Jemma’s Google Developer Days Diary
I was lucky enough to attend the Google Developer Days conference — a 2 day event for the development community, organised by Google and encapsulating a wide array of different Google technologies. It was a well organised, enjoyable and informative event and I had a great time. Here, I summarise what I got up to and share some of my highlights.
Embarking on my first solo trip abroad, I was excited and a little apprehensive about being in a new country on my own. I needn’t have worried — as has been my experience at many other developer events, I was welcomed again into the community with open arms and spoke to many friendly and interesting people over the course of the event.
Day One
The opening keynote had something for everyone, with Googlers from each platform sharing the latest about the Android platform, the Google Assistant, Machine Learning and Google Cloud, the Mobile Web and Firebase.
Although this event was not focused solely on the Android platform, the rest of the day held a variety of learning opportunities for Android developers. As an Android developer, I tailored my schedule to include sessions I thought would be useful to what I am already doing (such as the need to stay up to speed with the new requirements of Android O) and sessions of topics I wanted to try and was interested in.
Architecture Components
In the morning I attended a training session centred around the new Android Architecture Components. I arrived just in time to make it into the session before they proclaimed the room was full, and spent the first half sitting in the aisle on the floor — the session was popular!
An introductory talk was delivered by Florina Muntenescu, who then identified a number of helpful engineers in the room there to help and provided the link to the codelab.
Initially at this point, still sat on the floor, I considered leaving to do the codelab at a later date — it was available online after all! Then I hesitated and thought back to how many times I’d said ‘I wish I had time to look at that’ since I’d first heard the announcement of these new components. Here I was with a good hour and a half of time in front of me with which to dedicate to taking a first look, with lots of friendly experts on hand to help me if I got stuck. I now recognise the value in these sessions. So I reconsidered, and soon after a chair became available, so I promoted myself to one of the tables and got stuck in.
Android O
The afternoon included two very useful talks about new Android O features.
Shailen Tuli gave the first and shared some important points about how the changes made in the Oreo release change the way apps using background services act (or don’t act!). On Android Oreo, there is no way to start a service if the app is in the background, and developers should instead be using Jobs over Schedulers going forward.
Background apps will now receive location information in a throttled way, only a few times an hour. The app does not need to be targeting O yet for these changes to take effect. However, all apps will remain unaffected when requesting location in the foreground.
I would really recommend taking a look at this talk if your app requires the user’s location or previously relied on background services. It goes into detail about the decisions behind these changes, and the best ways to adapt your app to make full use of them.
The second talk was shared by Dan Galpin and Lisa Wray.
Dan delivered an impressive whirlwind tour of many new additions to Android O and the Support Library. In less than 18 minutes he crammed many useful starting points and quick wins for features such as adaptive icons, notification channels, shortcuts and widgets, custom fonts, EmojiCompat, TextView autosizing and improved vector drawable support, to name a few! I would definitely recommend giving it a watch if you have a spare few minutes and want to know more about the newer features in a quick, concise and useful way.
In a slightly more relaxed manner, Lisa Wray then spent the rest of the session focusing on physics based animations, detailing what was possible using the latest support library and some good examples of situations in which these could enhance the user experience.
Augmented Reality
To finish off the first day of sessions, I went to hear Tom Salter talk about the newly announced ARCore SDK. Augmented Reality is something we have a playful interest in here at ribot, and I was excited to see what Google’s offering would be and how it would compare to the ARKit of the Apple world (on the surface it looks pretty similar).
ARCore has taken Google’s learnings from Tango over the past few years and used them as a basis to provide an experience on Android devices which no longer needs any extra sensors or equipment to place objects in the virtual space. It’s still very early days for ARCore, but with some examples of the potentials for this technology, and the usual call for feedback from the developer community, I’m sure there is much more to come.
Party time!
The after party was held in the same building as the main conference. This was nice as there was no transitional walk to another venue and meant anyone who hadn’t been intending to stay, and who wouldn’t have walked to another venue, was able to see the party and finish off any conversations following the last talks of the day without being rushed out of the venue.
The party was probably the best I’ve been to in the industry. It had something for everyone. It had the open bar, food, a dj (with accompanying saxophonist!) and space to dance and talk. But it also had mini golf, giant Jenga, air hockey, ice cream, glow sticks.. and even a second music area complete with ball pits (my personal highlight!).
Day Two
The Day 2 Keynote gave some interesting stats and insight into the inner workings of Google. For me, as someone whose experience comes from working in a small agency team, some of the stats were pretty mind blowing — 40,000 developers working on a single codebase, with 1 billion files, making 60,000 commits per day! It is encouraging to see that even with that quantity of code, code reviews are still valued (and probably even more important), with 20,000 code reviews being conducted each day too.
The second day contained slightly less in terms of Android specific content, but this allowed a welcome foray into some other areas through the other sessions.
Boosting App Quality
Having previously heard various things about upcoming changes to the way apps would be surfaced in the Play Store, I made sure to get to the session delivered by Alexey Kokin on app quality. Ensuring you have a good quality app is important, both for keeping your users happy and also for increasing the business you can generate through your application.
The talk exposed the useful new tools in the Android Vitals dashboard which highlight areas for improvement — in particular, related to app crashes, battery consumption, and rendering. Some helpful reminders were given on how to increase the quality of your apps such as using material design and supporting all the relevant platforms to provide a seamless experience for your users. Finally, the ways that Google recognises and rewards quality applications were outlined.
Voice UI
For something a bit different, I sat in on a panel on Voice UI . This was a session with a Q+A format addressing pre-selected questions, led by Nandini Stocker. The session coincided with the launch of a new video series looking at these issues. It was interesting to hear some informed opinions on something relatively new to me, but which I’m sure will have a big impact in the future.
The panel fielded questions such as ‘Why do we need UX research in voice?’ and ‘How do you prototype in voice interface and design?’. There are certainly a number of problems to solve in this field, and the panel provided a number of questions and starting points to go away and ponder.
DeepMind
The final session I went to before the closing keynote was a short introduction and overview of DeepMind and what their technology is capable of, by Juan Silveira.
He told of how they had started training the system using Atari games and found that, without providing the agent with any of the rules, after 4 hours of playing the agent had discovered the winning strategy for the game Breakout. Having accomplished this, the team then looked for a new challenge — finding one in the ancient Chinese game ‘Go’. The artificial intelligence program created and trained by the DeepMind team — Alpha Go — was able to beat professional players in an unprecedented accomplishment by a computer program.
The work of DeepMind is being applied to real world problems too, including increasing efficiency and reducing energy usage in the cooling areas of Google’s data centres, and in medical research into areas such as early detection of treatable conditions.
Along The Sidelines
As well as the great content being shared inside the auditoriums and training sessions, there was a lot to see throughout the building. The ICE congress centre in Krakow was a perfect venue for the event, providing a big airy space with wide open areas for activity.
Office Hours
Tucked away on the top floor was, in my opinion, one of the best resources of the conference. It was a space dedicated for ‘office hours’ where Google employees who work on various aspects of the platform sat in wait of members of the wider community to approach them with any questions they might have. Sat under a banner stating their area of expertise, engineers from platforms such as Maps, Android, Machine Learning and more were approachable and open to questions. What better opportunity to ask bespoke and specific questions for personal use cases?
Women Techmakers
The Women Techmakers community had a big presence throughout the event and ran sessions with information about the program and how to join. As a female developer, I’m used to being in the minority at these events. It was a heartening surprise to walk around and see so many girls and women in the building. Speaking to a few of them, it became clear that Google had put a big effort into attracting those just starting out in the industry — and it had paid off. A number of the girls I spoke to were currently students and had wanted to come along to find out more and get involved.
Android Things
Android Things occupied a large space, with lots of fun examples of little projects making use of the Android Things platform. The one which really caught my eye was a little ‘Draw bot’ who, upon taking my picture, carefully took its time wheeling back and forth drawing its own line version of my face onto a piece of paper for me to take away.
To top it off, after interacting with the little robot, I was presented with a token to pick up my own Android Things Pico Pro Maker Kit — complete with a camera module, 5 inch multi-touch display and Wi-Fi antenna — to bring back to play with in the ribot studio.
Community
I spoke to many new developers at the event and it’s always inspiring to hear other people’s experiences told with enthusiasm and advice. People have a real passion for what they do in this community, and it shows!
This tweet provides a perfect example of the great community spirit. Ronald had created cute little figurines of the new Android Oreo mascot at home with his 3D printer, and had decided to turn it into a fun competition for the community by bringing a few to the event to give out.
Having seen his tweet earlier in the day, but unable to get to the lounge at that time, I was excited to finally bump into him at the party and entered my name into the draw. As chance would have it, my name was picked at the end of the event and now I have a nice reminder of the event and the kindness of the Android community waving up at me from my desk.
Food
An important part of any conference, this did not disappoint. Breakfast, lunch, afternoon snacks and even dinner (on day one) were provided in seemingly endless quantities. There was always a variety on offer and the options presented catered both to the healthy for the main meals, and those with a penchant for an afternoon slice of cake in equal measures.
A variety of juices were always on tap, and the queue for the baristas was consistent. The only slight disappointment came when I tried to find a mug of English Breakfast tea to have with my cake.. perhaps a drink not so popular in Poland! Still, I found a great green tea replacement, and a second slice of cake to console myself.
Coming to a close..
The closing keynote ended with the promise of more swag and the mysterious phrase “if you keep your eyes open, it might be interesting what you see”. Leaving the auditorium, I saw those who had made it out first hauling giant bean bags through the main doors.
Others had cushions, pot plants, anything that had been used to personalise the building with the google branding. I’ve never seen a venue cleared of furnishings so fast! (My initial disappointment dissipated by the realisation there was no way I was going to be able to fit any of those items in my hand luggage, let alone lug a bean bag more than half my height across the London underground on my return).
The two jam-packed days flew by, and I left the conference feeling happy to be part of such an amazing community. I’d made new friends, learnt new things and had a really great time. To quote Dan Galpin from the opening keynote:
“It’s the best time ever to be an Android Developer”
