Thoughts on DevFest Brasil

Last Friday I went to DevFest Brasil (in Portuguese). Since Google won’t promote Google Developer Day anymore, the Google Developer Groups (former GTUG, Google Technology User Groups) are promoting DevFest. So, these events, instead of being backed up by a big company, are from community to community. I recognize the hassle that is promoting these, and I think the people from GDG-SP (São Paulo), GDG-BH (Belo Horizonte) and GDG-GO (Goiás) did a great job nonetheless.

The critics

When I submitted my talk, there was a field to put a summary of the talk. I thought it would be online (as every talk in every event), but no, they just put the title in a calendar. So, a lot of people went to my talk having no idea what it was about. Is it my fault for not using a better title? Yes, but I would put a straightforward title if I knew the summary wouldn’t be used.

Googlers

Renato Mangini talk was very nice. He skimmed on several HTML5 topics pointing to other talks that would dig deeper afterwards.

Neto Marin talked about Android. For me, it wasn’t a very nice talk. He rushed through it, he put way more slides than the time slot allowed and, in fact, I could read the slides without him explaining.

Lastly, Jeremy Walker’s codelab wasn’t in fact a codelab. He showed a bunch of code, but we didn’t develop anything together. The organization asked us to bring notebooks to codelabs, it wasn’t necessary. It was very like my own talk, when I showed some code, but we didn’t develop anything together (in my case, it was impossible due to time constraints).

Non-googlers

I watched only one talk from a non-googler: “Desenvolvendo interfaces total-flex” (Developing total-flex interfaces) by Daniel Filho. It was the last talk before lunch, mine was first after lunch, so I left thinking “there’s no way I’ll be as cool as him.” He talked about flexible interfaces using CSS 3 and looked like he really knew the subject for years although he said he learned it for the talk.

My talk

I talked about Android internals. It was for beginners wanting to familiarize with Android source and maybe compile their own build. I started talking about Android SDK Reference Search, a Chrome extension. With it, one can starting poking the code on classes of interest while browsing documentation. Later, supposing they’re interested in digging down the rabbit hole, I explained the required setup and how to get started. Then I showed what was necessary to add an app to a build (so the app becomes a system app, such as SMS app or calendar app).

Organization

Very nice. Nice space, nice food (well, I missed coffee), talks on time, nice support for speakers, everything went fine.

Fun at the end

In the end of the day, they raffled some prizes, such as some Android courses from Globalcode, some Android themed backpacks, T-shirts and the big prize: a Samsung Galaxy Note (if I recall correctly, it was a Samsung Galaxy Note II). At first, they gave the T-shirts based on a random number generator and counting the rows and people. Later they just threw the T-shirts and people tried to catch them. I didn’t even try, several taller people in front of me, but one T-shirt bounced at the roof and fell almost in my lap, so I luckily caught one.

Conclusion

This was the first DevFest and it was worth the R$44 (approximately US$ 20). Next year I intend to participate again and submit another talk as well.

• Android