Droidcon London 2012: Highlights & Jenkins talk video

As Jørgen already posted shortly after the event, our Droidcon London talk on Android & Jenkins went pretty well. Long before the talk had even started there was plenty of enthusiam as our room overflowed its capacity, and after the talk we got loads of people approaching us with questions. Incentivised by the promise of a Jenkins sticker, I’m sure!

The slides and the demo we presented are both linked from Jørgen’s post, but the organisers Skills Matter have recently posted videos for most of the sessions, including ours which you can see here.

Being busy trying to finalise our talk, I didn’t see too much of Droidcon’s first day, and I hear the keynotes weren’t of much worth anyway, but conference highlights for me included Chiu-Ki Chan’s talk on custom components. Her app — Monkey Write — is very well put together with some nice custom views, plus she has a wealth of example code on GitHub on that topic.

Sony Mobile’s Erik Hellman gave a talk on “Fast, user-friendly and power-efficient network communication” which was fairly low-level and useful regarding HTTP and networking in general. During the talk, I asked some rather pedantic questions, winning me a Sony Smart Wireless Headset pro — which pushed Valentin and me to create the Google Cloud Messaging plugin for Jenkins and the BuildWatch project…

Plus I got a chance to speak with Eric Lafortune — the creator of ProGuard — who remains very passionate about his project, over ten years after he started it. Eric gave a general talk about ProGuard, and the new commercial variant he’s been working on, DexGuard, which applies Dalvik-specific optimisations and obfuscation to Android apps.

Regarding Android and Jenkins, some people asked me if there’s a good how-to guide available for setting up the stuff we presented. While I pointed to a series of posts by CloudBees, I should probably write something myself soon…