This article originally appeared on rand(alex).

Last week I went to DroidCon, a community driven conference. The conference center was in the Kosmos (in former East Berlin), a small but nice conference center. Their where about 500+ attendees. The event started on Sunday with a Hackaton session (with some predefined topics). I did not participate in the hackaton because I still had some last minute changes needed to be made to the NFC app.

On Monday there was a BarCamp. The idea behind a BarCamp is that in the beginning the attendees in the beginning of the day propose some talks and they will get scheduled throughout the day. A lot of people present something they learned while creating their apps.

Tuesday and Wednesday it was the real conference. The DroidCon sessions had a length of 30 minutes, that had it good and bad side. The good was, when a session was bad it only took half and hour. The downside was that really good talks where too short.

My personal highlights:

New Android Build System: This talk was given by the founder of Gradleware, the company behind gradle. The talk confirms that it was actually a good idea too look at gradle for our builds.
ProGuard: ProGuard is the optimiser and obfuscator provided by the Android SDK. Interesting talk about the tool and why you should use it, even when you don't care about obfuscation.
RoboGuice: Dependency injection for Android. Now we can use the same mechanisms for injection as we do for Java Enterprise applications.
RoboElectric: RoboElectric is a JUnit runner that let you run your unit test without starting the emulator. But we also learned to look at for the pitfalls (it's not for everything).

In general I was quite happy, but I think the percentage of good talks should be a bit higher. I found about 50% of the talks where good or ok of the talks I followed. All in all I was happy that we went, because the really good talks compensate the bad once. Next time I'll need to prepare my own talk for the BarCamp though.

DroidCon Berlin - 2013