mDevCamp Conference 2019 Review

My five cents and review of mDevCamp 2019. conference. Long story short, it was great! No day is great with out good cup of coffee, so here we go.

Ok, now onto the conference.

Here’s a little “vlog” of mine. Straight outta conference!

Wanted to attend one of the workshops, but as the spots were taken, I had no luck to do so. Luckily, Flutter workshop code is uploaded to the Github, so everyone can access and see what’s been done on that workshop.

The conference has been organized and held in beautiful Prague Congress Centre. Entry to the conference was a bit tricky to find in my opinion as this centre is huge.

First talk I went to, was Static Analysis with Android Lint, by Tor Norbye who is creator of Android Lint and Tech lead at Google’s Android Studio department.

It was interesting to see couple of things from his point of view and how they evolved Lint principle which was only developed for Android, to other platforms and languages as well. He was really talking passionately and lost the track of the time, so when ran off of it he admitted he had 30 slides left. ????

Mobile revolution is here — meet React Native, by Mike Grabowski.

This talk was one of the most interesting ones as from my judgment more than 90% of conference attendees were mobile native devs. And yeah… they don’t have strong opinion about React Native — “It just doesn’t feel native to me” was a quote I heard a lot from the people that I actually met and all around me. Pretty hilarious.

To get back on what was the idea of the React Native talk, it was simply, like I said, an idea for the developers to give it a try, to meet themselves with the hybridish approach of building apps for both platforms, both Android and iOS.

I, as a native developer, don’t really hate those technologies. Matter of fact, I’m kinda hyped when it comes to any new technology and approach, especially this kind, either between Flutter or React Native. So talk gave me an inspiration to truly give it a try and then to judge is it worthy challenger.

Which brings me to the — React Native or Flutter? Deep understanding of Multi-platform Development, by Lukáš Korba, Management Lead for Mobile at Showmax. He was presenting his opinion about famous Flutter vs React Native, their pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages. Everyone has their own arguments when it comes to this, but it really boils down to who prefers what. It’s really up to the person to decide.

Feel like this picture perfectly describes those VS/OR comparisons. Doesn’t matter what you choose you still:

Last talk I listened to was iOS related one, Improving Developer Experience through tools and techniques, by Krzysztof Zabłocki, Lead iOS developer at The New York Times.

He was talking about everyday issues and struggles of developing iOS apps and then giving the practical tips and tricks on how to overcome those with certain techniques and open source tools.

In the end, after all the talks, there were good ole’ Lightning talks. They were awesome! The topic of Lightning talks was the life of engineers when they’re not bashing their keyboards and programming. Every single one of them was great, but the last one was a spectacle. A magic trick show with cards, like a Cherry on top. Video below lasts for couple of minutes, so if you’re impatient, you can skip time to around 2:40 to see much swag such coolness. ????

Hope you enjoyed reading my review of this years mDevCamp conference. 

Hopefully I will be writing next year’s one as well.