More 2014 Meetups! Mark Murphy and Ray Ryan

If you’ve been to our meetups, you know that we always bring the best topics and speakers to our awesome Android community here in New York. For March, Mark Murphy, the founder of CommonsWare and author of The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development, joined us at StackExchange’s new office. Anyone who knows anything about Android should know about Mark Murphy (if you don’t, we’d be worried). He’s a “developer rockstar ninja” with a StackOverflow score of 388,081 (that quote is from Kevin) and speaks at conferences and workshops internationally.

Mark gave a great presentation on what the Android ecosystem will look like now that we’ve reached our first billion Android users. The talk was entertaining and witty. Mark’s resonating question at the end, “What will you do for the next billion?” left all of our developers and meetup attendees in a pensive, reflective mood. Many thanks to Paula from Booker for pizza sponsorship, and to Ana from StackExchange for beverages and hosting us in their impeccably designed new office space.

For May, our generous sponsors American Express flew Ray Ryan out for us! Ray is a senior software citizen at Square, where he focuses on making Android development tolerable. He talked about Dagger, Flow and Mortar, which are open source libraries that form the backbone of Square’s flagship Register app. Countless hands were raised for the Q&A; we hope everyone learned from Ray’s comprehensive presentation. Many thanks to Ray, and Michael at American Express for flying Ray out, providing the spacious auditorium, and sponsoring drinks..

We hope everyone enjoyed the talks and afterparty. Here’s to many more knowledgeable speakers and empowering Android talks in the future!

–Olivia
Operations, Touchlab
Co-organizer, NY Android Developers Meetup