Hi everyone, I'm Malvin from the Android team of Wantedly.
Last week, I had a chance of giving a talk at droidcon APAC 2020 and now I would like to talk about my overall experience of the event.
Droidcon is a series of developer conferences focusing on the Android platform and is currently the largest Android developer conferences outside of America. Speakers at droidcon events are the members of the Android developer community, including engineers from Google, Twitter, Spotify, and many other large tech companies, and they come from different parts of the world.
Droidcon events are held in many big cities across the globe like Berlin, London, San Francisco, and Singapore. However, due to the ongoing global pandemic, this year's droidcon has been moved to an online virtual event. The virtual event was split into 3 large regions based on the timezone: EMEA, Americas, and APAC. In order to participate in the online event, you could register from the droidcon website and pay any amount you want for the ticket.
Droidcon APAC was a 2-day event held on 14th to 15th of December 2020. In this event, I talked about how we at Wantedly made use of a custom Gradle plugin to simplify the process of managing build files in Android multi-module project. My session was a 40 minute session with 30 mins for talk, and 10 mins for Q&A.
As the event was held online, the event setup was quite different from a typical developer conference. As speakers, we had to present our talk using Zoom and show our slides through screen-sharing. The droidcon team had set up a dedicated Zoom meeting room for speakers that was connected to their Vimeo enterprise server and then broadcasted it live to the event attendees. Unfortunately, we weren't able to see the audience.
As for my setup, during my talk rehearsal with Wantedly team members, we noticed that we couldn't hear my voice clearly even with headphones and minimal white noises. Therefore, I decided to get a condenser microphone to ensure that the attendees can hear my voice clearly. I also decided to set up a separate light to help with the lighting as I was planning to use my MacBook's integrated webcam.
As a registered attendee, you are able to access Talque, the online event platform. In it, you can access the event's schedule, talks, and resources, participate in Q&A through Slido and interactive meeting with the speakers, and enter lucky draws.
In any given time during the event, there were up to 4 different speakers giving a talk at the same time. This is a very similar setup with a typical developer conference where you will have multiple tracks. However, since this is an online event, you can join and leave any session anytime you want by moving to another session, very much like switching a channel on your TV. This gives a very unique experience where if you have 2 interesting sessions that you want to watch at the same timeslot, you can easily switch between them, whereas you won't be able to do that in a normal developer conference.
Overall, I think the event was very successful. There were a lot of interesting talk from other Android developers, and I will definitely watch other sessions that I missed during the event. The organisers were also able to facilitate interactions between the speakers and attendees with online tools, and this make up for the lack of face to face interaction. Hopefully, 2021 will be a better year and we can attend droidcon events in person.