Mobile Tea #01 - Mobile Development Unplugged

Wednesday, March 6th, the MobileTea community will present the 1st edition of MobileTea Seattle hosted at Dropbox in downtown Seattle.

This event consists of learning and networking for anyone interested in mobile technologies

Participation is “free as in beer” and consists of interspersed talks with networking sessions that include live music and hors d'oeuvres.

Presentations will vary from 20 to 30 minutes and networking breaks will vary from 15 to 30 minutes. Be prepared for an informal atmosphere, great food, and drink. Bring your passion for all things development and innovation, we look forward to meeting you!

We'll also be giving away two tickets to Droidcon Boston. Join us!

Registrations open at 6:00 PM, the event starts at 6:30 PM.

All attendees, speakers, etc., are expected to abide by the Code of Conduct (http://mobiletea.net/code-of-conduct/)

---------

Agenda:

🎵Live Music From Mariu5 - https://www.mixcloud.com/mariushamilton/

🔸Networking Session 1 - Live Music - Food & Drink

🔹Intro

🔺 "App Camp for Girls" - Aleen Simms (https://twitter.com/Aleen)
App Camp for Girls seeks to address the gender imbalance in technology professions by inspiring middle-school age girls, transgender, and gender nonconforming youth with a broad introduction to the process of app development in a week of fun and learning. Let’s talk more about what App Camp does and how you can become more involved, starting with this presentation!

🔺"Color Contrast" - Liz Marley
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-marley-codeknitter/)

How much text contrast is enough? Instead of quibbling over shades of gray, we can use an equation to evaluate relative luminance and ensure more of our users can experience our content. An overview of the science behind the equation, and an exploration of some edge cases.

Liz's Bio:
Liz is a 13-year veteran of the Omni Group. She has also organized App Camp for Girls in Seattle several times. She speaks at conferences as an excuse to learn new things and hang out with other macOS and iOS developers. She hasn't written any books or hosted any podcasts...yet.

🔸Networking Session 2 - Live Music - Food & Drink

🔺"Who Benefits When Tech Becomes A Commodity?" - Eric Menninga
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-menninga-3716bb1/)

Mirriam-Webster: Commodification refers to a good or service becoming indistinguishable from similar products.

In the 80s, when I was in high school and college, there was a Cambrian explosion of personal computer hardware, operating systems, applications, file formats, etc. Evolution has progressed rapidly in the past 35 years, and most of that diversity has gone extinct. Our industry is "red in tooth and claw", with little remaining of past dinosaurs outside of a few fossils.

I'll talk about my experiences working on software for big companies, and some different strategies for surviving the competitive landscape we inhabit.

Eric's Bio:
25 years of experience programming complex software for Macintosh, iOS, Android, and Windows PCs. Object-oriented design and methodologies using COM architectures. Developing back-end efficient architectures and customer-facing features to optimize complex publishing tasks

🔺"How mobile and front-end design can supercharge AI" - Craig Martell
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/craighmartell/)

How can we use machine intelligence to make better business decisions?

Craig's Bio:
Craig Martell is the Head of Machine Intelligence @ Dropbox. Prior to joining Dropbox, he leads a number of AI teams and initiatives at LinkedIn, including the development of the LinkedIn AI Academy. Before LinkedIn, Craig was a tenured computer science professor at the Naval Postgraduate School specializing in natural-language processing (NLP). He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and is the co-author of the MIT Press book Great Principles of Computing.
Hot off the presses!

🔸Networking Session 3 - Live Music - Food & Drink