After almost ten years, I was in Poland again last week. Ten years ago I was an Erasmus student; last week I was a speaker at Droidcon Krakow!

The venue

Every Droidcon feels like a family reunion to me, but the funny part is that the family is continuously growing in size, every time we meet.

Droidcon Krakow venue was a hotel and turns out that’s just brilliant: everything is already there, organised, comfortable. The food was really good and those “always-on” buffets were delicious. I stayed in the same hotel and this made the logistics as smooth as possible.

The tech stuff

Talks and speakers were awesome. I met a few friends from my first Droidcon in Berlin and tons of new nerds, curious and ready to learn and share .

Chatting with people and attending the talks, I noticed a few strong trends:

  • Reactive Programming is growing on the community. Both talks, mine and Sasa Sekulic‘s were sold out. There is definitely less fear and more desire to evolve.

  • Testing is easier now and higher code quality is the final goal for a lot of developers, no matter what; developers cannot stand anymore to work on badly designed, untestable apps.
  • Kotlin could be the next big thing, but everybody is very skeptical about Google officially supporting it; we all hope that at some point, everybody will realise that Java 1.6 is “obsolete” for 2016 mobile development.

  • Nobody is using G+. Apparently, everybody is using Twitter, even in the Android ecosystem.

Media

My slides, both Keynote and PDF format, and the example source code are here:

https://github.com/hamen/rxjava-essentials/tree/master/slides/droidcon.pl

Conclusions

I definitely enjoyed Droidcon Krakow and I’m looking forward to the next year.