Our very own Dave Redding speaking at the University of Scranton

At Touchlab we’re not shy about telling everyone how amazing our team is and we just love it when other organizations recognize how great our people are. Today (November 19th, 2013) Dave Redding, one of our Senior Android Developers, is speaking to the Association for Computing Machinery at his alma mater, the University of Scranton about his ongoing experience with startups, programming and mobile in NYC.

We pulled Dave away from his screen for a few minutes to find out a little more about this talk.

So how’d you end up with this speaking gig?

My buddy Joe still works at the university and the professor in charge of ACM was looking for presenters. Joe suggested me and the professor remembered me and reached out (Dave did his undergrad and grad work there and even taught Computer Literacy for two years).

Can you give us a few highlights from the talk?

I’m going to talk to them about my journey from university to now. My first job was as the lead Android Developer building the USPS app in a big organization. After that experience I realized that I had ambitions of greater things and found Touchlab on Stack Overflow. They were a smaller, tight knit firm where I wouldn’t get lost in the clutter. I wanted to be a better programmer, this was the place to do that.

What do you hope the students are going to get from it?

That programming for Android doesn’t have to be difficult if you know what you’re doing. There are ways to solve the big problems and you can reach out to the open source community for help with those like syncing, fragmentation, user experience.

Give one piece of advice to today’s undergrads that you wish you knew back then.

Be more active in the open source community. As an undergrad I didn’t feel I was qualified and I was scared to jump in. The world is not filled with bad people, people are wiling to help you if you just expose yourself a little bit.