The Road to Droidcon NYC 2018

(Crosspost from medium.com/@kpgalligan)

It’s a little hard to believe, but this will be year #5 for Droidcon NYC. I’m super biased, but as great as every year has been, the year after seems to be a huge leveling up in terms of event and content quality.

That means this year needs to be ridiculous. It’s the 5 year, right?

This is a community conference, which means the content comes from the community. We’ve had a lot of great submissions so far, but it’s time to get the word out and make a big push to the end of CFP.

CFP Ends June 10th

That means we’ve got a couple weeks to get those submissions in. If you’ve submitted in the past, you’ve had the pleasure of experiencing my hand-rolled web system. No more! We’re using sessionize this year, which should be better for everybody:

Submit your talk(s) here

Topics

Every year we get requests for topics of interest and some guidance for how to submit. The real answer is “whatever the committee votes on”, and what *I* think is interesting is not always what *they* think is interesting, but I’ll make some guesses for 2018.

The good part about timing for Droidcon NYC is we get the fresh topics right after I/O. You can submit anything you want, but there are always a few big themes.

Multiplatform

There have always been a few talks about React Native (or whatever), but this year “multiplatform” has hit the mainstream (or at least people’s desire to talk about it at a native developer conference). We expect several talks, possibly a 1 day track on the topic. Most likely to be of interest are Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, or React Native. General topics may also be of interest.

Just FYI, the Droidcon NYC app will be updated this year to Kotlin Multiplatform using SQLDelight and whatever other libraries are functional by late August.

Android Things

Android Things is at 1.0! Probably a good topic.

Jetpack

A huge pile of things were released and/or rebranded under Jetpack. Clearly lots of stuff in there to talk about.

Android P

There’s also a whole new Android release to talk about.

Machine Learning

This thing. TBH, I need to learn about this more. May attend talk.

Kotlin

Kotlin was the big news last year, but we’ve had a year to absorb it and release a bunch of new libraries. In that year, Kotlin has been embraced to the point that it’s weird to see a Java slide at an Android event. Probably lots of talks around actually implementing it.

All the other stuff…

Implemented an instant app in production? Using voice assistant stuff? VR/AR? There’s a lot of stuff going on.

If you have ideas for topics you’d like to hear about, please leave a comment (or tweet)

General Guidance

Droidcon NYC has generally leaned toward more advanced or “deep dive” types of talks, but there will be content for a range of experience levels. If you are interested in a specific topic, I’d personally suggest creating multiple submissions, with different levels experience and specificity.

For any topic that is very popular, there will likely be several similar submissions. Last year, for example, had several “Intro to Kotlin” submissions. We’re only likely to pick one, so again, multiple submissions is the best bet.

As for how to write a submission, there are a lot of great resources online about this. My only real advice is that there are generally hundreds of submissions, so a catchy title and shorter description will probably work better. The voting process is a lot of work (and much thanks to the selection committee for their efforts).

A Note on Keynotes

Every year roughly 0 to 2 people submit talks specifically designated as “keynote”. If this is something you’d like to submit for, I highly encourage that you do. Just please put that in your title. As in “Keynote: Android in 2028” or “Keynote: Android S should be Stroopwafel!” We will likely go back to keynotes on both mornings, and possibly something end of day as well, so we will have multiple slots to fill.

Brooklyn!

This year will be in Brooklyn. Greenpoint, specifically, which might sound odd if you’re somewhat familiar with NYC, but if you’ve been in Greenpoint in the last few years, it’s not weird at all. Brooklyn in general and Greenpoint in particular has changed dramatically over the last few years. It is a major part of the NYC tech ecosystem. Plus there’s a big parking lot for food trucks.

Talk Selection

The talk selection committee details will be solidified in the near future. We expect to have 8–10 folks voting on submissions, with notifications going out 2 weeks after CFP ends.

Good Luck! See you in August!

And of course…

Touchlab is hiring. Super cool things happening!