Udacity Londroid

Constantly learning and improving your Android skills is one of the most important parts of being a developer, so we are really excited to have Udacity here to give us an insight into how they approach learning.

As a beginner this will help you get underway becoming an awesome Android dev, and if you are a little more knowledgable, it will help you become a better teacher and gain more understanding about your juniors.
This is definitely a Londroid for everyone!

There should be some free swag too :)

Schedule:

6:00pm - Open, arrivals, meet & greet

6.30pm - Hello Everyone!

6:45pm - Spilling the (Jumping) Beans - Sebastiano Poggi from Novoda

7:15pm - Udacity Android Nanodegree & the story of a Udacity Student - Alvaro Sanmartin from Udacity

7.45pm - Drinks Networking @ Skills Matter with Free Beer and Pizza!

Abstract: What is a Nanodegree? It is an online training program co-created between Google and Udacity that helps Android professionals and students level up their skills and build their own apps portfolio with interesting projects.Udacity Android Nanodegree lets you build functional, high-performance apps and experiences across multiple Android devices and environments ( phone, tablet, wearables, car & TV). Students also extend a core-app experience leveraging APIs for Google's popular services (Location, Maps, Analytics, Advertising and Identity) and learn how to test, productionize, and publish high-quality apps into the Google Play store.

Speaker: Alvaro Sanmartin

Alvaro Sanmartín, director of Growth in Europe, and one of the graduated Udacity students will explain what is the learning path that students follow @Udacity, as well as the projects involved in this online training program.

Abstract: Have you ever seen a really nice animation or effect in an app, and thought "that's really cool, I wonder how they do it"? Sebastiano had that exact same moment when he first saw Google's Hangouts. It used to feature a loading indicator that is composed of three dots, that jump up in a wave. It's a really nifty small animation that he instantly grew fond of, to the point of thinking he should replicate it. Then he forgot about it all. Fast forward, April Fool's is getting close, and Sebastiano wants to release a joke library. Unlike most joke libraries, he likes putting some really cool small thing in there to make them worth looking into. What started as an April Fool's joke library, grew into the semi-serious (if not fully serious!) project that JumpingBeans is today. This short talk will show how Sebastiano reverse-engineered the animation, and how he got to implement it in Android in what he reckons is the first example of open source animated Span.

Speaker: Sebastiano Poggi

Emerging from the foggy plains of northern Italy, where he left his job at a wearables startup, Sebastiano moved to London aiming to put his curls at the service of great Android apps. Regularly speaking at conferences and blogging got him into the Google Developer Expert programme in 2014. Now he spends his time obsessing over UI and UX details while coding some rather cool apps at Novoda.