Most Active Speaker

Merab Tato Kutalia

Merab Tato Kutalia

GDE for Android | GDG Tbilisi Organizer

Tbilisi, Georgia

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Software Engineer specializing in Android. GDG organizer and International speaker(DroidCon, DevFest, OWASP). Community builder. Tech blogger, Podcast host, mentoring. Avid runner and cyclist

Awards

  • Most Active Speaker 2023

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • android
  • Software Development
  • security

Building a high performant mobile team

Tired of slow development cycles and frustrated engineers? This session delves into the secrets of building a high-performing mobile team. We'll explore:

The power of good tooling and developer experience (DX): Discover how the right tools can streamline workflows, boost efficiency, and increase developer satisfaction.
Unlocking potential through continuous measurement: Learn how to effectively measure key metrics to identify areas for improvement and track team progress.
Activating and engaging your engineers: We'll explore strategies to keep your team motivated, empowered, and constantly learning.

Compose Modifier.Node and where to find it

This session dives into the world of Modifier.Node, the new low-level API for crafting powerful custom modifiers in Compose.

- Why Modifier.Node is the go-to approach for custom modifiers (hint: performance!)

- How to leverage Modifier.Node to create your own modifiers that manipulate UI elements.

- Where to find essential resources and best practices for working with Modifier.Node.

Demystifying CTFs - manipulating Android apps

This session dives into the exciting world of Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions, specifically focusing on the challenges related to Android security and application manipulation.

We'll embark on a journey to:

Uncover the secrets of CTFs: Gain a clear understanding of CTFs, their format, and the skills they test.
Demystify Android vulnerabilities: Explore common security weaknesses found in Android apps, equipping you to identify potential risks.
Master the art of manipulation: Learn practical techniques for manipulating Android applications, including basic decompilation, analysis, and exploitation (conducted ethically within a controlled environment).

What's new in Android 14?

Android 14 is the latest version of Google's mobile operating system, and it comes with a number of new features and improvements. In this session, we will take a look at some of the most significant changes and how to implement them like performance, UI, new features and many more. Join for this enlightening session as we explore the vast possibilities and exciting developments that Android 14 brings to the world of mobile app development. Whether you are an experienced Android developer or a newcomer to the platform, this talk will provide you with valuable insights and practical knowledge to leverage the latest features and improvements offered by Android 14.

How to Build a High-Quality Software Team Without Dedicated QA Testers

In the past, software teams were required to have dedicated QA members who would manually test software before it was released. However, with the rise of automation, many teams are now able to test their software without the need for dedicated QA testers.
In this talk, I will argue that software teams still need a QA mindset, even if they don't need dedicated QA testers. I will discuss the importance of automation, integration testing, snapshot testing, and regression testing. WIll go through the various tools and how to setup it on CI/CD

Adopting Huawei Mobile Services

Common questions - what, how, why?
What are Huawei Mobile Services(HMS) and Huawei App Gallery? How to apply to our application in a most efficient way. Reviewing alternative libraries of Google Play services from HMS. Why do we need to support another platform as a business and what are the best ways to overcome this difficulty? Is it HMS or platform-agnostic 3rd party services like OpenStreetMaps? This talk briefly covers all of these topics

Audience: Mid-level developers and up

Manage Gradle version conflicts with resolution strategy

This talk aims to understand how Gradle dependency resolution works. What happens when Gradle finds conflict and what type of conflicts Gradle can define. How to resolve accidental dependency version upgrades and prevent them in the future. Bonus part: Google provides StrictVersionMatcher Gradle plugin for Firebase and Google Play services to prevent version conflicts for its libraries.

Target audience: MIddle and upper-level Android engineers.
Session duration: 25mins
Blog: https://proandroiddev.com/manage-gradle-version-conflicts-with-strategy-611ac3f6ce19

Android UI Testing & Challenges

Review of Android's UI testing framework - Espresso. How software developers can utilize it and test automation engineers as well. Scaling from the laptop to the CI environment and sharding. All of these require solid tooling support. and stability. Demonstrating the power of Android Studio and test recorder. In the end, reviewing the challenges - topics that are hard by default to test on the Android platform for test automation and manual QA.

The talk is intended for beginner and middle Android devs and test automation engineers

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CHP7OneSwA

Reverse and Inject

Android reverse engineering & malware injection. As Android engineers, we often like tinkering with the platform and for us, it is much easier to recognize some patterns while analyzing malicious code which gives us a huge advantage. This talk aims to explore the basics of reverse engineering, trending tools. How to decompile, disassemble the application, how to find malicious code snippets, and what are the possible pitfalls. Difference between static and dynamic analysis. A little bit about Smali and DEX compilers. We will have 2 live demos. First: show how to reverse engineer an application and second: at the end of the session, we will decompile APK, plant malicious code, repackage again and install it on the device to test it for educational purposes. Also will provide some introductory info on what is the Catch The Flag challenges and how we can practice.

Advanced talk, 30 and more minutes. Available demos. 45 minutes perfect

droidcon APAC - https://www.droidcon.com/media-detail?video=491027100

OWASP Tbilisi 2020 - https://youtu.be/LwEPvOx-2fU (Georgian)

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/tatocaster/reverse-and-inject-droidcon

Defensive Programming x FinTech

Defend against the impossible, because the impossible will happen!
How to avoid common errors in the code and how to master this discipline. Will try to show good and bad examples achieving safe and cleaner code. But there is another extreme part of this: overly defensive code, too much defensive code, I'm going to underline this thin line between defensive and extremely defensive code. Bonus: From my experience, most FinTech Android applications nowadays do it wrong when it comes to money so we will try to fix it

30 minutes
DevFest Tbilisi 2019, DevFest Vienna 2019, DevFest Yerevan 2019 - https://youtu.be/LLtzvEDqedM

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/tatocaster/defensive-programming-x-fintech

Mobile DevOps

Mobile DevOps is a modern approach that enables seamless application delivery from testing to production. Modern agile teams need fast iterations and short feedback loops and CI/CD is what technology enables that. The role of the mobile developer has changed, from only being able to code to be able to build and provide an engineering solution. Now developers are required to have DevOps skills in their skillset, that way it makes life easier not only for QA but for the whole team, deploying and delivering applications with a breeze.

30 minutes
ExactPro - Software Development Webinar - https://youtu.be/KUzIGjxoMO0?t=3483

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/tatocaster/mobile-devops

Mobile Teams (Should) Move Fast

This talk highlights the processes that mobile teams need to have if they want to ship apps faster. How to sustain a high cadence of rollouts and yet stay productive as a team member. Working with a large codebase requires correct tooling and discipline which some teams lack. From lint tools to CI to security measures and to developer happiness this talk highlights the main aspects of them. How individual contributors can remove bottlenecks, how to analyze errors, forming shared code style, work with git hooks, tuning IDE, and creating a working framework for the teams.

target audience: from beginner to intermediate.
duration: 30-40 minutes

Make Codebases Secure with OWASP

What are the guidelines we have to follow in order to bring more security to our apps and users? What is OWASP? What is OWASP Top 10, OWASP MSTG? What tools can we use to monitor and prevent issues even before we ship the application? How to apply those practices to CI/CD pipeline. All these questions will be covered in this talk

reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eLtlDjPjNk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Opqdva9w8

Migrate to Gradle version catalog and convention plugins

Gradle always has been hard to grasp because of multiple ways to do the same thing. With the project scaling and requirements increasing it is crucial to scale our build logic and support developers across the teams. This talk will cover how to migrate to Gradle centralized version catalogs and share some of the build logic as convention plugins. This method is adopted by AndroidX project, Now In Android, and many more.

https://speakerdeck.com/tatocaster/migrate-to-gradle-version-catalog-and-convention-plugins

Validate your Manifest

How to utilize Android Lint to validate AndroidManifest.xml for new namespace entries and many more. This talk aims to walk through the process, of creating the lint rule as a library and writing the unit tests as well. Extend the feature to the Kotlin codebase. Add CI checks and IDE support. Add auto-fix support and cover with unit tests. all in one session.

This could be a workshop too.

Composable build logic - adopting convention plugins

Gradle convention plugins are a powerful way to simplify your build scripts. They allow you to define a set of conventions for how your project should be built. This can save you a lot of time and effort, and help you to keep your build scripts clean and organized. Convention plugins are a great Standardize build process, Reduce boilerplate code and Improve code consistency. In this session we will implement most used build scripts as convention plugins.

GDG DevFest Pisa 2024 Sessionize Event

June 2024 Pisa, Italy

Android Makers by droidcon 2024 Sessionize Event

April 2024 Montrouge, France

droidcon Uganda 2023 Sessionize Event

November 2023 Kampala, Uganda

DevFest Armenia 2023 - 10th Anniversary Sessionize Event

October 2023 Yerevan, Armenia

Mobile DevOps Summit 2023 Sessionize Event

October 2023

droidcon Lisbon 2023 Sessionize Event

September 2023 Lisbon, Portugal

AndroidMakers by droidcon 2023 Sessionize Event

April 2023 Montrouge, France

DevFest Pisa 2023 Sessionize Event

April 2023 Pisa, Italy

droidcon Italy Live 2021 Sessionize Event

November 2021

droidcon APAC 2020 Sessionize Event

December 2020

Merab Tato Kutalia

GDE for Android | GDG Tbilisi Organizer

Tbilisi, Georgia

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