Choosing the next career step in such a diverse and fast-paced industry is not an easy task. But when it comes to our careers, there is no right or wrong. Or there is? How do we know? In this talk we will be talking about different career choices, how can we choose good companies to work for, what we can learn from interviews and selection processes, when should we look for a new job, and how to change our working environment.

About the speaker...

Sandro Mancuso

Sandro Mancuso is a software craftsman, author of SOftware Craftsmanship: Professionalism Pragmatism Pride, and co-founder of the London Software Craftsmanship Community (LSCC)

Software craftsman at Codurance, author of The Software Craftsman, and founder of the London Software Craftsmanship Community (LSCC). Sandro has been coding since a very young age but only started his professional career in 1996. Before starting his own consultancy, he worked for startups, software houses, product companies, international consultancy companies, and investment banks. During his career Sandro had the opportunity to work in a good variety of projects, with different languages, technologies, and across many different industries. Sandro has a lot of experience in bringing the Software Craftsmanship ideology and Extreme Programming practices to organisations of all sizes. Sandro is internationally renowned by his work on evolving and spreading Software Craftsmanship and is frequently invited to speak in many conferences around the world. His professional aspiration is to raise the bar of the software industry by helping developers become better at and care more about their craft.

The RxJava hype is still in full swing and almost everything gets Rxified. At least since the stable RxAndroid 1.0 release it’s time to take RxAndroid seriously!

In this session you will learn what RxJava is about, how to use it on Android and how RxAndroid can be used to build maintainable Android Apps from networking with Retrofit2 to UI with the new RxBinding and RxLifecycle libraries powered by MVP.

If you haven’t had the time to Get Reactive, we’ll provide a quick introduction why you should use RxAndroid in your current and next projects.

About the speakers...

Pascal Welsch

Pascal Welsch is a real Android native who started coding with the Motorola Milestone as his fist mobile phone due to the fantastic open source community to which he also contributes now.

He is passionate about design which was quite hard in the pre-material design era.

Making great user experiences needs both knowledge of the possibilities of Android and an awareness of pixels. Being such a middleman is part of his daily work at grandcentrix in Cologne.

He is an active member of the GDG Düsseldorf and other mobile communities around Cologne. Get in touch on Twitter at @passsy or GitHub to discuss open source projects and the future of Android development.

Wolfram Rittmeyer

Wolfram Rittmeyer is a passionate Android-Developer and loves to share his knowledge.

He has been writing articles about Android, is blogging on his blog Grokking Android, shares on Google+ and Twitter and talks about Android topics on devfests, user groups and conferences. Apart from Android he also has more than 15 years of experience with Java and JavaEE.

You can find him on Twitter at @RittmeyerW, Google+ and github. He blogs on Grokking Android.

You will be walked through the features of the Google Cloud Platform used in building the Google Cloud Spin demo shown at recent #GCPNext events. The demo uses an orchestrated set of smartphones to capture multi-angle views of an object at the same point in time, upload them to the cloud and have them stitched together in real time to create a single 120-degree snapshot of that moment.

About the speaker...

Robert Kubis

Robert is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform based in London, UK, specializing in Container, Storage and Scalable technologies.

Before joining Google, Robert collected over 10 years of experience in Software Development and Architecture. He has driven multiple full-stack application developments at SAP with a passion for distributed systems, containers and databases. In his spare time he enjoys following tech trends & good restaurants, traveling and improving his photographing skills :)

Follow Robert at @hostirosti

All modern mobile applications heavily, if not totally, rely on touch input from the user. This is why it is critical for a developer to deeply understand how the Android framework works under the hood in order to create an amazing User Experience.

During this talk Marco will explain the journey of a touch event through the view hierarchy and how to change its path, or consume it, based on our needs. He'll also present what the platform provides to help you with this task.

About the speaker...

Marco Cova

Extremely passionate android dev. He has worked with different companies all in the “Social” space until he joined Facebook. Besides working on the main Facebook app, he developed and released the Facebook app “Riff”.

TV shows and films are no longer restricted to our antennas and satellite dishes, and streaming video using your internet connected devices has become increasingly popular. In this talk you will learn how to build your very own video streaming app. We will use the latest tools and libraries to demonstrate how easy it is to build your very own streaming app.

About the speaker...

Andrew Jack

Andrew Jack is an Android developer in the OTT mobile team, at Sky. He has worked on the Android app for Sky Store, as well has a few open source apps.

While Virtual and Augmented Reality are quickly becoming household terms, most developers believe it's an either-or situation. Luckily though, there is a device that can do both very well – Epson’s Moverio BT-200 smart glasses. These binocular see-through glasses are a perfect platform for AR, but are also extremely capable of handling VR. There is even a Unity3D Android Plugin for the Moverio to jump-start your development.

In this presentation you will discover the following:

• A quick intro covering the capabilities and features specific to the Moverio BT-200

• Best ways to code UI and 3D interaction with Unity3D for Head Mounted Displays, and Moverio’s hand controller

• An intro to Mixed Reality, Blackboxing, and adding true Augmented interactions with real world scenes

• Some best practices and research from a top Head Mounted Display developer on how to make amazing experiences

• How to setup your scene for Stereoscopic 3D, and some best practices for setting up the proper Field of View and how to display UI within a Stereoscopic system

• Unity3d and Android integration and how to port your previous apps over to the Moverio

• A quick start on using the Unity3D Android Plugin and a walkthrough of the Tutorial Code

About the speaker...

Sean McCracken

Sean McCracken is the founder of Imaginary Computer – a world’s leading developer of head-mounted wearable games.

He has developed a number of popular applications and games for Epson’s Moverio BT-200 smart glasses, with several being used by Epson to demonstrate the device’s capabilities.

Sean is one of the world’s leading voices in wearable applications and counts developing the first video game on Google Glass as one of his many achievements. Over the last two years, he has won best Glass Application at TechDisruptSF 2013 and recently led a team that won the NBC Universal Studios Orlando Hackathon. Sean has also brought the Moverio Unity3D plugin to market, enabling Unity3D game developers to access the Moverio SDK, as well as a head tracking library, to create AR games and apps quickly and easily.

As a fan and talented example of what the technology behind Epson’s smart glasses can do, Epson has invited Sean to present his developments on its stand at CES for the past two years. And at the most recent event in Las Vegas, he gave a demonstration of Moverio BT-200 to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Join us on the exhibition floor over the coffee break for your chance to chat with leading experts and discuss upcoming trends and technologies. We have an awesome range of clinics taking place across four zones, as well as a number of amazing raffle prizes to give away at sponsor booths.

Sony Clinic

About the speakers...

Over the past months, various performance improvements have been made in Gradle core that highly benefit Android developers. And more radical improvements are coming soon. On the forefront are the modeling of variants and a revolutionary new configuration model. This will further enhance the experience of developing Android applications with Android Studio way beyond better performance.

In this presentation, you will take a closer look at those Gradle improvements and how they manifest in the context of Android and Android Studio. You will also discover some new tooling that is going to be very beneficial to understand and improve your Android builds.

About the speaker...

Etienne Studer

Etienne works at Gradle Inc. as VP of Product Tooling. He has been working as a developer, architect, project manager, and CTO over the past 15 years.

Etienne has spent most of his time building software products from the ground up and successfully shipping them to happy customers. He had the privilege to work in different domains like linguistics, banking, insurance, logistics, and process management. Etienne used to share his passion for high-productivity tools as an evangelist for JetBrains. He was also a founding member of the JetBrains Development Academy and of Hackergarten. In his little spare time, Etienne maintains several popular Gradle plugins.

Follow Etienne on Twitter at @etiennestuder

Android has come a long ways since its humble beginnings in 2003. What began as a desire to develop, in Andy Rubin's words, "smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences" has grown into a behemoth which can now be found running on cars and washing machines.

Due to its open source nature, it was only a matter of time before the independent developer community would rise up, and extend, Android. XDA Developers www.xda-developers.com was founded with the sole desire of creating an environment where developers could share, collaborate, and create. It was here where famous projects like AOKP, CyanogenMod, OmniROM, and Paranoid Android began. XDA has now grown to over 6 million members around the world. You will explore how the developer community has evolved, and even struggled, since Android began.

About the speaker...

Jeremy Meiss

Jeremy Meiss is the Community and OEM Relations Manager at XDA Developers, responsible for the outward-facing endeavors at the largest mobile community in the world with over 6 million members. He has over 15 years experience in mobile technology, and his passions are his wife and kids, coffee, and all things tech.

The session will begin by exploring the key principles behind user-centred design and the various techniques you can adopt to ensure you are creating relevant, useful products that satisfy the needs of your users.

You will learn how to put theory into practice in a hands-on workshop, creating paper prototypes to test ideas and gather user feedback to inform your design decisions.

The workshop is open to those of you interested in optimising their design process: designers, developers and product owners all greatly welcomed!

About the speaker...

Leonie Brewin

As a Designer at Novoda, Leonie spends her days crafting user experiences for Android. With 8 years experience as a designer, she has spent the last 5 years specialising in mobile with a passion for user-centred design and usability testing.

Discover Leonie's work on Behance.

We spend a lot of time putting apps together, but when was the last time you pulled one apart? How wonderful is it that Android is open-source, so we can simply look at the code when we need to? What if it were just as easy to look at the source code and behaviour of any other app? If we can streamline the process of looking inside a compiled application then we're more likely to employ it to answer questions and teach us valuable lessons we can apply to our work. We may learn from others and also make our own apps more secure. We can pinpoint bugs that come from closed-source libraries such as those for ad and tracking networks, and work around those bugs, get them fixed faster, or even patch them if need be. This talk will explore simple real-world examples for the greatest practical benefit, using some of the ever improving set of reverse engineering tools for Android. You don't need to have any experience reverse engineering anything before, but hopefully even if you do you'll learn a few useful tips. With this talk Jon aims to make every developer more familiar with the reverse engineering tools available for Android, and how and why they should apply them. There's an incredible amount that can be learned from taking things apart!

About the speaker...

Jon Reeve

A freelance mobile developer with more than 6 years experience in Android (still got that G1!), and over 10 years previous in everything from JEE and Swing to C & C++. Has a love of clean code, tests and TDD, and taking things apart to see how they work.

ASOS.com’s mobile apps are among the most used and best rated shopping apps, enjoyed by millions of happy users. Come to learn about our team, our daily process to move from design to production, the continuous integration and automation testing strategy that ensure we build robust applications. Find out what tools we use to monitor performances, modify network calls on the fly, track crashes.

You’ll explore a lot of topics, technologies and tools of the trade (Gradle flavours and remote config settings, Appium, NewRelic, Travis CI, HockeyApp, Charles Proxy and more), and Marco hopes that developers of any level will find out something interesting.

About the speaker...

Marco Belinaso

Marco happily works at ASOS.com as a Solutions Architect for the Mobile Team. He has been writing code for almost 20 years, developing all sorts of software, but for the past few years he mostly focused on iOS and Android apps.

In a previous life he did a lot of backend work and even wrote some boring books about ASP.NET. After all this time he still spends his free time creating little apps and games with friends!

Follow Marco at @mbellinaso

It's now a long time Gradle is the official build system for Android. And as a very good developer you already switched to it, and you customize it depending on your needs. Most of the time, the cleaner way to manage all these customizations is to build Gradle plugins. During this talk you will discover best practices about building your plugin to make it a good citizen, more efficient, and more famous!

Eyal will explain how to:

• interact with the Android Gradle Plugin;
• build Gradly DSLs;
• use incremental builds;
• test your plugin on a good way;
• and many other things!

About the speaker...

Eyal Lezmy

Eyal is a software engineer at Genymobile, working on Genymotion – an Android emulator. He's been working with Android since 2009.

He's also Treasurer at the Paris Android User Group and a Google Developer Expert in Android.

Over the years, Eyal has been involved in several RandD projects with the French internet providers; worked for Samsung's Android B2B team; and built an Android STB for a hotel chain.

Follow Eyal on @eyal_lezmy

Over the last 18 months Ustwo Games took on the challenge of creating a VR experience that would be a worthy successor to the BAFTA award-winning Monument Valley. The result is Land’s End, the showcase game that Oculus and Samsung used to launch the new consumer version of the Gear VR.

VR is a totally new medium where existing design principles, genres and tropes must be left behind and new ones developed. This talk will describe why Ustwo Games is so excited about mobile VR and the lessons learnt pushing beyond the enthusiast origins of VR into making enjoyable VR experiences for everyone.

About the speaker...

Peter Pashley

Peter has been Ustwo Games’ Technical Director for the last five years. Hailing from a background in console games he has fully embraced the challenge of making unique experiences for everyone on mobile devices, culminating in 2014’s Monument Valley.

He has spent the last 18 months figuring out how to do good mobile VR and co-designing Land’s End for Samsung Gear VR.

The session will begin by exploring the key principles behind user-centred design and the various techniques you can adopt to ensure you are creating relevant, useful products that satisfy the needs of your users.

You will learn how to put theory into practice in a hands-on workshop, creating paper prototypes to test ideas and gather user feedback to inform your design decisions.

The workshop is open to those of you interested in optimising their design process: designers, developers and product owners all greatly welcomed!

About the speaker...

Leonie Brewin

As a Designer at Novoda, Leonie spends her days crafting user experiences for Android. With 8 years experience as a designer, she has spent the last 5 years specialising in mobile with a passion for user-centred design and usability testing.

Discover Leonie's work on Behance.

The Amazon Echo is next generation hardware designed around your voice. This session will provide a first glimpse of the device up close, and show how easy it is to create apps for it as we live-code some examples. We’ll cover the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and teach you everything you need to know to create voice-enabled apps for Amazon Echo, leveraging the cloud-based Alexa Voice Service to recognize and respond to voice commands.

About the speaker...

Peter Heinrich

Peter Heinrich is a Developer Evangelist with Amazon, specializing in mobile game development and web services. A frequent contributor to Amazon's developer blog, he also speaks regularly at technical conferences about best practices for creating games on mobile platforms. Peter addresses all aspects of game production, from design, architecture, and coding to marketing, analytics, and monetization.  

Before Amazon, Peter was a full-time game developer for fifteen years, working on desktop and console titles before moving to online and mobile games. He co-founded indie game studios Smarterville and Zero Entertainment after working as an individual contributor for several large game makers.

Sony’s Open Devices program allows you, whether you are a novice or advanced developer, to build and customize 2014+ devices with open source software using minimal pre-compiled binaries, while using as much open source code as possible. This kind of approach enables you to implement new customizations, security enhancements, and power or speed optimizations, since everything is built from open source code. With Open Devices, you can easily port any Custom (Android or Android Based) ROM to all supported devices, since all devices use the same 3.10 kernel tree and same prebuilt libraries. To recognize open source developers who are actively contributing, Sony has initiated the Hero Developer reward program. Want know more about it and Sony's Open Devices Project? Join Alin at this session and talk with Sony's developers!

About the speaker...

Alin Jerpelea

Alin Jerpelea works for Sony as Community Manager in Developer Relations. His engineering background includes expertise in the Linux kernel and the lower layers of Android. He is responsible for the Open Devices Project as platform architect. Alin is active on XDA forums and has been part of the hacking community since 2006, where he has been creating customs ROMs and helping other open source developers.

Follow Alin on Sony Developer World at developer.sonymobile.com and on Twitter at @devjerpelea.

Join us on the exhibition floor over lunch for your chance to chat with leading experts and discuss upcoming trends and technologies. We have an awesome range of clinics taking place across four zones, as well as a number of amazing raffle prizes to give away at sponsor booths.

A day in the Life (Practices & Tools Zone - Kensington Gardens)

JRebel for Android in Action (Not Phones Zone - Hyde Park)

The latest in Augmented reality (Games Zone - Kensington Gardens)

Cross-platform native app development in Java with the Intel INDE Multi-OS Engine (Design Zone - Hyde Park)

About the speakers...

Gergely Kis

An IT professional and entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in mobile, embedded and enterprise technologies as software developer, project manager and architect.

Gergely started his own business in 2007, where he is responsible for all software development projects. In the past 2 years he led the development of Migeran for iOS, their product that was acquired by Intel and is now part of the Intel INDE Multi-OS Engine.

Sean McCracken

Sean McCracken is the founder of Imaginary Computer – a world’s leading developer of head-mounted wearable games.

He has developed a number of popular applications and games for Epson’s Moverio BT-200 smart glasses, with several being used by Epson to demonstrate the device’s capabilities.

Sean is one of the world’s leading voices in wearable applications and counts developing the first video game on Google Glass as one of his many achievements. Over the last two years, he has won best Glass Application at TechDisruptSF 2013 and recently led a team that won the NBC Universal Studios Orlando Hackathon. Sean has also brought the Moverio Unity3D plugin to market, enabling Unity3D game developers to access the Moverio SDK, as well as a head tracking library, to create AR games and apps quickly and easily.

As a fan and talented example of what the technology behind Epson’s smart glasses can do, Epson has invited Sean to present his developments on its stand at CES for the past two years. And at the most recent event in Las Vegas, he gave a demonstration of Moverio BT-200 to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Mandeep Khataria

Mandeep is an apprentice software developer and has been working at Sky for 2 years.

He completed education up to A-Levels and then decided to do an apprenticeship in ICT. In the last 2 years Mandeep has explored and learnt a variety of different tools and technology and also invested time in to learning new language.

Jesus Gumiel

Passionate Android developer and football lover. Ten years working in the dark side (big companies) in Spain and UK, trying to strenghten their Android community and to convince designers that not everybody use an iPhone. I dedicate my spare time to code in my own startup, Footballtracker, and to attend startups and Android events worldwide.

About the speakers...

About the speakers...

In TDD, tests lead our implementation. You start by writing a failing test and then code to make the test pass. Once you have a passing test, then you are free to refactor the system with high confidence that you didn't break other things. you continue this process until the feature is finished.

The best way to practice test driven development (TDD) is through [katas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata_(programming). These are small programs or exercises that you complete over and over again to build testing muscle memory and improve the speed that you write applications.

By the end of this workshop, you will be comfortable with the major types of tests that you will encounter in your day to day coding with Robolectric as well as the best testing practices.

Only through practice will you become comfortable and find your programming flow!

About the speaker...

Corey Latislaw

Corey Latislaw is an Android Google Developer Expert (GDE), software engineer, author, speaker, and teacher.

She has written several high profile Android applications at companies large and small. By day she is installing solar in Tanzania with Off Grid Electric. At night she authors videos and books on Android programming, runs a consulting firm, and organizes the Philadelphia Google Developer Group (GDG). She is passionate about travel, local food, the outdoors, photography, and living in Philly.

Visit Corey's website coreylatislaw.com

A barcamp talk by Boris Farber

About the speakers...

A Barcamp talk on Application Testing and Continuous Integration by Paul Blundell & Xavi Rigav

About the speakers...

Join us on the exhibition floor over lunch for your chance to chat with leading experts and discuss upcoming trends and technologies. We have an awesome range of clinics taking place across four zones, as well as a number of amazing raffle prizes to give away at sponsor booths.

App Clinic (Design Zone - Hyde Park)

About the speakers...

Sebastiano Poggi

Sebastiano Poggi is an Android Software Craftsman at Novoda in London. A self-taught and strong OSS believer who loves beautiful and simple UX and UI, where “less is more”, Sebastiano spends a big chunk of his spare time reading and writing about Android development. He also creates and maintains some FOSS apps and libraries, that span from the fun, smaller projects to the more serious (and, perhaps, useful) work. Sebastiano worked for some time in AKQA as a Senior Software Engineer. Before moving to London, he also worked at i’m Spa (an Italian smartwatch startup) for two years, playing with the Android platform and handling their Developer Relations. He’s been toying with the Android SDK since 2010.

Maria Neumayer

Maria Neumayer is an Android Developer working at Citymapper where - amongst other things - she has built their app for Android Wear. She's been developing for Android for more than five years with a focus on UI work. Austrian expat living in London. Previously at Path, Saffron Digital and Rummble.

Pascal Welsch

Pascal Welsch is a real Android native who started coding with the Motorola Milestone as his fist mobile phone due to the fantastic open source community to which he also contributes now.

He is passionate about design which was quite hard in the pre-material design era.

Making great user experiences needs both knowledge of the possibilities of Android and an awareness of pixels. Being such a middleman is part of his daily work at grandcentrix in Cologne.

He is an active member of the GDG Düsseldorf and other mobile communities around Cologne. Get in touch on Twitter at @passsy or GitHub to discuss open source projects and the future of Android development.

Mark Allison

Mark Allison is a GDE for Android and software engineer with almost 25 years' experience. He is passionate about providing the user with the best possible experience. He has developed both server and client side, most commonly Android on the client side, but with also for iOS, HTML5, Symbian, and J2ME. Mark writes a technical blog (http://blog.stylingandroid.com) which focuses on Android UI/UX topics, but often covers more general Android development techniques. He regularly speaks at Android developer events in such diverse locations as Turkey, Spain, and Brazil. He is a stalwart of Droidcon London - this will be his fourth consecutive appearance. When not being geeky, Mark likes to unwind by hurling abuse at football referees, specifically those who are unkind to his beloved Watford FC with whom he holds a season ticket. He also has a deep love of the chilli pepper and consumes spicy food (his favourite being Indian) at every opportunity! Mark is happily married with a grown up step-daughter, and lives in Hertfordshire, UK.

Wiebe Elsinga

Besides being a Google Developer Expert for Android, Wiebe Elsinga is a technical team lead at Egeniq in The Netherlands.

He has a passion for UX and design. He regularly speaks at Android Developer events, or is giving workshops. And let's not forget a co-founder/organizer of the GDG Dutch Android User Group.

Don't mention Whisky to him, as that will probably trigger a long conversation (meaning he will rant for hours).

Leonie Brewin

As a Designer at Novoda, Leonie spends her days crafting user experiences for Android. With 8 years experience as a designer, she has spent the last 5 years specialising in mobile with a passion for user-centred design and usability testing.

Discover Leonie's work on Behance.

Nick Butcher

Nick is a Android Design/Developer Advocate in Google's London office where he helps designers and developers to create sublime mobile apps. ”

He has been making Android apps for over 5 years and has worked with hundreds of companies to help them to make the most of the platform. Nick is a frequent contributor to the official android developers blog, conference speaker, host of Google Developers shows (Android Design in Action, Android Office Hours, DevBytes), co-author of the 'Android Design for Developers' Udacity course and shares pro-tips on Google+ and Github. Nick has worked on Google apps such as Google I/O and Android Device Manager. Recently Nick has been focused on helping designers and developers to understand and create beautiful material design apps.

About the speakers...

About the speakers...

In TDD, tests lead our implementation. You start by writing a failing test and then code to make the test pass. Once you have a passing test, then you are free to refactor the system with high confidence that you didn't break other things. you continue this process until the feature is finished.

The best way to practice test driven development (TDD) is through [katas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata_(programming). These are small programs or exercises that you complete over and over again to build testing muscle memory and improve the speed that you write applications.

By the end of this workshop, you will be comfortable with the major types of tests that you will encounter in your day to day coding with Robolectric as well as the best testing practices.

Only through practice will you become comfortable and find your programming flow!

About the speaker...

Corey Latislaw

Corey Latislaw is an Android Google Developer Expert (GDE), software engineer, author, speaker, and teacher.

She has written several high profile Android applications at companies large and small. By day she is installing solar in Tanzania with Off Grid Electric. At night she authors videos and books on Android programming, runs a consulting firm, and organizes the Philadelphia Google Developer Group (GDG). She is passionate about travel, local food, the outdoors, photography, and living in Philly.

Visit Corey's website coreylatislaw.com

About the speakers...

About the speakers...

Intel Software and the whole team are happy to be back at Droidcon London. Next to cool demos, devices, tools you can experience during the show we are also giving away some nice gadgets, best of all: we will conduct a raffle on both days and give away a Dell Venue 8 7000 Android Tablet (16GB).

On the 2nd day not only that but we add a Tesco Hudle, courtesy to Tesco! All you will have to do is fill out a raffle card and provide the correct answer to 3 tech questions.

About the speakers...

About the speakers...

About the speakers...

In TDD, tests lead our implementation. You start by writing a failing test and then code to make the test pass. Once you have a passing test, then you are free to refactor the system with high confidence that you didn't break other things. you continue this process until the feature is finished.

The best way to practice test driven development (TDD) is through [katas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata_(programming). These are small programs or exercises that you complete over and over again to build testing muscle memory and improve the speed that you write applications.

By the end of this workshop, you will be comfortable with the major types of tests that you will encounter in your day to day coding with Robolectric as well as the best testing practices.

Only through practice will you become comfortable and find your programming flow!

About the speaker...

Corey Latislaw

Corey Latislaw is an Android Google Developer Expert (GDE), software engineer, author, speaker, and teacher.

She has written several high profile Android applications at companies large and small. By day she is installing solar in Tanzania with Off Grid Electric. At night she authors videos and books on Android programming, runs a consulting firm, and organizes the Philadelphia Google Developer Group (GDG). She is passionate about travel, local food, the outdoors, photography, and living in Philly.

Visit Corey's website coreylatislaw.com

As a management consultant, Chet has been paid by many companies to tell them how to manage their own people, teams, and processes more effectively. Now for the first time, Chet will share with you some of this advice out for free so that you can learn just as much as they have.

Managing is not for everyone. But you may be told to do it anyway. Wouldn't you like someone to tell you how?

About the speaker...

Chet Haase

Chet is the lead of the Android UI Toolkit team at Google, where he works on animations, graphics, and performance. He also writes technical articles, writes and performs comedy, and gives presentations at developer conferences like Droidcon London 2015.

Developers used to the Java programming language from years spent in the trenches of web, server, and even desktop computing have developed certain patterns of how they use the language and the ecosystem of libraries surrounding it. But writing mobile apps is not the same as writing these other kinds of applications, and good Android apps will have to take mobile constraints into account. Join this session to learn how to use the language effectively and how to write better and more performant Android applications.

About the speaker...

Chet Haase

Chet is the lead of the Android UI Toolkit team at Google, where he works on animations, graphics, and performance. He also writes technical articles, writes and performs comedy, and gives presentations at developer conferences like Droidcon London 2015.

Join us on the exhibition floor over lunch for your chance to chat with leading experts and discuss upcoming trends and technologies. We have an awesome range of clinics taking place across four zones, as well as a number of amazing raffle prizes to give away at sponsor booths.

App Clinic (Design Zone - Hyde Park)

About the speakers...

Sebastiano Poggi

Sebastiano Poggi is an Android Software Craftsman at Novoda in London. A self-taught and strong OSS believer who loves beautiful and simple UX and UI, where “less is more”, Sebastiano spends a big chunk of his spare time reading and writing about Android development. He also creates and maintains some FOSS apps and libraries, that span from the fun, smaller projects to the more serious (and, perhaps, useful) work. Sebastiano worked for some time in AKQA as a Senior Software Engineer. Before moving to London, he also worked at i’m Spa (an Italian smartwatch startup) for two years, playing with the Android platform and handling their Developer Relations. He’s been toying with the Android SDK since 2010.

Maria Neumayer

Maria Neumayer is an Android Developer working at Citymapper where - amongst other things - she has built their app for Android Wear. She's been developing for Android for more than five years with a focus on UI work. Austrian expat living in London. Previously at Path, Saffron Digital and Rummble.

Pascal Welsch

Pascal Welsch is a real Android native who started coding with the Motorola Milestone as his fist mobile phone due to the fantastic open source community to which he also contributes now.

He is passionate about design which was quite hard in the pre-material design era.

Making great user experiences needs both knowledge of the possibilities of Android and an awareness of pixels. Being such a middleman is part of his daily work at grandcentrix in Cologne.

He is an active member of the GDG Düsseldorf and other mobile communities around Cologne. Get in touch on Twitter at @passsy or GitHub to discuss open source projects and the future of Android development.

Mark Allison

Mark Allison is a GDE for Android and software engineer with almost 25 years' experience. He is passionate about providing the user with the best possible experience. He has developed both server and client side, most commonly Android on the client side, but with also for iOS, HTML5, Symbian, and J2ME. Mark writes a technical blog (http://blog.stylingandroid.com) which focuses on Android UI/UX topics, but often covers more general Android development techniques. He regularly speaks at Android developer events in such diverse locations as Turkey, Spain, and Brazil. He is a stalwart of Droidcon London - this will be his fourth consecutive appearance. When not being geeky, Mark likes to unwind by hurling abuse at football referees, specifically those who are unkind to his beloved Watford FC with whom he holds a season ticket. He also has a deep love of the chilli pepper and consumes spicy food (his favourite being Indian) at every opportunity! Mark is happily married with a grown up step-daughter, and lives in Hertfordshire, UK.

Wiebe Elsinga

Besides being a Google Developer Expert for Android, Wiebe Elsinga is a technical team lead at Egeniq in The Netherlands.

He has a passion for UX and design. He regularly speaks at Android Developer events, or is giving workshops. And let's not forget a co-founder/organizer of the GDG Dutch Android User Group.

Don't mention Whisky to him, as that will probably trigger a long conversation (meaning he will rant for hours).

Leonie Brewin

As a Designer at Novoda, Leonie spends her days crafting user experiences for Android. With 8 years experience as a designer, she has spent the last 5 years specialising in mobile with a passion for user-centred design and usability testing.

Discover Leonie's work on Behance.

Nick Butcher

Nick is a Android Design/Developer Advocate in Google's London office where he helps designers and developers to create sublime mobile apps. ”

He has been making Android apps for over 5 years and has worked with hundreds of companies to help them to make the most of the platform. Nick is a frequent contributor to the official android developers blog, conference speaker, host of Google Developers shows (Android Design in Action, Android Office Hours, DevBytes), co-author of the 'Android Design for Developers' Udacity course and shares pro-tips on Google+ and Github. Nick has worked on Google apps such as Google I/O and Android Device Manager. Recently Nick has been focused on helping designers and developers to understand and create beautiful material design apps.

Right now, as a mobile developer you must choose between your own efficiency and providing the user with the best native experience. React Native aims to give you the power to develop these great experiences with web-like velocity. React, a powerful js framework that rethinks UI development, can now be used to write real mobile apps for Android and iOS. This talk will explore why React Native matters for Android developers.

About the speaker...

Olivia Bishop

Olivia has been at Facebook since 2011 having graduated from MIT. She worked on mobile web and was a key member of the Android Messenger team where she learned how to address the problems of scale and how to celebrate success by setting people on fire (please ask her for further explanation). She has now moved to London to manage the React Native Android team where she is attempting to empower developers with a better way to write mobile apps (and dodging fire alarms).

What is text? The answer of those who know, and like 90s music, is most likely "baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more". It is often said that text is the most difficult part of a graphics toolkit, and that is for good reasons. In this talk you will learnthe skills that will enable you to understand text, and bend this mysterious creature to your will.

Just think of what you do to show some text in a TextView. Simple enough, isn’t it? Well, as it turns out, under the hood doing text is harder than it looks. Way, way harder.

From the typography theory behind the fonts system, to the intricacies of supporting Unicode bidirectional text runs, to the typesetting itself, that would be enough to drive someone crazy. And there's still nothing being drawn on screen, with that alone!

Next you'll need to have a text rendering engine that takes care of loading the fonts, laying out the glyphs, taking care of hinting too, and then actually draw them somewhere (let alone doing all this in a performant way).

Then, and only then, you will see your one-line-of-Java "Hello World" showing up on your device.

Still here? Good, then prepare for a journey that will take you through the history, implementation and pain of dealing with text. Behold the amazing powers you’ll acquire, enabling you to tame all kinds of text you’ll see on Android.

About the speakers...

Sebastiano Poggi

Sebastiano Poggi is an Android Software Craftsman at Novoda in London. A self-taught and strong OSS believer who loves beautiful and simple UX and UI, where “less is more”, Sebastiano spends a big chunk of his spare time reading and writing about Android development. He also creates and maintains some FOSS apps and libraries, that span from the fun, smaller projects to the more serious (and, perhaps, useful) work. Sebastiano worked for some time in AKQA as a Senior Software Engineer. Before moving to London, he also worked at i’m Spa (an Italian smartwatch startup) for two years, playing with the Android platform and handling their Developer Relations. He’s been toying with the Android SDK since 2010.

Eugenio Marletti

Self-taught in everything that matters. Former freelancer in Italy as a programmer, designer, and videomaker. After experimenting with desktop, frontend and backend development, his fate was sealed when he fell in a love/hate relationship with the green droid in 2011. Following many adventures, in 2014 he ventured into the heart of Berlin and decided to join Clue, where he's currently busy exercising his powers as an Android Alchemist. Always looking for novel ways to push the boundaries of what's possible with the Android framework.

Ever been bothered by apps that fail to work when the network suddenly drops? Do you get frustrated by games that require a constant Internet connection even though all they seem to do is ping a server? Can your app handle network handover gracefully? You will discover how to make your app more resilient to varied network conditions and what options you have to maintain a good user experience when the device is not online. This talk will explore various stuff like best practice for integrating web services, persistence alternatives and how to actually be sure that you have a fully working network connection.

About the speaker...

Erik Hellman

Erik is the author of "Android Programming: Pushing the limits" and a long time Droidcon speaker. He has worked on the inner details of the Android platform at Sony Mobile, hacked on the Android client for Spotify and is currently a consultant working for Bontouch Inc in Stockholm. Erik has also been teaching software development, including Android programming, for both new and senior developers.

Some of the previous talks:

http://uk.droidcon.com/2014/sessions/android-programming-pushing-the-limits/

http://uk.droidcon.com/2012/sessions/g-track-1/

http://uk.droidcon.com/2012/sessions/fast-user-friendly-and-power-efficient-network-communication-on-android/

The measurement of time has always had a big impact on our society. The way we tell the time greatly evolved especially in the last centuries, leading to the creation of always more accurate tools, up to the first wearable technological devices. In this talk you will explore the evolution of horology. You will discover the common elements that remained unchanged across the centuries, and how you can still find them in modern wearable devices. You will also learn about how different it is to develop for a smartwatch, compared to a smartphone, especially considering the Android Wear platform.

About the speaker...

Daniele Bonaldo

Daniele Bonaldo is an Android software craftsman at Novoda London. He’s passionate about photography and wearable technologies. Before moving to London, he worked at i’m Spa, an Italian startup where he had the chance to play with the Android platform while developing one of the first smartwatches on the market ("Doing smartwatches before it was cool" as they said).

Daniel is on twitter

Earlier this year, Google announced the experimental Jack and Jill compilers for Android apps. The compilers replace the current Java and Dex compilers. They still translate Java source code to Dalvik bytecode, so at some level, it may seem like a small change. In this presentation, Eric will explore the implications for developers. How can you start using the compilers? What are the advantages? Are there any disadvantages? Eric will also share some insights in the underlying technology, such as the Gradle build process and the new Jayce bytecode representation. These changes may impact the Android ecosystem more profoundly.

About the speaker...

Eric Lafortune

Eric is the creator of the open-source optimizer and obfuscator ProGuard, and its commercial extension DexGuard. Eric is obsessed with making applications more compact, more efficient, and better protected against attacks. He is the founder and CTO of GuardSquare, where they put this obsession to good use.

http://uk.droidcon.com/2013/sessions/proguard-eric-lafortune/

http://uk.droidcon.com/2014/sessions/fighting-application-size-with-proguard-and-beyond/

People no longer need to sit at a desk to get the benefits of technology. You can now build experiences that work seamlessly between the virtual world and the real world. Superpowers that would not have been possible, too complex or prohibitively expensive are now possible.

Join this session for the latest update from Google on the platform components now available. The talk will also cover design philosophies and technical details on how best to take advantage of the strength of the various platforms and give your users superpowers in the real world.

About the speaker...

Hoi Lam

Hoi is a subject matter expert at Google for Wearables and Internet Of Things (IoT). He previously worked on Google Cast where he was part of the launch team for both the Google Cast SDK and Chromecast in Europe.

Prior to joining Google, he founded Exahive to disrupt the mobile commerce marketplace with new technology and business models. Hoi was an Equity Research VP at Deutsche Bank and Citigroup between 2007-2012 advising technology CEOs, CFOs on corporate strategy and institutional investors on technology investments.

Before banking, he was an enterprise architect at Accenture heading up product management for large client programmes. Hoi holds a Master and Bachelor degree in Space Engineering from the University of Cambridge.

Follow Hoi on Twitter at @hcl21

Material design's "paper" stresses the beautiful typography of print journalism – but how? This talk will work directly through translating paper designs to Android's TextView, starting with styles, Spans, and Typefaces and finally diving deep into FontMetrics and custom text drawing. Forget about Roboto – you’ll go down the rabbit hole.

About the speaker...

Lisa Wray

Lisa is an Android developer at Genius, the world's largest repository of musical knowledge. Previously, she previously worked as a mobile developer at the New York Times and a developer advocate for Android and wearables at Google. She has a B.S. in Computer Science and Music from M.I.T.

Designers and developers are both working to create the best possible product but for some reason we keep failing time after time. There are many points of failure which we keep running into. In this talk Juhani wants to explore some of the obvious ones and some of the more obscure ones. Juhani also wants to share with you the tricks on how to avoid the pitfalls and improve the results of the projects.

About the speaker...

Juhani Lehtimaki

Juhani is an Android developer with design interest. He writes blog, makes noise in internet and has been speaking in multiple conferences about Android design from dev point of view.

Android Wear got a big upgrade this year with always on support and maps. These new features make it more compelling for you to create apps for wearables.

Through this session you will learn what it takes to make your app available on Android Wear and understand its limits and quirks.

About the speaker...

Maria Neumayer

Maria Neumayer is an Android Developer working at Citymapper where - amongst other things - she has built their app for Android Wear. She's been developing for Android for more than five years with a focus on UI work. Austrian expat living in London. Previously at Path, Saffron Digital and Rummble.

Android has matured to the point where there are several database access and management options, as well as some totally non-sqlite alternatives. You will discover some of the well known options, take a look at Realm, and demo an ORMLite port that uses annotation processing instead of reflection, with benchmarks.

About the speaker...

Kevin Galligan

Kevin is the President of Touchlab, an Android development shop based in NYC (that also runs Droidcon NYC).

He started coding at age 7, and has been professionally coding for over 15 years. Kevin's Android experience started before the G1 was released. He is also the original author of the ORMLite/Android implementation.

Follow Kevin at @kpgalligan

Come say hi to us at the Booking.com booth!

• Talk to our developers about the world’s number 1 travel app

• Play an A/B testing game

• Share your details and have the chance to win a one-night stay voucher at a property of your choice (available on Booking.com and upto Eur200)

About the speakers...

Scrolling is one of the most important gesture on mobile platforms. Indeed, it easily allows you to access a fairly large amount of content just by swiping your fingers on screen. In order to implement such gestures, the Android SDK comes with a bunch of scrolling containers: View, ListView, RecyclerView, ScrollView, etc. While using these components independently is relatively simple, it starts getting complicated when nesting them… In this session you will get a complete overview of how Android deals with scrolling in general and how to master the scrolling mechanism to create compelling mobile user experience.

About the speaker...

Cyril Mottier

Cyril Mottier is Mobile Software Engineer at Capitaine Train and Android Google Developer Expert. Passionate about technology and design, Cyril is an avid lover of Android and a multi-skilled engineer. He is actively involved in the Android community and shares his passion writing blog posts, creating open source libraries and giving talks. His motto: “Do less, but do it insanely great”

Ever tried functional languages? Ever been annoyed that every time you see the same Fibonacci examples or yet another maths problem? So what can functional languages really teach us on your day to day life as Android developers? This talk will focus on what you can learn from functional languages and how to apply those concepts to any language. Ben will start by exploring some concrete examples and see how some functional approaches can make your life easier. Join Ben into a journey towards a more functional Android.

About the speaker...

Benjamin Augustin

Benjamin is a Software Craftsman and Android developer at Novoda. Ben might have started thinking functionally when, as a kid, he got hit on his head by a ladder while doing maths homework. Suddenly, he could see functions everywhere, and now he's sharing his visions with the world. Or maybe this is just one of those crazy made up back stories, who knows? One thing is sure, he is convinced that functional programming has a lot to teach us on our everyday work.

Follow Benjamin on Twitter @Dorvaryn.

Through this presentation you will explore the challenges you must face when designing for Android, such as fragmentation, Pixel/Dpi conversion, and adaptive design, as well as the best practices to work together with your developer during the implementation phase.

You will also discover why it's so important to focus on the user, and smart ways to achieve fast and pleasant experience thanks to native patterns and Material Design.

About the speaker...

Lydia Selimalhigazi

Lydia is Senior Interaction Designer @Clue, and she has over 9 years of experience as a designer.

Over the past years she has worked as a User Interface designer, specialising herself on app design and developing an extensive knowledge of the design patterns and standards that underlie each platform (iOS, Android and Windows). She also has a significant experience in print design (corporate, culture, publishing, annual reports) and Illustration. Lydia is very enthusiastic about Material design and the challenges Android offers UX/UI wise and she considers each day as an opportunity to learn something new and be a better designer.

Follow Lydia on Twitter at @Lys_Lydia

Good design is hard. Over the last few years (since Holo), Android users have been spoiled by a sea of apps with "good-enough" design. It's easy to do. It's paint-by-numbers. It's following design guidelines. But it's not good enough! You will discover about design and implementation faux-pas that are considered acceptable, why they're not really good enough,and learn how easily they can be fixed. You will recognise the difference between the concept of accessible and the concept of usable, and note how anyone can develop an accessible app, but why usable apps might be more difficult to make. You'll come away with a set of (actionable!) design and development processes that will guide you in making apps that everyone can use on an Android TV.

About the speaker...

Ataul Munim

Ataul is an Android software craftsman at Novoda London. He likes dry-erase boards, complaining about OSX Finder and chain-watching old TV shows.

Oh how we love the Material Design, but to make an app Material Design that is a different story. So why not make/use prototypes? Prototypes can be a great way to improve Android application results on two fronts: they can prove a concept or improve on it, and they can teach you valuable lessons about the best ways to develop/design the app.

This session will provide practical information about the approach and experiences implementing prototyping.

About the speaker...

Wiebe Elsinga

Besides being a Google Developer Expert for Android, Wiebe Elsinga is a technical team lead at Egeniq in The Netherlands.

He has a passion for UX and design. He regularly speaks at Android Developer events, or is giving workshops. And let's not forget a co-founder/organizer of the GDG Dutch Android User Group.

Don't mention Whisky to him, as that will probably trigger a long conversation (meaning he will rant for hours).

Join us on the exhibition floor over lunch for your chance to chat with leading experts and discuss upcoming trends and technologies. We have an awesome range of clinics taking place across four zones, as well as a number of amazing raffle prizes to give away at sponsor booths.

Minimum viable team: testing your ideas alone (Practices and Tools Zone - Kensington Gardens)

Cyanogen (Devices & Apps Zone - Hyde Park)

Sky Clinic (Not Phones Zone - Hyde Park)

Asos Clinic (Games Zone - Kensington Gardens)

About the speakers...

Pavel Jacko

Technical Team Lead at Sky

Abhisek Devkota

Abhisek Devkota is the Senior Engineering & Community Manager for Cyanogen Inc., and a lead on The CyanogenMod Project (CM).

The CyanogenMod Project is an open­ source Android distribution that is community driven and created in collaboration with volunteers around the world. CM has enabled millions of users to truly own their phone by controlling their software experience through new functionality, greater frequency of updates, and enhanced security and privacy tools beyond those provided by their device manufacturer.

Before joining Cyanogen Inc. he worked on implementation of Software as a Service solutions for various US government agencies and in his spare time was himself a volunteer to the CyanogenMod project for 6 years.

Rafael Ördög (aka DeVill)

Rafael Ordog (DeVill) is a Lead Developer at Budapest-based Emarsys and popular speaker in the Hungarian software community. As a founding member of Emarsys CraftLab - the dedicated coaching team of Emarsys - he has taught university courses and lectured at numerous conferences. His passion for short feedback loops drove him to create Lean Poker, a workshop where developers have the opportunity to experiment with continuous delivery in an artificial environment.

Take a look at Rafael's blog here.

Emarsys can be found here, and the Lean Poker meetup is here.

Material design emphasizes using meaningful motion within your UIs. But when should you use it and how can it be implemented?

In this session you’ll learn about tools and techniques that help you apply motion design within your app. You will discover how to create, choreograph and control sublime animations and transitions from an engineer’s perspective. Above that you’ll use real world examples that you can dive into and learn from.

About the speakers...

Nick Butcher

Nick is a Android Design/Developer Advocate in Google's London office where he helps designers and developers to create sublime mobile apps. ”

He has been making Android apps for over 5 years and has worked with hundreds of companies to help them to make the most of the platform. Nick is a frequent contributor to the official android developers blog, conference speaker, host of Google Developers shows (Android Design in Action, Android Office Hours, DevBytes), co-author of the 'Android Design for Developers' Udacity course and shares pro-tips on Google+ and Github. Nick has worked on Google apps such as Google I/O and Android Device Manager. Recently Nick has been focused on helping designers and developers to understand and create beautiful material design apps.

Benjamin Weiss

Ben is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google located in London. Here he works to make Android Developers live better.

Since 2009 he has been involved with Android, creating apps for several companies and organizations. Ben used to be involved in the Berlin Android community, co-organized several bigger events and presented on various Android related topics. Ben has recently developed Topeka for Android, a material design showcase. Furthermore, Ben is the developer behind the Crouton library for Android and held a Guinness World Record.

Come to learn about Android permissions! What is new with runtime permissions in M? With are all the new changes, and what do you need to do to update? You will start with an introduction to permission groups, what permissions /data/app, /system/app, and /system/priv-app apps get for free, and what dangerous and normal protection levels are. Then, learn about the basics of asking for permissions at runtime. When should you check for granted permissions? How do you ask for permissions? What are the cases you might miss? What happens when a user changes his mind about a granted permission? Eric will also explore briefly what the new model means for backwards compatibility in apps. Now, how do you get your existing app up to speed before M releases? You will discover good ideas and practices for making the leap as well as recommended UX changes to handle the multitude of cases that will come up in your permission request interactions. At IFTTT, the flagship IF automation app is a permission-hungry beast (in a good way)! At IFTTT they love permissions as a way to gain so much Android functionality, but not all users want to use all of that functionality in their apps. The new permissions model is opening up a great opportunity for IFTTT, as users do not have to agree to permissions for features they don't need up front. They are having a blast updating to the new permissions model. With no more scary lists of permissions, IFTTT may be a prime use case and are hoping to grow with even more users. Runtime permissions are going to be great for the IFTTT team; see how they can build trust with users for you, too!

About the speaker...

Eric Cochran

Eric strives to build delightful experiences for users' most personal devices. At IFTTT, Eric has the pleasure of working with a broad range of Android APIs and features across four apps. We love to automate all the things, and Android has been no small part of that dream. Eric loves constantly learning and building new techniques, and Android provides both a great platform and an excellent community for devs.

Android devices running on battery need to be optimized for power. When taking a look at the CPU this optimization starts typically with the race to idle, meaning to go to finish the workload as fast as possible.

However typical Android devices are running on a SoC with many other parts like GPU, hardware decoders, sensors, 2G/3G/4G/Wifi modules... All these parts need to be optimized to reduce the power consumption, but the biggest part of the problem/solution are applications themselves.

Guessing what software is actually causing high power consumption and mitigating it aren't simple tasks. In this session You will explore typical causes of high power consumption, how to debug them and provide possible solutions.

Android provides a number of APIs, OS tricks, and developer tools around power consumption, you will also get to know, learn, and understand them through this talk.

About the speaker...

Xavier Hallade

Xavier Hallade is a software engineer at Intel Software and Services Group in Paris, France, where he works on a wide range of Android frameworks, libraries and applications, helping developers to improve their support for new hardware and technologies.

He's a Google Developer Expert in Android, with a focus on the Android NDK and Android TV.

http://uk.droidcon.com/2014/speaker/xavier-hallade/

How to scale your Material Design app in many different screen sizes. You will learn a very good technique to decide when to use certain patterns from Material Design and how to use animations and colours to express your branding. When it's ok to create your own pattern and how to not become a guidelines developer.

About the speaker...

Marcos Paulo Damasceno

Marcos is an Android Craftsman at Mirego and Droidcon Montreal organizer.

He loves simple and beautiful UX and UI and has his attention always focused to small details and what makes mobile apps great. A passionate about Start Ups, he serves as a mentor for some successful Brazilian apps like Mobills (+600k downloads) and in some hackatons and events in Montreal. He has been playing around with mobile since 2010, worked in many significant android apps as well as on the backend side for the Brazilian market.

Creating games is a difficult task, but your chances of delivering a successful game can be greatly increased if a UX Research process is implemented. This talk will explore ten methods that help improve the player experience of your game at all stages of the development lifecycle - concept, design, production, and soft/post-launch. When combined, they help to ensure that players find your game understandable, usable, and ultimately, enjoyable.

About the speaker...

Graham McAllister

Graham is the Director of Player Research, an award-winning user research and playtesting studio based in Brighton, UK. Player Research help studios deliver world-class games by challenging assumptions, validating design decisions, and providing evidence on the player experience throughout development. Their clients include Sony, NaturalMotion Games, EA, Mind Candy, Jagex, Ninja Theory, Madfinger Games, Hutch Games, and Channel 4 among many others. Graham is a BAFTA Games member and writes a monthly column on user research for GamesIndustry.biz.

Zeroturnaround Raffle - We're giving away a Sphero BB-8 and Sphero SPRK Edition. Stop by the ZeroTurnaround booth to enter the competition and win!

Intel Raffle - Intel Software and the whole team are happy to be back at Droidcon London. Next to cool demos, devices, tools you can experience during the show we are also giving away some nice gadgets, best of all: we will conduct a raffle on both days and give away a Dell Venue 8 7000 Android Tablet (16GB).

On the 2nd day not only that but we add a Tesco Hudle, courtesy to Tesco! All you will have to do is fill out a raffle card and provide the correct answer to 3 tech questions.

About the speakers...

Using Kotlin for Android development has grown in popularity over the last year. Even to those who are not currently using it, the value proposition of the language immediately resonates. There already are a lot of introductory talks to the language and its extensions for use on Android. This talk will explore advancing the usage and design patterns of the language for Android development to solve larger problems.

Prior knowledge or use of Kotlin is not required to attend this talk. Some concepts of the language will be used without introduction but they are intuitive and/or quickly learned. Even if you don't fully understand every language concept on which each example is built, the resulting functionality will be clear.

About the speaker...

Jake Wharton

Android developer for Square working on Square Cash. Has a long-time severe allergy to boilerplate code and for years has been raising awareness on the issue as well as leading efforts to eradicate this horrible disease that plagues modern developers.

In this talk you will learn how physics allow you to create fully interactive, coherent UIs that are a joy to use and easy to maintain. Filipe and Will will start by explaining the underlying physics (aka Springs) that power modern animation libraries, how to tweak its (typical) parameters and examine alternatives. You will then discover different ways of implementing such libraries on Android, making the case for how decoupling animation state from Views can make your life easier. Along the way you will explore related topics such as prototyping tools, filling the developer-designer gap and how this all fits into material design.

About the speakers...

Filipe Abrantes

Filipe has been developing for Android since before the G1, mostly music players but not only. He's now making Android nicer @ Twitter. Loves Games and things that move or look neat.

Will Bailey

Will is a Software Engineer at Facebook/Instagram who focuses on bringing delightful user experiences to Android. While leading the front end development efforts for Facebook Home, he developed a simple framework (Rebound) and philosophy for coordinating user interfaces with physics. He enjoys applying this approach in his day to day work and sharing his ideas with others through through open source.

Most developers agree that their apps should be “accessible,” but what does that even mean? Even if you’d like to have an accessible application, you find roadblocks along the way: lack of documentation, push-back from product priorities, no standards for mobile devices, and perhaps most importantly, not understanding what users really want. As Accessibility Lead for iTriage, Kelly has worked with advocacy groups such as the Blind Institute of Technology to uncover what makes an app truly accessible, and the actual developer time investment required. Spoiler alert: it’s easier than you might think! Join Kelly as she explores common pain points suffered by many technology users, how the Android platform is quickly gaining on iOS in accessibility features, and how you can make your app accessible to all. You will finish up with code samples of common pain points, including Material Design examples, and learn how easily they can be fixed.

About the speaker...

Kelly Shuster

Kelly Shuster is a Senior Android Developer and Accessibility Lead for Android, iOS and Web at iTriage in Denver.

Prior to mobile development, she worked as an Embedded Firmware Engineer focused on disk drive read channel optimization. She holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Electrical & Computer Engineering with minors in Computer Science and Political Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Kelly is currently the director of Women Who Code Denver, and enjoys sharing technical knowledge wherever she goes, from local meetups to international conferences. When not programming, she can be found snowboarding or hiking in the Rocky Mountains.

While smartphone usage is increasing year over year, single apps get less and less attention. This opens up an opportunity to turn this problem into a strength: moving your app into the background by turning core services into an invisible app. The invisible app is a concept that became apparent in the last few years; businesses like Uber have moved central parts of the app interaction into the background without requiring the user to confirm central decisions over and over.

Braintree, a PayPal company, is partnering with various companies that fall into the invisible app category. In this talk Tim will share with you his lessons learned from mentoring startups and innovative companies that tried to achieve being “invisible”, while maintaining security, profitability and most important: a great user experience.

Amongst the technologies that will be explored there are tokenization and leveraging user uniqueness based on smartphone usage behavior. A wide array of sensors – like GPS, Bluetooth LE, and WiFi - supports this concept and can be leveraged creatively to get closer to being “invisible”.

About the speaker...

Tim Messerschmidt

As a long time mobile and web developer, Tim channels his knowledge and experience as Braintree's Head of Developer Relations. He is passionate about startups and serves as a mentor at multiple incubators and accelerators. Prior to joining PayPal, Tim worked with Neofonie Mobile and Samsung focusing on several mobile projects. In his spare time, he leads and creates training classes in all sorts of developer-oriented topics, contributes to Open Source projects and is one of the authors of the Mobile Developer’s Guide to the Galaxy. In addition, he authored numerous articles published in print magazines.

Previous talks:

• http://uk.droidcon.com/2014/sessions/death-to-passwords/
• http://uk.droidcon.com/2013/sessions/authentication-for-droids/

The button was a game and social experiment run on Reddit from 1 Apr 2015 to 5 Jun 2015. The idea was simple: a 60 second countdown timer next to a reset button. When users pressed the button at a specific time, they would also be assigned a specific colour: purple if between 52 and 60 seconds, blue between 42 and 51 seconds, etc. and grey if a user hadn’t pressed the button yet. The power of the game is in its simplicity, but also in its scale: during that time, over a million users joined together to keep the game going. Developing games for this scale is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. In this talk, you will create our own ‘button’ game by connecting a comically oversized button to the internet and writing a companion Android app for audience members to play along. The button and app will be connected through Firebase, an application platform designed to speed up mobile, web, and IoT development by providing authentication, realtime synchronization, and Reddit scale. By the end you will learn how to use Firebase to create mobile and IoT applications which seamlessly interact between hardware and software. You’ll also learn how to leverage realtime, event driven programming models for both game and IoT development. Also, unlike the Reddit version, this experiment promises a more climactic end!

About the speaker...

Mike McDonald

Mike is an engineer on Firebase, a powerful application platform designed to speed up mobile, web, and IoT development. He spends his time building and evangelizing mobile solutions, working on internal tools, and supporting Firebases’ 200,000 developers. In his free time, he enjoys the outdoors and developing embedded hardware.

Join us on the exhibition floor over the coffee break for your chance to chat with leading experts and discuss upcoming trends and technologies. We have an awesome range of clinics taking place across four zones, as well as a number of amazing raffle prizes to give away at sponsor booths.

Code Review (Practices & Tools Zone - Kensington Gardens)

About the speakers...

Erik Hellman

Erik is the author of "Android Programming: Pushing the limits" and a long time Droidcon speaker. He has worked on the inner details of the Android platform at Sony Mobile, hacked on the Android client for Spotify and is currently a consultant working for Bontouch Inc in Stockholm. Erik has also been teaching software development, including Android programming, for both new and senior developers.

Some of the previous talks:

http://uk.droidcon.com/2014/sessions/android-programming-pushing-the-limits/

http://uk.droidcon.com/2012/sessions/g-track-1/

http://uk.droidcon.com/2012/sessions/fast-user-friendly-and-power-efficient-network-communication-on-android/

Kevin Galligan

Kevin is the President of Touchlab, an Android development shop based in NYC (that also runs Droidcon NYC).

He started coding at age 7, and has been professionally coding for over 15 years. Kevin's Android experience started before the G1 was released. He is also the original author of the ORMLite/Android implementation.

Follow Kevin at @kpgalligan

Google provides a number of terrific mobile services that developers can use to build better apps. In this talk, Laurence a developer advocate at Google, introduces a number of these services, including Location, Maps, Places and Mobile Vision APIs.

About the speaker...

Laurence Moroney

Laurence Moroney has authored more programming books than he can remember.

A well known speaker at conferences such as Google IO, Microsoft Build, and others, he's passionate about mobile development, and Android in particular. When not messing around with development, he's a published Sci-Fi novelist and produced screenwriter.

Follow Laurence on @lmoroney

Vector Drawables were introduced with the Android L Developer preview and the accidentally leaked Compat library shows that Google are adding backwards compatibility for this extremely useful addition to the Drawables toolkit.

Mark Allison, author of https://blog.stylingandroid.com, will offer an overview of how Vector Drawables work and then share with you some examples of how to achieve some really cool animated icons using AnimatedVectorDrawable.

About the speaker...

Mark Allison

Mark Allison is a GDE for Android and software engineer with almost 25 years' experience. He is passionate about providing the user with the best possible experience. He has developed both server and client side, most commonly Android on the client side, but with also for iOS, HTML5, Symbian, and J2ME. Mark writes a technical blog (http://blog.stylingandroid.com) which focuses on Android UI/UX topics, but often covers more general Android development techniques. He regularly speaks at Android developer events in such diverse locations as Turkey, Spain, and Brazil. He is a stalwart of Droidcon London - this will be his fourth consecutive appearance. When not being geeky, Mark likes to unwind by hurling abuse at football referees, specifically those who are unkind to his beloved Watford FC with whom he holds a season ticket. He also has a deep love of the chilli pepper and consumes spicy food (his favourite being Indian) at every opportunity! Mark is happily married with a grown up step-daughter, and lives in Hertfordshire, UK.

In the beginning, SoundCloud mobile and web clients both used SoundCloud's public API, which allowed the company to “be their own customers” when developing their public API. As SoundCloud's mobile and web clients evolved, public API development became a bottleneck for feature development, because mobile and web clients have different needs. To unblock themselves, they introduced BFF (Backend-for-the-Frontend!), a framework to build custom, usecase-oriented APIs which allowed their mobile engineers to develop and maintain their own API (in Scala!). BFF’s goal is to make writing robust, scalable APIs easy. Duana will share with you the wins and learnings in moving to this architecture and how it enabled the company to transition to feature teams at SoundCloud.

About the speaker...

Duana Stanley

Duana Stanley has been building both public and internal APIs for the last 4 years. At SoundCloud she has built microservices in Ruby, Node.js and Scala. She is now learning Android so she can make changes to the SoundCloud Android App as required by her feature team. She also enjoys making tech accessible for everyone by coaching at RailsGirls and OpenTechSchool events in Berlin.

Static analyzers are automated tools that spot bugs in source code by scanning programs without running them. They complement traditional dynamic testing: Where testing allows individual runs through a piece of software to be checked for correctness, static analysis allows multiple and sometimes even all flows to be checked at once. Infer is a static analyser that is used internally to analyse the main Facebook apps for Android and iOS, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, among others. At present, the analyzer reports problems caused by null pointer access and resource and memory leaks, which cause a percentage of app crashes.

Each month, hundreds of potential bugs identified by Facebook Infer are fixed by our developers before they are committed to our codebases and deployed to people's phones. Facebook Infer is open source (http://fbinfer.com/) so you can use it yourself.

This talk will explore the basics of using Facebook Infer.

About the speaker...

Martino Luca

Martino Luca is a software engineer in Facebook's London Engineering office, where he works on the Infer development team.

Developing games for mobile devices is certainly one of the most lucrative genres today. Google reflected this importance by splitting the "Games" section of the Play Store into sub-catogries to account for the growing market in that area. With Android TV Google even created a whole platform designed for gaming on Android and partners like Nvidia and Razer joined the party.

It's already hard enough to come up with a fresh idea for a new game, make it look good and work on all the target devices. But adding social features like leaderboards, achievements, multiplayer features to compete with friends and offering an easy way to continue a game phone that you started on your tablet is what can catapult a good app to a great everyone of your friend knows. All these features and more you can get with the Google Play Games Services bringing you happier users, higher rentention rates and viral recommendations - all for free and with support for all major platforms.

The talk will explore the different parts of Google Play Games Services, how to set them up and integrate them with your Android app, mention a few pitfalls and finishes off with a multiplayer live demo of these features - if the demo gods are playing nice. In the end you'll be ready to easily add those features to your app and make your users happy while still having time to focus on what's important: Your game.

About the speaker...

Stefan Hoth

Stefan works as an Android Software Craftsman at Novoda in Berlin. He helps creating community events like Google Developer Group Berlin, Berlin Hack and Tell and the DevFest Berlin. He enjoys learning new tricks and discuss about best practices.

Pollfish Raffle - Pass by Pollfish booth at Droidcon London and take part in our raffle for a Moto 360 smartwatch!

Epson Raffle - Visit the Epson stand for your chance to win a pair of Moverio BT-200 smart glasses. To enter the draw simply submit an entry form at the Epson stand on the 29 and 30 October 2015. All names will then be placed in a raffle to be drawn at random during the final conference day. Don’t worry if you need to leave early, we’ll be emailing the winners after the draw!

About the speakers...

Virtual reality is coming. Join Shanee and explore virtual reality and how it may change your life. Learn how it works and how to design virtual reality experiences. Learn about Project Tango and what can be done with advanced sensors on mobile devices. Gaming with positional tracking and augmented reality barely scratch the surface. Experience demos at the end of the talk.

About the speaker...

Shanee Nishry

Shanee Nishry is a Games Developer Advocate working to empower game developers, advance virtual reality and bring the best gaming experience to Android. Prior to Google, Shanee worked as a game programmer and created various games and cross-platform game engines. Shanee is extremely passionate about games, engine architecture and virtual reality and was listed in the UK's Top 100 Women in Games of 2015.

Previous droidcon presentations: https://events.bizzabo.com/droidcontlv2015/agenda/session/106650

Android is the most popular operating system in the world and is used by billions of people! This presents unprecedented opportunity in emerging markets to make a positive impact on people's lives.

You will explore emerging use cases across such diverse sectors as agriculture, banking, activism, and healthcare. You will walk away with a deeper appreciation for the technical and social challenges you will encounter in these markets and practical mitigations to overcome them to make a difference.

How will you impact the next billion?

About the speaker...

Corey Latislaw

Corey Latislaw is an Android Google Developer Expert (GDE), software engineer, author, speaker, and teacher.

She has written several high profile Android applications at companies large and small. By day she is installing solar in Tanzania with Off Grid Electric. At night she authors videos and books on Android programming, runs a consulting firm, and organizes the Philadelphia Google Developer Group (GDG). She is passionate about travel, local food, the outdoors, photography, and living in Philly.

Visit Corey's website coreylatislaw.com

With this talk you will consider the advantages of usability testing in product development and tackle the challenges you, as Android creative, face along the way.

Leonie will begin with a brief introduction to the concept of user-centred design and how it helps you to gain further insight into your users and the products you create.

Leonie will explore a variety of methodologies and tools, with tips on how to recruit the right users, how to get the most out of your research and how to define sensible action points from your results.

About the speaker...

Leonie Brewin

As a Designer at Novoda, Leonie spends her days crafting user experiences for Android. With 8 years experience as a designer, she has spent the last 5 years specialising in mobile with a passion for user-centred design and usability testing.

Discover Leonie's work on Behance.

The amount of car accidents that are caused by distractions is rising every year. Most countries of the world banned mobile phones while driving over safety concerns. Google creates a safety solution with Android Auto. With it, phones can project your compatible apps right to your vehicle infotainment system.

About the speaker...

Benjamin Stürmer

Benjamin is an Android developer at Quartett Mobile in Munich, a startup with an emphasis for automotive apps. He's been working with Android auto since the first pre-release.

Our remit at the BBC means we have to reach as wide an audience as possible. When you consider how this applies to our iPlayer mobile app, we have to support a huge variety of devices and os combinations. Daunted by the amount of manual testing we would have to perform, we invested heavily into automation to reduce our manual efforts.

We quickly built up a large and successful suite of automated tests and could run these on a single device driven by our CI system. When it came to making this scale to the large number of devices we wanted to support, we really struggled.

The difficulties we faced were:

• how to manage and run tests on multiple devices
• keeping devices stable and ready to run tests
• dealing with false positives and intermittent failures
• managing the huge number of tests we’d accrued and the GBs of results we were generating

We struggled to scale our approach using conventional CI tools. We wanted a system that could help us in three areas:

• managing the physical devices and keeping them in a ready-state to run tests
• scheduling and running tests across multiple connected devices
• collating and interpreting results across a single build.

We built a custom CI system, which we call Hive CI to help us overcome these problems. Hive CI was designed to be device aware, and test aware giving us greater control over how we run our tests, what tests we run, and what devices they run on. Our system could be used by any team in the BBC, for any mobile testing project, using any testing framework.

Now that we could run all our tests on all our devices, we found ourselves with a completely new set of problems. The effort of maintaining over 200 tests across all our physical devices was a full time job. And left no time for investigating the millions of test results we generated every day. We needed a more intelligent approach to what we ran. We solved this in three ways:

• breaking our test suites into smaller suites focusing on specific domains (core journeys, statistics, accessibility) and reducing our on-commit tests to a core set of journeys -- what we call PUMAs
• using our monitoring to identify the highest reach devices and operating systems
• expanding the Hive result engine to be able to differentiate between genuine failures and intermittent problems.

About the speakers...

Jitesh Gosai

Currently working with the Mobile platforms teams within the BBC with teams such as iPlayer Mobile and iPlayer Radio to identify and establish test automation approaches that have aided the teams to move faster and release quicker than before.

David Buckhurst

David Buckhurst is a Technical Architect at the BBC leading the Test Engineering Team and providing the strategic thinking for wider testing problems in the corporation.

David is a passionate advocate of open source and is leading the charge to open up all the BBC’s testing tools.

Join us for the final wrap up with Droidcon organising team, this year's highlights and some great giveaways.

About the speakers...