Chicago Roboto 2018 Recap + First Keynote!


Chicago Roboto was back again this year as a single track conference and there were a lot of excellent talks.  Last year I gave a talk with my co-worker and product designer extraordinaire Jess Moon about design and development workflows and this year I was back again but as a Keynote speaker.

Keynote

Giving a keynote was a stretch goal I set for myself in 2018 and I managed to achieve it early thanks to the Chicago Roboto review committee. The topic I chose was being an Android Advocate who brings teams and communities together. I will be writing a follow up blog post about my keynote process soon but before that, a quick shout out to Corey Latislaw and my coworkers at Warner Bros. Digital Labs who took a look at my first and second drafts and listened to all my half-baked thoughts and ideas.
The recording should be out very soon. Slides and resources are available at https://speakerdeck.com/yprabhu/keynote-being-more-than-an-android-developer.

Takeaways

Chicago Roboto was a conference with a lot of great talks and speakers. I've highlighted a few talks and resources below.

Android Architecture components by Phil Shadlyn

Phil started experimenting with Android Architecture Components on a reminder app that he built and shared his lessons learned with everyone else. The work-in-progress sample app is available at https://github.com/physphil/RemindMe and slides are available at https://speakerdeck.com/physphil/i-wrote-an-app-with-architecture-components.

Tips from the Time Machine by Nate Ebel 

Nate Ebel's talk on starting out as a Android developer was like stepping back in time and remembering the good and bad times of starting out in Android. Not knowing "all the things" was something Nate mentioned in his talk which coincidentally tied in with my keynote.



Who's afraid of Machine Learning? by Britt Barak

I loved Britt's machine learning talk with an introduction to neural networks and then trying to figure out if the given input was a strawberry or not by using TensorFlow.


Picasso 3.0 by Jake Wharton & John Rodriguez

Picasso - the popular Android image downloading and caching library is  undergoing some major changes. Slides are available at https://speakerdeck.com/jakewharton/rinsing-the-brush-picasso-3-dot-0-chicago-roboto-2018. 

ShapeShifter by Alex J Lockwood

ShapeShifter, the amazing tool by Alex helps us write path morphing animations without the use of design tools. Slides are available here.

The future of the community is You by Dan Kim

I had to leave midway through Dan Kim's talk but caught up with it on Twitter. His advice (which touched on some of the things that I mentioned in my keynote) is to contribute to the community through writing, speaking, mentoring and open source. Slides at https://speakerdeck.com/dankim/the-future-of-our-community-is-you.

Until next year...

Thank you Chicago Roboto for a wonderful time! I met a lot of wonderful people from all over the world and learned a lot from all of them.

And thank you for giving me the opportunity to be the Keynote speaker at your conference. 

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