Since I started going around for conferences in 2015, I mostly attended Droidcons. Over time, I realized that I was building a weird sort of bubble and patterns started to emerge:

  1. Android vs iOS 💣
  2. My library vs your library 🔥
  3. My stack vs your stack
  4. My MVVM vs your MVI
  5. RxJava Vs Coroutines 😡
  6. Dagger Vs Koin 😠
  7. …

It started to feel uncomfortable and that’s why I started to look outside the Android bubble.

Conferences like AppBuilders.ch, MobiConf, VoxxedDays helped me a lot to meet new people that face different challenges due to different platforms, environments and expectations, but share the same passion.

This year I added DevFest Coimbra and Mobius.

DevFest Coimbra 🇵🇹

It was my first time in Portugal and the conference was in a city without a major airport. I was a bit concerned at the beginning, but the staff was super supportive. I also hit some connectivity problem with my SIM card, but the GDG community took care of me in such a great way:

We arrived in Coimbra a day earlier and we had the opportunity of visiting the city.

The river (duh)
20191115_163630-pano
One of the university areas.

There were about 500 people, mostly students I believe because the venue was at the university and it had that unmistakable Faculty Vibe 😜❤️

Talks were very diverse: from Machine Learning to Kotlin Live Coding, from testing on iOS passing through Android Architecture Components to offline web pages.

I met friends from the Berlin Android community (I mean, those people are EVERYWHERE!!! 😂)

However I also met incredibly cool people from GDG Coimbra and… wait for it… the iOS community 😂

 Donny was working for Disney+ and we exchanged a lot of funny work stories. He was also working on some blog post ideas for his #adventofcode challenge: 24 posts in 24 days, before Xmas. I loved the idea and I had the greatest respect for him: that’s an insane amount of posts in that time frame!

DevFest Coimbra was great and the cherry on top was the donation they made a with the money from the tickets:

 I didn’t see that coming and I was very happy to had contributed to something like that ❤️

Mobius Moscow

After a few weeks, I went from extreme West Europe to extreme East Europe and got on a plane to Moscow.

A few months before this moment, Vladimir invited me to join the Mobius line up. Mobius staff worked very hard in the latest years to increase diversity of speakers and attendees. They are doing an incredible work in a very challenging environment. I felt very honored to go.

At Mobius a lot of talks were in Russian, but the organizers had us covered with something pretty neat:

Overall, I loved the atmosphere and confirmed that I prefer multi-platform conferences. They give me the opportunity to exit my bubble, my Android comfort zone and to learn more.

The video from my talk is available here:

What’s next?

I feel like 2020 will be unusual for a lot of people, somehow a “changing” year. From my side, I’ll be attending fewer Android conferences, for sure, and I’ll try to interact more with diverse communities than obsess on the little green droid.

It’s gonna be interesting.