droidcon Berlin 2015

Hey friends, I just wanted to share my feelings about droidcon Berlin which happened 3-6 of Jun 2015 (http://droidcon.de/).

The first day had barcamp format what was pretty cool.

I enjoyed speech of Eugene Martynov "ANDROID TEMPLATE PROJECT", he shared experience about setting up Android proj from the scratch. I found "jacoco" and "calabash" as new libraries for myself. He promised to share his template later.
Than was talk about KEYSTORE and problems connected with it. Keystore api feels realy raw.
Later Kate made short overview of tools and approaches for app hacking and ways to prevent this. Slides are available here http://t.co/hRNECrnSUB. You definitely will find there links to read about something new.
Next talk was taken by two awesome polish guys Alek and Rudy who told about "HOW TO DETECT YOUR APP IS BEING UNINSTALLED" (using native code). They looked really confident in app hacking and investigation.

The most of barcamp activities were described in gitbook here http://droidcon.gitbooks.io/2015-berlin-barcamp/.

Speeches I liked from next two main days:

Janne Jul Jensen – The Cognitive Abilities of the Human Mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAJrL0P6uGA (wll structured, good flow, all is clear)
Alberto López – Building a mobile location aware system with beacons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFkHoGPIgB0 (very basic, watch if you never heard about beacons)
Arnaud Camus – Build a signup flow that doesn't suck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ivxjklDRFY (pretty basic, but found couple of new ideas)
Leif Janzik – Common pitfalls in mobile testing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJMMiRgY5pI (definitely recommend you, very confident guy)
Roland Wagner – Overview of differnet geo APIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhwjFO_oHM (just overview, watch this if you are interesting in geo apis)
Hannes Dorfmann – Annotation Processing 101 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43FFfTyDYEg (almost live coding session – how to write own annotation processor, motivation, advices)
Paweł Junak – Don't reinvent the wheel, use libraries: Modern Android Stack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51D8oqbZ4oA (basic, but I found one or two new names for myself)
http://droidcon.de/session/layout-traversals-android this one is fantastic speech about how build own layouts. Seems that recording is not available.
http://droidcon.de/session/alternative-fragments-say-hello-mortar-flow – I expected big discussion about this, but speaker was a bit monotonous and wasn't looking as inspired guy, so no discussion happend.
http://droidcon.de/session/lets-get-functional – recording is not available yet, but I strongly recommend you this speech. Motivation and suggestions for functional code in your proj.
http://droidcon.de/session/android-reactive-programming-rxjava – expected much more, but ut turned up to speech about what does this and that method mean.

Last thing was hackathon http://droidcon.de/hackathon, it was pretty nice, even much better than I expected. We developed "light manager" which allowed to save energy power. If it is bright outside we switch lamp off, othervise switch it on (not discrete but continual). We played with https://www.relayr.io/products-services/wunderbar/. Consumed light sensor data and managed Philips Hue lamps (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT5W_Mjuz5I).

Also we added noise trigger – if it is higher than threshold, show another random color for hue lamps. Relayr stuff is cool, it has nice dashboard and sdk based on RxJava, but sensors itself are not really stable. It freezed or switched off pretty often, but finally it worked. I would play more with it. Philips Hue sdk is simple to use. Android sample turned on while first try.

We’ve taken 2nd place :)

Couple words about event itself – 60/40 good/failed sessions, perfect wifi, well organized, good lunches, failed snacks. Very nice food at hackathon. Some official pics are here https://www.flickr.com/photos/133733835@N08/.