Droidcon UK 2019 completes its deep dives into Android

All hail DroidconUK – the UK’s largest Android event for developers, which swept into London at the end of last week. It’s over for another year now but once again proved a popular and useful resource for deep dives into Android-related technologies.

Once again the two-day event seemed to get bigger on previous years and the familiar venue was the Business Design Centre in Angel, Islington.

The vast array of talks and keynotes covered the likes of Jetpack, Kotlin, unit testing, animations, scalable UIs, Flutter, localisation, program architectures, biometric authorisation and much more. As well as keynotes, and exhibitors such as Zebrea, Spotify, bitwise, Fiit, Facebook and Starling and Monzo banks. Oh, yes, and Google.

You can see why I say it was exhausting, so much to take in – I couldn’t pretend to cover it all. Check out a mini (low-fi) gallery of pics further below.

Highlights

Personal highlights were the Firebase backend development talk by Doug Stevenson (you always feel Firebase is worth exploring further), an overview of designing for voice interactions within an app by Alina Catalia Banuleasa (taking an interesting wider perspective of what a conversation really means in specific context) and a Deep Dive into the Google Play Billing Library by Kai Koenig making the case for why in-app purchases should be user-friendly transactions (and incidentally, did you know Pokemon Go harvested $2 billion in revenues within 800 days?).

Loads happening at #DroidconUK – building a smart guitar, #Firebase back end development, designing for voice… and a trip inside a mini planetarium… #Android pic.twitter.com/MwGQ634Mfr

— Electronics Weekly (@ElectronicsNews) October 25, 2019

Concentration

Another interesting sub-theme of the conference was how to handle interruptions – a deeply ionic situation, of course, as the ‘nagging curse’ of social media, constantly demanding attention, itself comes courtesy of technology development (Slack came in for particular attention, incidentally).

For example, the opening keynote, by Christina Lee was titled Coding like an an Athlete and she good humouredly covered the costs – physical and mental – of constant interruptions. The two most basic takeaways were that good sleep is essential and that ART (attention restoration theory, not Android Runtime!) highlights the lingering cost of an interruption to your concentration. In other words, once interrupted you stay in an interrupted state for as many as 20 minutes even after the initial cause has gone.

Basically, if the interruption wasn’t worth 20 minutes of your time, you are down on the deal….

Philip Hofman, of the diabetes specialists mySugr, also covered this theme in his talk The Focused Developer. And as well as covering strategies for managing daily tasks to increase efficiency and reduce interruptions, he recommenced three books on concentration management, suitable for developers:

Deep Work, by Cal Newport
Your brain at Work, by David Rock
Digital Minimalism, also by Cal Newport

It was also interesting when he outlined how his company, based in Vienna, had designed a purpose-built workspace to address these concerns.

For example, various parts of the building represent various stages of concentrated work – with ‘non-interruptible’ seclusion zones sitting apart from project home ‘bases’ and communal, social cafe-like areas… It had the ring of the future to it, certainly.