While in San Francisco for KotlinConf, I was also able to attend droidconSF. This was the second time this conference was held, and the first time I was able to attend. Once again, I was amazed by the knowledge shared.

There was a great mix of topics, and I was able to learn about many things I have yet to touch in the Android ecosystem. Caren Chang helped us understand how audio playback works on Android, and some of the gotchas you might run into. Lydia Schiff introduced us to the RenderScript API we can use to process those huge bitmaps off the Java heap. I also learned about the benefits of using gRPC with protobuf as a replacement for HTTP from Sam Bobra, and how we can use JNA to work with native code on Android from Eric Butler.

Chris Horner was able to share his experiences creating transitions between views without using Activities or Fragments. I’ve never had much time to play with transitions, so this is a lesson I’ll definitely be able to apply moving forward. Being a dancer myself, I also appreciated Corey Latislaw’s talk on the importance of creativity, and how we can make it a bigger part of our everyday lives.

I was again able to present my talk “Kotlin: Uncovered” while I was there. In it, I go over the basics of Kotlin, and decompile the generated bytecode to understand some of the language features. I was able to make some sweet 🍰 changes to my examples this time around, uncovering different language features than I did before. (If you’re interested in my talk, I also made it into a blog series you can start diving into here.)

We had some great networking opportunities both around the venue, and over s’mores at Spark Social after the first day of the conference. Overall, this conference was a great experience and I’m glad I was able to participate.