AnDevCon Santa Clara 2015

Me with giant android girl

This year has been quite a busy one for public speaking, and I closed it out by talking about accessibility at AnDevCon Santa Clara.

The Conference

I arrived at the conference Tuesday around noon, where I got to attend a lunchtime keynote about Gradle improvements by Hans Dockter.  It was a great talk, but since I was eating I couldn’t take notes. 🙁  Luckily, he was giving another Gradle talk later during the conference.

After lunch I jumped into the second half of Karim Yaghmour’s Android Internals day long tutorial session.  I recently purchased his book Embedded Android, and have been slowly making my way through it when I get time, so I was *really* excited to sit in his class!  I was bummed to miss the first part, but still absorbed so much from the second part.   If you get a chance to see him speak, don’t miss it.  Not only is he very knowledgable, his content was really well organized and well delivered.

I started out in my career doing hardware and firmware, so for me walking through the Android.mk files was like a trip down memory lane. Back in the day I did a big project redesigning the build system on a large firmware project, and it was quite a scarring memorable experience. 😀 All joking aside, it was pretty cool to be digging around in OS source stuff again!

Later that evening I attended Lightning Talks, which I really enjoyed. I really love good lightning talks; they are short enough to really keep you engaged, and you walk away really remembering some key points.  Intel offered up some cool video processing source code samples.  Dolby did a cool piece on 2 ways you can increase user engagement: focus on high sound quality, and pump up the bass.  Karim did a cool demo of some open source tools that his company wrote.  My favorite one was this system service visualizer, which showed you all the apps running on a device, and all the services they are using in a super cool interactive graph!  Source code for that one will be released soon here.

The next day we had the super star-studded Google keynote, with Chet Haase, Reto Meier and Romain Guy all at the same time!  It was a great talk, and I had fun sketchnoting it w/ Chiu-Ki:

I of course really enjoyed Hans Dockter’s deep dive talk about Gradle as well, and I was really excited to hear him mention that there is a Gradle for Android course on Udacity.  I bet its awesome, I hope I can check it out.

My Talk

On the final day of the conference, I gave my talk on accessibility.  I was very happy to not be on the last time slot this AnDevCon. I was disappointed to see that there was no table next to the podium for my talk. At every other conference there has been enough room for my overhead camera setup, so I never thought to ask organizers about it. Oops!!  Since there wasn’t very much room, I had to set up my camera a bit differently, and it resulted in the audience having a bit more trouble seeing the text on my sample app.  From now on, I will always make sure to ask conference organizers if there will be enough room for my setup!

Other than that slight demo misstep, my talk went well. People enjoyed the content and asked good questions. I also had a lot of great conversations with people after my talk.  One developer (all the way from Australia!) talked about how her team has a big focus on accessibility both in their app and in their workplace, as one of their developers is blind.   Another developer recently stepped up to be the accessibility advocate on his team.

Having a team advocate (whether formal or informal) is really important for the success of accessibility on a project.  Its so important because the hardest part of accessibility is usually just remembering to do it. Initially having a person to keep everyone accountable on pull requests or manual QA reviews helps to set a standard for the team.  Then eventually, it will become second nature to everyone.

Silicon Valley

I’ve been to San Fransisco several times, but I’ve never actually been in the official Silicon Valley. It was really neat to finally visit the place that is the epicenter of my industry! While I was there, I got to attend a GDG Silicon Valley meetup.  The talk was about Android TV, and had a lot of great code samples.  It was also held in Google’s Mountain View headquarters, which I have never visited before!

It was a great conference, and I learned a lot.  Thanks for having me, AnDevCon Santa Clara!

This entry was posted in Accessibility, Android, Conferences. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *