Better App Architecture + Firebase

We're back with two technical talks for this month, at Shopify's office.

◙ Upgrade to Architect: Skills to scale your impact, Yervant Kulbashian

The popular image of a ‘Software Architect’ carries connotations of respect, expertise, and sometimes pompousness. But in practice, regular programming and software architecture are not that different. ‘Architecture’ is just how you manage code for the long term.

If you’re soon to lead a large Android project (or already are), I’ll present a few tips to help you create a project that survives scaling-up and its inevitable onslaught of feature requests. We’ll delve into S.O.L.I.D. principles and how they apply to Android, using a live code demo.

Although some Android experience is useful for getting the most out of this talk, most of it is applicable to any programmer that wants to code at scale, in any language.

◙ Firebase Notifications, Eric Fung

With only a minimum of coding, Firebase provides your Android app with simple push notifications and collects analytics to measure user engagement. However, if you need to customize the notifications or their behaviour, you need to implement everything yourself.

For a recent Android news app I developed, I wanted to use push messaging to inform users when new articles were published. This talk will describe how I used Firebase tools (Notifications, Cloud Messaging, Remote Config and Analytics) to implement custom notifications and analytics to track their performance.

This is appropriate for Android developers who are interested in implementing push notifications with Firebase to re-engage their users. No prior experience with Firebase is needed.

Eric began his career in the embedded world, writing cryptographic toolkits. Since 2010, he has been working in mobile, and is currently employed as an Android developer at Shopify. He has built a backend to deliver notifications to multiple mobile platforms, and has tinkered with Android cloud messaging technologies from C2DM onwards.