Back to front - Backend technologies for the frontend developer

What is an ETag? What is a CDN? What is optimistic locking? What is idempotency? What is a cluster? Wth should I care?

In this session we will be discussing a few very important technologies and ideas that will help you take your career to the next level.

Using Git like a pro: Shazam's "master-only" workflow, other branching strategies and Git hacks

In this talk we will be discussing advanced git techniques, how you can utilize different branching strategies to achieve a rapid workflow depending on the structure of your team (and demonstrating the branching strategy the Android team uses at Shazam), followed by an assortment of 'hacks', or useful tricks, that allow you to optimize the way you work and share code with others.

360|AnDev Denver 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_se7iLYWVhE
Droidcon Zagreb 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPnOKbk73HI

Migrating a mature code base to Kotlin

In this presentation we will talk about the practicalities of slowly migrating a mature Android app to Kotlin.

The ASOS Android app is about 4 years old. During this time, a lot of legacy code has been accumulated, and many different technologies used.

We will present our approach of integrating Kotlin, the lessons we learned and a few Kotlin features we love and can no longer do without.

Mobiconf Karkow 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QOxEuQYpHo

Lightweight Android lifecycle annotations

In this talk I will demonstrate how to create reusable components that can be applied on an ad hoc basis to activities and fragments, bypassing Androids restrictive inheritance model, allowing the implementation of cross cutting concerns (such as ads and analytics) without polluting your code base

Java2Days Sofia 2015
Mobiconf Krakow 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1t0-iK8LxU
Londroid @Codenode 2015

Preventing Analytics and Ads from polluting your codebase

The need for monetization is an unavoidable fact in today's mobile industry. Key to achieving that is the need for user behaviour analytics and, in many cases, in-app native advertising. More often than not though, these needs end up producing spaghetti code that is mixed in with business logic code that hinders maintenance and feature development.

Droidcon Thessaloniki 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtH7utBVQxY
Devoxx Krakow 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A12dfb1uj1U
Droidcon Montreal 2015

How we Build Rock-solid Apps and Keep 100M+ Users Happy at Shazam

Shazam is a very popular audio recognition app. It is installed on 100M+ Android devices and it’s growing rapidly. In this talk, we would like to address how we have made our releases schedule faster, more predictable and with more features by using BDD and automation testing. We will demonstrate how that can be done without slowing down or hindering the development process and why our developers actually find writing tests is fun. Finally, we will look at how our testing strategy has translated to our testing framework and hardware infrastructure.

QCon London 2015: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/mobile-shazam/
Droidcon London 2014

Where are all the senior people?

From my experience as an interviewer, a trend has become apparent while recruiting for mobile engineers. It is getting exceedingly difficult to find senior people with a strong grasp of software engineering principles.

This discussion focuses on what the current landscape looks like, potential reasons why mobile development doesn't attract many senior engineers and what can be done to remedy the situation"

London Mobile Forum 2014

Introducing Gwen: BDD on Android done right

Gwen is a tiny library that facilitates the creation of clean, reusable and maintainable acceptance tests via the creation of a Domain Specific Language which describes the app under test. This live coding session will demonstrate how to create a new acceptance test suite from scratch and introduce concepts like a proper domain model, specification vs implementation and why they such things important when dealing with any platform.

LiveCode Android London 2013