DevFest Baltics 2017 Mobile Edition: My impressions

On Friday, November 17th, my team Chili Labs and I attended a tech conference about mobile development. This was my first time participating in such an event and I’m really happy I did because I got to meet some awesome people and listen to engaging & informative talks from the professionals in the field.

Keynote: Think beyond IT

The conference started with an inspiring speech from Jozef Vodicka about expanding your comfort zone one step at a time, not being afraid of trying new things and networking with the people around you.

Designing for mobile: context matters

Another inspiring talk was given by George Eid about work at AREA 17, their approach & philosophy towards mobile design. He showed us some of their projects and spoke about design techniques for both — designers & developers, as these characters should be respected by each other.

If branding is behaviour, then developers are in fact modern brand designers.

Introduction to Continuous Delivery with fastlane

In this talk Manu Wallner showed us how fastlane works and how we can implement it in our apps.

The conference hall was divided into two smaller rooms, where at the same time were presentations for Android & iOS developers. As I am part of the former team, I attended the according talks.

Yo Dawg! I heard you like Kotlin

Considering how Kotlin for Android is only getting more & more popular among developers, this was a very relevant talk about how you can replace Java, XML & Groovy with just Kotlin. It was given by Antonio Leiva, he showed us implementation examples and talked about pros & cons of using this approach. Nice bonus: we had a chance to win (and I did!) a signed copy of the book written by Antonio “Kotlin for Android Developers: Learn Kotlin the easy way while developing an Android App”.

Unidirectional data flow on Android using Kotlin

This was a new topic for me, as I haven’t heard about unidirectional data flow or Flux/Redux before and Cesar Valiente talked all about how to implement these architectures principles in our Android applications using the advantages of already mentioned Kotlin. I found the topic very interesting and definitely plan to try it out for myself.

Altogether, this was a very exciting experience, I had enjoyed the talks from all of these people and definitely gained some knowledge on a couple of topics. The organisation was great, so big thank you to the organisers of the DevFest Baltics 2017 for this event, Chili Labs for the opportunity to attend it & to all of the speakers for sharing their experience & knowledge with us.

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Twitter: @ChiliLabs

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