Seetha Annamraju
Android Developer @ Velos Mobile
San Francisco, California, United States
Seetha works at Velos, a mobile dev shop in San Francisco, and has been an Android Engineer for four years. She previously worked as a software developer at Amazon Lab126, and then went on to launch her own startup in the food tech space. Through lessons learned, she started advising early stage startups on idea validation and market fit. Seetha has a Master's degree in Mobility and a Bachelor's in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She enjoys solving problems in the mobile landscape, and gives special attention to user experience and rapid prototyping.
Topics
Thinking Functional: What Kotlin Really Enables for Android Development
Kotlin is now officially supported by Google to be used for Android, but most Android devs are still writing Kotlin code like Java code. As an Android developer, if you haven’t yet embraced the functional style of Kotlin, then you’re not fully taking advantage of this cool language. Using Kotlin’s functional capabilities in Android allows you to have concise code, immutability, lambda expressions, and more! But what does this really mean for your Android applications?
I have been working with Kotlin for the past year, and have learned a lot of lessons on writing Kotlin through functional styles. To really grasp the power of Kotlin, I built an entire Android app using pure Kotlin and released it to the Play Store. In this talk, I will walk through the lessons that I’ve learned while introducing functional styles of Kotlin into my Android development, and the places in my app that benefited the most from using a functional approach. You will walk away with an understanding of the ways in which functional Kotlin enables you to be a more productive Android developer and how it improves the reliability of your Android applications. Afterwards, you will be able to start introducing functional styles of Kotlin into your own apps.
I will present specific functional concepts in Kotlin that make Android development more efficient using examples from my project.
Session duration: 30-40 minutes
Beyond the Code: Lessons on Building Your Android Minimum Viable Product
We all have great ideas, but as developers, we have a tendency to spend more time on building apps than on iterating by sitting down with users. Building an Android app before using rapid prototyping methods to really figure out your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) can be a lot of wasted time in the long run. You might end up building a beautiful app, but you still may not be able to satisfy your users. Worse, you could ruin your startup’s brand and make users disinterested in your future products.
Rapid prototyping, refining your idea, and iterating with ample user feedback will allow you to build a great app incrementally, and keep your users engaged.
I launched my own startup a few years ago, and through lessons learned, built out a method to keep prototyping and development of app in balance. With my team, I fine-tuned the art of mapping a user’s mindset and figuring out how to build prototypes to get user feedback quickly. I then took these lessons and helped other local startups to build prototypes quickly and launch their MVPs.
In this talk, you’ll learn about the steps involved in taking your idea to MVP stage while building Android apps. We will cover specific tools, methods, and processes for figuring out your idea’s market fit, engaging users, and building out your MVP.
This talk was first delivered at droidcon Berlin. The original talk is 20 min but I can present as a 20min talk or a 30-40min talk as necessary.
Droidcon Berlin, "Beyond the Code: Lessons on Building your Android Minimum Viable Product"
Spoke about lessons on taking your idea to an Android MVP.
Droidcon San Francisco, "The Journey From Legacy Code to Idiomatic Kotlin”
Spoke on the journey from legacy code, and common patterns that can be converted to idiomatic Kotlin.
Make School, "Showing Grit in the Face of Adversity"
Spoke at Make School on the value of grit in the face of adversity.
Seetha Annamraju
Android Developer @ Velos Mobile
San Francisco, California, United States