Meetup at Spotify! Testing and Android bugs

On a cold and rainy night in December, 80+ brave Android developers journeyed to Spotify headquarters for the last NY Android Developers Meetup of the year. They were rewarded with 42 boxes of hot pizza, a fridge full of beer, and in-depth talks from Spotify’s top Android developers, Sean Kenny and Erik Hellman.

Kevin Galligan, Touchlab president/meetup organizer welcomed the group with opening remarks. He delivered exciting news about Droidcon Montreal, the first ever Droidcon to launch in Canada! We will most likely also throw a meetup drinkup party after Christmas, so stay tuned for updates via email!

Brian Christensen, who also spoke at Droidcon NYC, then greeted the group and told the story of how he started at Spotify before we kicked off talks.

Sean Kenny went through Spotify’s testing methodology. He took the group though the various testing levels, covered crash reporting, and showed how they’ve improved over time to create a more stable and robust application. He noted that even though there’s more code contributors than ever, there’s been significantly less crashes over the years due to extensive testing. Sean’s slides can be found here.

Erik Hellman, luckily in New York for the week, gave his talk about Android bugs that are actually features. For example, he talked about how binding services and life cycles were unknown “gotchas!” His presentation slides can be found here.

After the talks were done, Kevin and I conducted a speedy raffle of Erik’s book, Spotify t-shirts, and moleskin notebooks. If you missed the meetup, you can watch the recording on LiveStream (password: djkhfwoeu4938).

Thanks to everyone who braved the rain, and Sean/Brian at Spotify for hosting and surpassing all sponsors for number of pizza pies ordered. (We unfortunately didn’t finish all 42 boxes of pizza, but it was a valiant group effort.)

Until next time,
Olivia Lin
Operations, Touchlab
NY Android Developers Meetup & Droidcon NYC Co-organizer