· 2 min read Posted by olin
October meetup: GraphQL, and braving the Live Demo
For our first meetup after Droidcon, we returned to Facebook’s spacious NY headquarters in the East Village. Kevin Schultz and Brent Watson returned as speakers and each taught our group something new. See the recorded meetup here. After Kevin’s opening remarks and Nick’s sponsor welcome on behalf of Facebook, Kevin Schultz presented an abridged version of his popular Droidcon NYC talk, “Practical GraphQL for Android.”
Facebook has used GraphQL since 2012, and Kevin walked through its usage in an Android app. If you want to try GraphQL today, Kevin suggests:
- Try Graph_i_QL in your browser – http://graphql-swapi.parseapp.com/
- Take a look at the documentation – http://graphql.org/
- Watch this video about wrapping your API with GraphQL – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBGzsb2UkeY
Brent Watson, whose team at Percolate made the switch to Kotlin over the past few months, started his talk with a poll. With a quick show of hands, he found that although many members had heard of Kotlin, few actually used it in their apps. After a quick prayer to the Live Demo Gods, Brent converted parts of the I/O app from Java to Kotlin – and it went smoothly!
Brent’s number one tip for the group was: “There is very little risk trying Kotlin in your project (much less than you’d think). Setup is simple, the tooling support is wonderful, and you’ll probably find yourself being more productive than you were writing Java code.” His presentation can be found here.
After Q&A the group continued on to Central Bar, where they were unfortunately showing the third presidential debate. Needless to say, a few of us drowned our political sorrows in beer and wine (see: photo on bottom right). Thanks to the 100+ members who came out, to Huy and Ciara for coordinating, and to Facebook, our October sponsor!
