols. Jeroen is a great speaker. And this talk was an excellent overview of his reflection on his carrier path — decisions, effort and return — a great talk to learn and be inspired by someone’s experience.
• “Exposing Data” by Hadi Hariri. Hadi is an entertaining speaker — watching any of his talks is just fun. I learned a bit more about the Exposed library from JetBrains and JetBrains’s plans for its future. I also wondered if Exposed could be run on Android (it should since it is Kotlin and Sqlite is in the list of supported databases).
• “90s Websites… in 2023 on mobile in Compose” by Maia Grotepass. A massive nostalgia for the earliest web with nice examples of using different animations and drawing api’s in compose.
• “Unstable or undebuggable? Rebelling against best practices” by Louis CAD. The implementation of the idea of how to use the beauty of compose with the smoothness of the native view for Android watch. Nice story about an attempt to keep a similar API but with a recycler view instead of the lazy column.
• “The rise and fall of Feature teams” by Danny Preussler. Danny is one of the most experienced developers I know. And we share the love of writing tests and pair programming. This time he speaks about the feature teams in the industry. And gives Soundcloud’s way to return to the platform teams. From my experience, a great feature team performed above any platform team I knew. However, I also appreciate the bravery of going against the mainstream and ditching the concept that doesn’t work for your team/company. I wanted to reflect my company structure according to Conway’s law. And in general, visit all articles and cases Danny mentioned in his talk.
• “Go with the flaw” by Akshay Chordiya. A broad and excellent talk about the Flows. Defiantly I would recommend it in the list of easy and helpful for beginners with the Kotlin coroutines. First time I saw Akshay’s talk, and I will search for his other talks to follow up.
• “What a long strange trip it’s been: a year in Android” by Ash Davies. An entertaining talk with English humour about what happened last year in Android and not only.
• “Sweet architecture” by Benoît Quenaudon. Another talk about the internals of the CashApp and architecture decisions done in one of the biggest Square apps. Interesting to see their approach and decisions. That leads to quite a boilerplate — however, maintainable and flexible code. I wanted to see more goals in mind that were leading to the current state. It was also great to see some tricks on preparing code for future migrations. Finally, I got a click why to write even non UI code with compose. And as action point — I want to check the new kid from Slack — Circuit.
• “Off to the races with Android” by Etienne Caron and Francois Legare. Super entertaining talk with a great demo of how Kotlin Multiplatform speeds up prototyping and building a top-notch technology product. It was not the first time I heard about the power of ESP32 controllers.
• “Confetti: building a Kotlin conference app in 40 mins” by John O’Reilly and Martin Bonnin. One of the talks that look like an easy/peasy coding, but you know how much effort was to prepare such. Another great example is how using KMM helps to create fast and acceptable solutions. Great to watch and learn how to do live coding with the help of the powerful IDE.
• “Get a performance score for your app” by Alexandre Moureaux. The new tool announced to help with app performance scoring/testing. There are a lot of question to check about the methodology and approaches underhand. But the simplicity and power of the tools is appealing to try it as soon as possible. The tool/service name is https://flashlight.dev/.
• “10 years of the Android Development: The retrospective” by Julien Salvi. Entertaining talk about some noticeable points in the Android development history. That brings much nostalgia about our ways of dealing with problems in the early and later stages.
• “Defensive programming: The best software development methodology ever intended” by Chet Haase and Romain Guy. Another comedy talk from this couple. Especially relevant in the current times. I had an idea to create a TV channel with all these comedy talks, and I am pretty sure there will be a small audience.

Talks I also marked to watch that I missed:

• “Clean code base with Lint and Custom rules” by Sinan Kozak.
• “Forging the path from monolith to multi-module app” by Marco Gomiero.
• “Designing for the foldables in 2023” by Enrique Lopez Manas and Pierluigi Rufo.
• “AI want take your job but it sure will help you do it better” by Orel Zion.
• “How to ship apps better, faster, stronger” by Fabien Devos.
• “~/git -help” by Zhenlei Ji.
• “Developing system apps without AOSP” by Erik Hellman.
• “Migrate to grade version catalogue” by Merab Tato Kutalia.

The videos will be available soon, wondering on Droidcon website or Android Makers YouTube channel.

And the next year is already announced, with early bird tickets sale starting soon.

That was a train trip post with an unstable connection :) Sleep well, and stay tuned.

If any mistake or improvement — don’t hesitate to contact me.