London Droidcon 2012 review

Month ago I had a pleasure to participate in Droidcon 2012 in London. For me it was new and very exciting experience for two reasons. First - it was my first big international event in which I participated. Second - I was a volunteer and I had possibility to see how such a conference looks from a backstage.

I will start from many different companies stands that were available to participants. For me the most interesting was the Sony stand. Beside many Experia phones (one device was even swimming in aquarium) guys from Sony had new watches. What's a big deal ? -  you could ask. Well, those watches was running on Android ! Whats more there is a special SDK provided by Sony to write applications for those watches. Few of the participants had enough luck to win them ! Really great stand.

A second interesting stand belonged to Nook. The company is launching two high-resolution tablets in both UK and US and because they run on Android, Nooks guys appeared on conference to do a little marketing. What is really awesome about Nook (imho) is their app store where the most important value is quality. Nook has whole acceptance process of application where they check an application on all available on a market devices, responsiveness, whether the contents of the application matches the description etc. In return developers get quite big market where 90% of application are paid. I think it is fair enough and it really intrigued me. Sadly range of countries from which developers can write apps for Nook is limited and Poland is not in that range.

Beside mentioned before there was also quite nice ABRS job boards with guys always ready to help you find some interesting job offers.

Of course there was also a lot of presentations. Actually whole two days of them. However most of them even if interesting was killed by presenters who didn't know how to interest audience. It is a pity. But still there were three presentations that attracted my attention. 

• "Write less\Do more" was really nice lecture that presents a big tool set of various purposes. From json serialization tools to dependency injection containers. Very practical lecture. (slides)
• "Beaming Data to Devices with NFC" was very entertaining presentation. NFC is still not very popular technology but Mark Murphy show how easy it is to make use of it in very funny and simple way. (slides)
• "Effective Automated Tests for Android apps" is a last lecture which is worth mentioning. Julian Harty presented many approach to testing android applications. I have this feelings that Julian was trying to show too many things in one lecture. Because of that every topic he touched was briefly described. However still quite good lecture.

OUYA keynote gather a crowd. Unfortunately Julie Uhrman couldn't get to London so she was presenting OUYA project through Skype. Unfortunately nothing particularly new was mentioned during this session.

Presentations and stands, that's not all. There was Droidcon party, democamp, hackaton and much much more. For me time on Droidcon was so enjoyable because of people that I have met there and ones that I have already known (thank you very much !). I would like also to say thank you to organizers (SkillsMatters) that they let me be part of such a successful event.