Laurence de Villers

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Compose Camp

2023-01-22 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Events, Meetup

A big thanks to Transit for the venue!

5333 casgrain, bureau 803, Montréal, H2T 1X3

We are happy to announce our Compose Camps, a workshop that will takes place over 3 evening sessions of 2 to 3 hours each. 

Date :

  • 31 January from 6 PM To 9 PM
  • 7 February from 6 PM to 9 PM
  • 13 February from 6 PM to 9 PM

Compose Camps are community-organized events focused on how to build Android apps using Jetpack Compose, where attendees get hands-on coding experience with Compose.

This event targets experienced Android developers (familiar with Kotlin and the view system) who want to learn Compose and integrate it into their existing apps. What better way to learn than through a supportive community of learners helping each other?

Hope to see you there!

#ComposeCamp

 

To register please take a free ticket on eventbrite:

There are no upcoming Events at this time.

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DevFest 2022 in-Person

2022-11-02 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Events, Meetup

In-Person Event – Saturday, November 19th at Notman House

We are happy to announce our first Devfest in person-event since the beginning of the pandemic.

DevFest is a global, community-led event series offering speaker sessions across multiple products and areas of technologies, hack-a-thons, codelabs, and more!

Join us on November 19th  for a full-day event to talk about

  • AI
  • Espresso
  • Design
  • And more!

Get a free ticket to attend the event.

  • The ticket includes food for the day!

This year, we have an incredible roster of experts coming to Montreal.

Subjects will be more varied than in prior years and we can’t wait to share with you the final agenda. Here is a sneak peek at some of the speakers and talks we have planned for you.

GDG Montreal - DevFest 2022 image

What is Vertex.ai all about?

In this talk, we’ll introduce you to Vertex.ai, an “optional-code” machine learning platform that enables you to train and deploy models on the Google Cloud Platform.

We’ll show you how to get started with Vertex.ai, train your datasets using no code, or some code, explore the most interesting parts of Vertex and finally deploy your models to production for the world to use!

 

GDG Montreal - DevFest 2022 image

Advantages of espresso tests automation how and why?

As engineers, it is good practice to maintain a healthy culture where we write both UI and unit tests. However, the biggest hurdle comes when you have to set up continuous integration; how do you ensure your tests don’t slow down builds from other pull requests hence slowing down the merge process..? What if I told you we found a tool and now run our UI tests nightly and on specific days? Join me, and let’s talk about how, why, and what tool we use.

 

GDG Montreal - DevFest 2022 image

Design for engineers: How to make your UI sizzle, or at least not embarrassing

Many development projects don’t have access to design resources so it falls on the engineers to make interfaces. This session will teach you practical tricks to improve the “feel” of your interface, decrease UX blocks, incorporate branding, and highlight resources you might be missing. As a bonus, we’ll cover a few several CSS/HTML tips to make “good design” easier to achieve.

 

Building Multi-Platform Projects with MVI Architecture

For modern applications, targeting multiple platforms has become table-stakes. That can be an insurmountable challenge for a team working on a project with limited resources. Kotlin Multiplatform is a promising solution to this problem, allowing you to target mobile platforms and the web.

The strength of Kotlin Multiplatform is that it allows you to write _native_ applications, unlike cross-platform frameworks like React-Native and Flutter. While having access to native APIs can lead to a superior user experience, you need to be careful to avoid code duplication.

We’ve decided to embrace the Kotlin multiplatform approach at my company, convinced it will help us build better quality products. And in this talk, I will show how we’ve used MVI architecture patterns to help us maximize code sharing.

Building mobile apps at scale

This talk will cover how to scale up your team and development process to serve millions of users. You’ll learn how to ship fast while maintaining a very high level of reliability, reduce tech debt while continuing to ship new features, and handle issues in production like a pro.

Whether you work for a startup or a unicorn, you’ll be able to immediately apply techniques to take your development process to the next level.

 

Inclusive Design

Naveen Nigam, the head of developer ecosystems at Google is going to talk about inclusive design.

 

 

Community Partner

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August Meetup

2022-08-17 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Uncategorized

Wednesday, August 24th, 2022

A big thanks to Mirego for the venue!

1195 Wellington, bureau 501, Montréal (QC) H3C 1W1

 

Schedule:

  • 18:30 Welcome!
  • 19:00 Building Multi-Platform Projects with MVI by Etienne Caron
  • 19:45 Break
  • 20:00 TBD

 

Building Multi-Platform Projects with MVI by Etienne Caron

by Etienne Caron

  • For modern applications, targeting multiple platforms has become table-stakes. That can be an insurmountable challenge for a team working on a project with limited resources. Kotlin Multiplatform is a promising solution to this problem, allowing you to target mobile platforms and the web.
  • The strength of Kotlin Multiplatform is that it allows you to write native applications, unlike cross-platform frameworks like React-Native and Flutter. While having access to native APIs can lead to a superior user experience, you need to be careful to avoid code duplication.
  • We’ve decided to embrace the Kotlin multiplatform approach at my company, convinced it will help us build better quality products. And in this talk, I will show how we’ve used MVI architecture patterns to help us maximize code sharing.

 

Description of the second talk will come soon!

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DevFest Montreal 2020

2020-11-11 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Events, Meetup

Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

Fo our event, we are using remo  https://live.remo.co/e/devfest-montreal-2020

 

DevFest is a global, community-led event series offering speaker sessions across multiple products and areas of technologies, hack-a-thons, codelabs, and more!

Join us on November 25th to talk about

  • Stately and Composed
  • State Management with MobX, it just works
  • And more!

We will be using remo.co as a platform to allow smaller breakout sessions and ease discussions between us all before and after the talks. Presentations will be shorter in time to allow for more questions in the split groups. So come prepared with your questions and we will do our best to answer all of them.

Please join us here : https://live.remo.co/e/devfest-montreal-2020

Stately and Composed

Level: Intermediate
Language: English

by Etienne Caron

Libraries like RxJava, LiveData and Flow have made it easy to build, observe and react to data streams. But the story sours when you try to consume those streams with a static, XML-backed UI.

Jetpack Compose is the missing puzzle piece. We’ll soon have an excellent first-party solution that will make it easy to build reactive UIs with dynamic data streams.

In this session, we will explore how Jetpack Compose empowers us to push the envelope of UI and UX interactions. We’ll learn about State management, Unidirectional Data Flow, and how Jetpack Compose keeps things efficient while reacting to changes in your application State.

Bio

Etienne Caron is part of Google’s Developer Expert program, an instructor for Caster.io, and a freelance software development consultant.

Etienne has been an active member of the Android developer community in Montreal since 2010 and regularly devotes his time to mentoring startups, developers and students in the mobile space.

https://twitter.com/kanawish

 

State Management with MobX, it just works

by Joshua maiquez de guzman

In this talk, I will cover MobX’s core principles and its practical usage. With the examples, you’ll see how intuitive and declarative MobX is when using it for your Flutter applications. Lastly, I will also share our team’s experience building an app for a startup, using MobX as its core state management tool.

Bio

Joshua is a software engineer with a passion for learning and teaching. He is a Google Developer Expert for Flutter and Dart and a Software Engineer for Betterbank, a fintech startup based in Brooklyn, New York.

Life outside work, Joshua enjoys engaging with the community through meetups, conferences, writing articles. He also enjoys reading books, solving the Rubik’s cube and recently, have been enjoying playing Among Us with friends!

https://twitter.com/joshuamdeguzman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadeguzman/

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Android 11 Meetup

2020-07-02 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Meetup | ,

Wednesday, July 15th, 2020

For our event, we are using remo.co

Join here: https://live.remo.co/e/android-11-meetups

Android 11 is just around the corner and we are excited to share with you all that we learned so far while testing some of the new features and API.

Join us on July 15th to talk about

  • IME animations
  • MotionLayout and editor
  • New development tools.

We will be trying out a new tool for this meetup to allow for smaller breakout sessions and ease discussions between us all before and after the talks. Presentations will be shorter in time to allow for more questions in the split groups. So come prepared with your questions and we will do our best to answer all of them.

Android development tools

by Prachi Durge

In this talk we will walk through some new features of Android studio 4.1/4.2 .

Bio

Prachi is an Android app developer with more than 6 years of experience.

Also has worked with cross platform technologies like Titanium, phonegap and Flutter.

She is a WTM Ambassador with GDG Baroda. She enjoys Community work and networking.

IME Animations

by Harman Bhutani

In this talk we will talk about IME Animations introduced in Android 11. It is a new set of APIs which let’s you synchronize your app’s content with the IME (input method editor, aka soft keyboard) and system bars as they animate on/off screen, making it much easier to create natural, and intuitive IME transitions.

Bio

Harman is an AI Enthusiast and Machine Learning Engineer by Profession. Currently working as a Data Scientist , also pursuing Masters in Data Science from the University of Ottawa. Before that, He worked with some of the companies such as Accenture, Google, and T-Mobile, Hum-Hain, and did his own startup during his bachelor’s as well – Techorion.

PS: My favorite food is a circle cut into triangles warped in a square i.e. pizza.

Animate views with MotionLayout

by Nav Singh

  • In this talk we will cover how Motion Layout helps us to create beautiful animations.
  • We will also cover How to use Motion Layout Editor to create/modify animations. Which is introduced in Android Studio 4.0

Requirements : ConstraintLayout version 2.0/higher and Android Studio 4.0/higher

Bio

Nav is a professional Android developer at Manuvie. He is also writing technical articles related to Android/iOS at Medium.

During his free time he loves to watch Netflix, reading books, and playing with new technologies/frameworks, etc.

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October Meetup

2019-10-17 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Meetup

Wednesday, October 23th, 2019!

We have a special meetup this month! It will be held by our sponsor onepoint!
They are providing food and drinks  🎉

606, rue Cathcart, Office 400, Montréal (Québec) H3B 1K9

Schedule:

  • 18:00 Socializing!
  • 18:30 Test-driven development in Android by Illias Kondratov
  • 19:15 Break
  • 19:30 Doze Mode and App Standby by Graeme Campbell

Sponsors

https://www.groupeonepoint.ca/

Test-driven development in Android

Level: Beginner

by Illia Kondratov

Introduction for people who never tried TDD or unit testing before, or struggle with some part of it. We’ll cover benefits, discuss best practices and see what people mean when they say “it’s better to have unit-tests here”.

Bio

7 years in Android development, 3 years in TDD

Doze Mode and App Standby

Level: Intermediate

by Graeme Campbell, Octave Group

Since Doze and App Standby were introduced in version 6.0 (Marshmallow), Android has been trying to preserve battery life by limiting the amount of processing that apps are allowed to perform when they are in the background, and when the phone is not in active use. This talk will help developers understand these limitations, and know how to work with Doze mode to provide a better user experience.

Bio

Graeme has been working as a software engineer for 15 years, and started learning the Android platform in 2012. He is currently working as a mobile developer at Octave Group, creating music and entertainment products under the brand names TouchTunes and PlayNetworks.

 

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Kotlin/Everywhere

2019-07-26 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Events, Meetup

Wednesday, August 28th, 2019!

We have a special Kotlin/Everywhere meetup.

Kotlin/Everywhere is a global series of community-led events, where developers can learn the essentials and best practices of Koltin in Android, Google Cloud Platform and multi-platform development.

 

At Hopper, 5795 Gaspe Ave #100, Montreal, QC H2S 2X3

  

Schedule:

  • 18:00 Socializing
  • 18:30 Android functional testing made easy with Kotlin by Marc-Antoine Sauvé
  • 19:00 Delegation in Kotlin by Philippe Breault
  • 19:45 Break
  • 20:00 Coroutine + Flow = MVI ❤ by Étienne Caron

Sponsors:

https://www.hopper.com/

 

Android functional testing made easy with Kotlin

Level: Intermediate

by Marc-Antoine Sauvé,  Hopper

This talk will walk you through how Hopper leveraged Kotlin to build clean DSL based functional testing that separate the “what” from the “how”.

Bio

Marc-Antoine Sauvé is a Senior mobile developer at Hopper, a Montreal startup that use Big Data to predict the price of hotels and plane tickets.

He’s a mobile enthusiast, enjoying bleeding edge technology, app architecture, functional programming, reactive programming, Swift and Kotlin.

Delegation in Kotlin

Level: Beginner

 

by Philippe Breault, American Express

Ever heard of the phrase “Prefer composition over inheritance”? One of the better patterns to achieve this is “Delegation”. And thankfully, Kotlin has built-in support for this pattern.

This talk will cover class delegation and delegated properties as a mean to make your code more readable and reusable. We’ll take a look at both approaches’ strengths, weaknesses, and when you should use them. We will also take a look at the code that is generated under the hood to discuss performance implications.

Bio

Phil is an Android engineer who has been passionate about Kotlin since way before Google officially accepted it as an official language for their mobile platform. He worked on a wide variety of Android apps for banks, newspapers, startups, television providers, and more. He currently works at American Express.

Coroutine + Flow = MVI ❤

Level: Intermediate

 

by Étienne Caron, Google Developer Expert, Shopify

Managing state in Android applications can be painful. Over the years, various architectural patterns have evolved to try and tame it: MVC, MVP, and MVVM. MVI (Model-View-Intent) is an evolution of these patterns. Thanks to Immutable State management and Unidirectional Data Flow, we can finally say goodbye to race conditions and rogue mutations. Combine the power of MVI with Kotlin Coroutines alongside the recently released Kotlin Flows library. The result? Real magic. No RxJava incantations required! In this session, you’ll learn how to build a Model-View-Intent (MVI) Android App, using both Kotlin Coroutines and Kotlin Flows. You’ll walk away understanding the core principles of this pattern, as well as its key benefits. Get ready to fall for MVI❤!.

Bio

Etienne Caron is a developer lead at Shopify, a popular Canadian e-commerce company. He is also part of Google’s Developer Expert program, and an instructor for Caster.io

Etienne has been an active member of the Android developer community in Montreal since 2010, and regularly devotes his time to mentoring startups, developers and students in the mobile space.

3D animation, procedural content generation and VR are some of his hobbies, and he loves introducing other developers to this fascinating field.

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Google I/O special event

2019-05-20 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Events, Meetup

Thursday, May 30th, 2019!

We have a special Google I/O meetup co-organized with ApplETS, a scientific student club.

We have the pleasure to have a Firebase speaker for this event!
We will provide food for the occasion!

 

 .

 

1100 Notre-Dame St W, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3 (Room A1170)

Schedule:

  • 18:00 Socializing
  • 18:30 Build and scale serverless mobile apps with Firebase and Google Cloud by Doug Stevenson
  • 19:15 Break
  • 19:30 Jetpack Compose by Étienne Caron

 

Build and scale serverless mobile apps with Firebase and Google Cloud

Level: Intermediate

by Doug Stevenson, Google Developer Advocate, Firebase team 

If your app has millions of users, you need a backend infrastructure to support its growth.  Do you want to build that infrastructure?  Of course not!  Your time is better spent focusing on the app.  In this talk, we’ll take a look at the code for a mobile app that works like a “universal translator”.  It uses Firebase and Google Cloud services and APIs.  And we’ll do it “serverless” without having to manage servers or infrastructure.  A live demo of the app will be done with audience participation – bring a phone or laptop!

Bio

Doug is a veteran engineer, experienced public speaker, and developer advocate at Google with the Firebase team.  He developed web apps before the web had “apps”, and developed for Android since the very first Android device was on the market.  In the SF bay area, he’s bootstrapped the efforts of several startups.  Outside of work, Doug follows professional ice hockey and enjoys craft beer.

Jetpack Compose

Level: Beginner

 

by Étienne Caron, Google Developer Expert, Shopify

Jetpack Compose is an unbundled toolkit designed to simplify UI development that was released at Google I/O 19. It combines a reactive programming model with the conciseness and ease of use of the Kotlin programming language.

Bio

Etienne Caron is a developer lead at Shopify, a popular Canadian e-commerce company. He is also part of Google’s Developer Expert program, and an instructor for Caster.io

Etienne has been an active member of the Android developer community in Montreal since 2010, and regularly devotes his time to mentoring startups, developers and students in the mobile space.

3D animation, procedural content generation and VR are some of his hobbies, and he loves introducing other developers to this fascinating field.

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Google I/O Extended

2019-04-15 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Events, Meetup

Vous n’avez pas réussi à avoir un billet pour le Google I/O ou vous ne voulez pas payer 1500$ USD pour y aller? Vous êtes chanceux, GDG Montreal Android et Desjardins organisent le Google I/O Extended de Montréal! En plus des deux Keynote de Google, il y aura 3 conférenciers. / If you weren’t able to get a Google I/O ticket or you don’t want to pay $US1,500 to go, you’re in luck, GDG Montreal Android and Desjardins are organizing the Montréal’s Google I/O extended! Both keynotes will be streamed live and a few speakers will also be on hand.

Au programme / Program:

  • Google I/O diffusé en direct / Google I/O LiveStream
  • Conférences / Conferences
  • Café, thé, eau, petites bouchées sucrés / Coffee, tea, water, sweet little bites
  • Une section RH pour faciliter les échanges entrent les employeurs et ceux qui recherchent un emploi, Desjardins y sera ! / An HR section to facilitate exchanges between employers and those looking for a job, Desjardins will be there!
  • Prix de présence (Liste des prix à venir) / Attendance prizes (Price list coming soon)

Diner / Lunch

Pour 10$+frais, ne cherchez pas ce que vous allez manger / For $ 10 + fees, do not look for what you are going to eat

  • un sandwich options aléatoire, végé ou sans porc / a random, veggie or pork-free sandwich
  • accompagnement aléatoire / random accompaniment
  • dessert aléatoire / random dessert

 

Programme / Schedule:

  • 9h30 Ouverture des portes / Doors openning
  • 10h15 Mot d’ouverture par Chadi Habib (Premier vice-président Technologies de l’information, Mouvement Desjardins) / Opening remarks by Chadi Habib (Executive Vice President, Information Technology, Desjardins Group)
  • 10h30 Comment mobiliser une démarche centrée utilisateur pour intégrer le talent dans une organisation ? (in French:  slides and talk) par Loïc Nunez
  • 11h15 Assistant vocal Desjardins (Ok Google, je veux parler avec Desjardins) (slides in english and talk in french) by Yannic Luyckx and Loic Legault
  • 12h00 Diner et socialisation / Lunch and networking
  • 13h00 Google Keynote
  • 14h45 Scheduling Background Work on Android (all english: slides and talk) by Alexandre Boucher
  • 15h45 Developer Keynote
  • 17h00  Mot de la fin, tirage des prix de présence et socialisation / Conclusion, attendance prices and networking
  • 18h00  Fermeture / Closing

 

Sponsors

Eventbrite - I/O Extended 2019 Montreal

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April Meetup

2019-04-09 |by Laurence de Villers | 0 Comments | Events, Meetup

Wednesday, April 24th, 2019!

We have a special meetup this month! It will be held by our sponsor Mirego!
They are providing food and drinks  🎉

1195 Wellington, bureau 401, Montréal (QC) H3C 1W1

Schedule:

  • 18:00 Socializing!
  • 18:30 Be a good citizen – Care about Android lifecycle and window size by Guillaume Bourassa
  • 19:15 Break
  • 19:30 Flutter 1.0, go or no-go by Samuel Dionne

Sponsors

https://www.mirego.com/en

Be a good citizen – Care about Android lifecycle and window size

Level: Intermediate

by Guillaume Bourassa, Mirego

Properly handling app lifecycle and window size is a challenge as old as Android itself. However, even today, many developers still don’t care enough about it, either because they don’t really understand the issue or because they think that they don’t really need to.
With Google pushing ChromeOS more and more, Android apps that work properly in a multi-window environment is more important than ever. And this requires proper lifecycle and window size understanding.

This talk will explain the different challenges of lifecycle handling, how to properly craft layouts that fits in any window size and, above all, why Android developers should care about all that. And why “my app is phone-only and locked in portrait” is not a valid reason to ignore these aspects.

Flutter 1.0, go or no-go

Level: Intermediate

by Samuel Dionne, Transit

Now that flutter have been in version 1.0 for a couple of months. Is it ready for prime-time? We’ll look at some good use cases for it and some less ideal situation. Hopefully this talk will get you excited and you might consider flutter for your next project that fits with the previous points.

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