Notes on Tech, Public Speaking and Leadership

We're a month into 2018 and I already have a lot going on for the next couple of months. But before things are in full swing, I wanted to take a step back and review the past year. Photo by Miesha Moriniere from Pexels In numbers Wrote 2 blog posts  Won 2 awards  Attended 5 conferences  Spoke at 4 conferences Attended 14 meetups Spoke at 4 meetups Read 12 books  A lot of firsts! Speaking This was the first time I gave 3 completely different talks on different topics like design-developer collaboration, public speaking and leadership, and mastering Android's app resources. It was also the first time I gave a talk with a co-presenter at a conference ( Chicago Roboto - Design Develop Deploy ) Community Organized and helped run the first Android meets iOS meetup at Philly Tech Week. Learning new things This year I immersed myself in Kotlin via Kotlin Koans, Kotlin in Action book and Koltin programming challenges. It took me a while to write my first PR

I recently attended and spoke at Android Summit , an Android conference organized by the folks at Capital One. Special shoutout to Jared A Sheehan, Michael Jones and the entire organizing committee for running a fabulous event which raised $6000 for Women who Code. All speakers received a Phillips Hue Starter Kit as a speaker gift which I've used to toggle and dim my living room lights via Amazon Echo. So much fun! I had a prior commitment and could only attend Day 1 but here are my highlights. Process & Workflow A common theme on Day 1 was process and workflow talks which tied in beautifully with Kelly Shuster 's keynote. Kelly is an excellent story teller. In her keynote, she connected a story of communication from her theatre background to how developers, designers and testers need to work together to reduce boiler plate conversations when designing and developing apps. I gave a similar talk earlier this year at  Chicago Roboto  with my co-worker and designer  J

Google I/O 2017 was a lot of fun and informative. I wish I had Hermione's Time-Turner as there were many talks to attend and many amazing people to meet. Here are some things I learned at I/O: AI & Machine Learning This year, I/O was all about AI on every Google product. A product mentioned at the Keynote was Google Lens which enables your smartphone to take pictures of an image like a flower and identify it. That's pretty helpful for a hobbyist gardener like me.  I also happened to drop by their  Android Experiments  sandbox and play the AI powered  Quick Draw  with fellow I/O attendees. Google Assistant  Google's voice assistant is available on many devices now - not just on your Google Home & Pixel phones but on Android TV as well as iPhone. It's also available on more languages and has an  Assistant SDK . You can build an app fairly quickly with Actions on Google and there is a challenge at  g.co/ActionsChallenge . You could possib

I had a lot of professional growth goals this year and that included speaking, blogging and engaging my community more. I ended up doing a lot more in 2016 than 2015.  My goal for 2017 is to keep it simple and do less :) January Wrote abstracts for all the conferences I wanted to attend/speak at and laid the groundwork for the year ahead. February Ran my first Android Study Jam for Google Developers Group(GDG)/Android Alliance Philly which I co-organize. March Gave a lightning  talk at GDG/Android Alliance Philly on RecyclerViews which was part of my talk on Material Design implementation for Developers April Gave a  talk  at GDG/Android Alliance Philly on Material Design implementation for Developers. May Did an AMA with the AnDevCon Boston team to promote my talk on Material Design. Attended the global GDG conference in San Francisco and Google I/O in Mountain View which was a blast as I got to hang out with members of the Androi

Recently I was a panelist on ElaConf's Leadership and Management Panel along with awesome tech bosses Alison Rowland , Caro Griffin and Alisha Miranda . The panel was moderated by Alisha who had crowd-sourced a great list of questions. The panel was for women interested in pursuing a management career path. Alisha started off the panel with a round of introductions from each of us on our manager-origin story. I moved into the tech team lead role after being an individual contributor (IC) for 3 years. Since two years, I've been leading a team of 4 Android developers. Breakout seession about leadership and management at #elaconf . It's a full room!   @yashvprabhu @DramaFeverDevs pic.twitter.com/8lW9lvRGoP — Moldy Dentures (@MoldyDentures) November 5, 2016 Learning about leadership & mgmt with  @yashvprabhu   @carolinesyrup   @arowla   @makeshiftalisha   #elaconf   pic.twitter.com/AUrsOIJjMC — Jen Dionisio (@jddionisio)  November 5,

This is probably going to be one of several blog posts related to ElaConf . It's a wonderful conference for empowering women in tech that took place in Philly for the second time recently. One of the breakout sessions at ElaConf was on Technical Blogging which was run by Vaidehi Joshi ( @vaidehijoshi ). Here are my takeaways from that session. We started off by reading Julia Evans' blog post on  processes . Vaidehi asked us to take a few minutes to read it and discuss with a partner. Here are some things that stood out to us in the blog post: Conversational Matter of fact Formatted Code snippets Author's personality shows in the code comments Condensed scope, author links to external content for more research Good introduction to the topic even for a newbie We also took some time doing a fun exercise, with one of us pretending to be a student and the other a teacher. The teacher had to describe " opening a Facebook account to someone who has not used a