Going to Berlin for Droidcon/Fluttercon

Wednesday, 14 August 2024

In the beginning of July (from 3rd to 5th) I went to Berlin to attend the joint Droidcon/Fluttercon conference.

It was my second time attending that event. Last year I was a speaker, but this time my CFP unfortunately didn’t make it through. When I learned that, I decided to not go, but then my good friend Albert had 1 spare ticket that he gave me (he was a speaker, and speakers get 1 ticket to share). I’m very grateful for that, and that made me go.

Being a regular attendee was pretty cool – I was not stressed at all, my only responsibility being attending as much good talks as possible and learning a lot.

Day 1

Solving Poly-Repo Dependency Nightmares

by Mohamed Gamal, Mobile Staff Engineer @ SumUp

Day 2

Android Platform Views Past, Present, Future

by John McCutchan, Flutter Team Leader @ Google

Software Correcteness

by Marcin Wojnarowski, Software Developer @ LeanCode

WebRTC in Flutter

by Masakiro Asaki @ Flutter Tokyo & OpenCI

Coroutines Mastery: Tips, Best Practices, and Real-world Insights

by Sergei Maslov, Senior Software Engineer @ Paradox Cat

Composing an API the right way

by Márton Braun, Developer Advocate @ JetBrains

Is This App Accessible? A Live Testing Demo

by Eeva-Jonna Panula, Accessibility Specialist & Senior Android Developer

AOSP Development Environment: best practices, tips, and tricks

by: - Roman Illarionov, Senior Software Engineer @ Paradox Cat - Viktor Mukha, Principal Software Architect @ Paradox Cat

It was a really great talk and it expanded my perspective on what does development of AOSP looks like – tl;dr it requires tons of CPUs, RAM, and patience.

There are not many established development environment practices about AOSP development, so speakers shared how they do it at Paradox Cat.

They also shared 2 useful VSCode extensions

The past, present, and future of native interop in Dart

by: - Daco Harkes, Software Engineer @ Google - Hossein Yousefi, Senior Software Engineer @ Google

Day 3

Unconference | Sustainable package maintenance models

Package Ecosystem Summit sesssion

Unconference | Addressing package ecosystem fragmentation

Package Ecosystem Summit sesssion

Speechless Slide Karaoke with Chet Haase

Now, I have to share something: if there’s someone I could call a programming idol of mine, it’d be Chet Haase. I’ve been following him since 2018, when I was still in junior high school and trying to build my first Android apps.

I always loved his talks with Romain Guy at Google I/O.

I didn’t have an opportunity to go and talk to him in person. Still, knowing he attended the same event was… I don’t know, cool?

Summing up

Overall I’m glad I attended. This year I really tried to make notes, and writing this 1 week after the event, I see it was beneficial. I’d have forgetten so much if I hadn’t been writing this stuff down!

The worst part was definitely food that was provided on the venue – but for a different reason that last year. Last year the food was just bad. After waiting in a long queue, I took a few bites and threw it away.

This year quality was much better – they had a whole floor for food trucks – but there was not enough of it. On 2 out of 3 days, I didn’t manage to get lunch, because they literally run out of them.

Aside from that little hiccup, I’m glad I went. It was a great event.

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2024-08-14 – Going to Berlin for Droidcon/Fluttercon
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2024-06-04 – My journey to Google I/O ’24
2024-05-11 – GitHub Actions beg for a supply chain attack
2024-03-19 – Writing a custom Dart VM service extension (part 1)
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2019-01-07 – Google Code-in 2018