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.

The Science of Signals: Mastering Telemetry for Observability

DroidCon Berlin - 2013