Android February Meetup

A big thanks to Transit for the venue!

Join us for our first Meetup of 2024 on Wednesday, February 21st. We will talk about Android more specifically Compose, architecture and Tensorflow.

5333 casgrain, bureau 803, Montréal, H2T 1X3

Speakers:

• Etienne Caron – GDE and Consultant
• Samuel Dionne – Android developer@Transit
• Nav Singh – Senior Mobile Software Engineer @Manuvie

We will explore the library called Circuit from the developers of Slack and see what it means to use Compose beyond the UI layer.

I recently worked on updating a version of the SDK. While the SDK has been migrated to Kotlin, it still uses Java internally.

Following the SDK update and removing the nullability, everything seems to be working fine. There is however a crash as indicated by the following stacktrace:

java.lang.NullPointerException: Parameter specified as non-null is null: method com.*.*.viewmodels.ViewModel$1.onSuccess, parameter result

Therefore, in this talk, we will cover the generics in Kotlin, as well as the upper bound on its type system.

April flutter meetup (in-person)

Flutter is a fast-growing framework. Many companies and start-ups use or already migrated to Flutter for its fast development and performance.

Join us for a second full fluter event in Montreal. Whether you’re a flutter developer, assessing, or curious about flutter, you can join our in-person event in Montreal. This is the best moment to find and get to know Flutter developers and the companies that use Flutter in their products.

Speakers:

• Ali Yazdi – Flutter developer and open-source contributor
• Jhin Lee – Full-Stack Developer@Unity
• Samuel Dionne – Android developer@Transit

Subject: state management in the Flutter application

In this event, we are going to talk about state management in the Flutter application. If you have experience in any state management, be prepared to talk about that at the event. We’re going to present why you would want to use a state management solution and two options we worked with: BLOC and RiverPod

RiverPod state management

by Jhin Lee

Compose Camp

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:

DevFest 2022 in-Person

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.

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!

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.

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

February MeetUp – Online

Thursday, February 25th, 2021

For this event, we will be using remo  https://live.remo.co/e/gdg-montreal-february-meetup

Schedule:

• 18:20 Welcome!
• 18:30 The D-KMP Architecture: Declarative UIs + Kotlin MultiPlatform + MVI pattern by Daniele Baroncelli
• 19:15 Break (time to get another coffee / beer / etc.)
• 19:30 Custom Lint Rules by Boris Dubois

The D-KMP Architecture: Declarative UIs + Kotlin MultiPlatform + MVI pattern

by Daniele Baroncelli

Year 2020 has not only been the year of the pandemic, but also the year which set the division between “The Past” and “The Future” in apps development. With JetpackCompose and Kotlin MultiPlatform reaching “Alpha” stage in August 2020, The Future will already start in 2021, the year where both technologies will reach “Stable” stage.

The Future is a clean cut from the The Past, as “MultiPlatform” will become the preferred choice. We will see many platform-specific technologies (LiveData, RxJava, Dagger, Retrofit, Room, etc.) losing their centrality, replaced by KMP technologies such as StateFlow, Coroutines, Ktor, Serialization, SqlDelight, etc.

In this talk I will present the D-KMP architecture which is based on the 3 pillars:
– DeclarativeUIs (JetpackCompose on Android, SwiftUI on iOS, Kotlin/React on Web)
– Kotlin MultiPlatform (KMP)
– MVI pattern.

Bio

I am a mobile architect (client/server), with over 10 years experience. I started Android development in 2009 and iOS development in 2015. I am also one of the early Golang adopters, starting in 2013.

I have architected the highest-rated travel app in Europe (called Trenìt!), which has 4.8 stars on both Android and iOS, out of over 110,000 reviews.

I have historically focused on “thin” client architectures, with most logic residing on the webservices. I am now envisioning a future of “rich” client architectures, thanks to declarative UIs and Kotlin MultiPlatform.

Custom Lint Rules

by Boris Dubois, Transit

Custom lint rules or how to enforce your code style to your coworkers without them knowing 🙂

DevFest Montreal 2020

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/

GDG Monctorontreal!

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020

We’re teaming up with GDG Moncton and GDG Montreal for virtual Android talks by speakers from across the east coast, join us in welcoming Phil Shadlyn and our very own Samuel Dionne for two outstanding talks on the latest Android tech!

The event will be hosted on Remo here:
https://live.remo.co/e/gdg-monctorontreal

To check if your computer is ready for participation, please run the Remo System Check: https://remo.co/mic-cam-test/

Join us on September 23rd to talk about

• Kotlin Contracts
• Dagger and Hilt
• and Web Components.

What’s the Deal with Kotlin Contracts?

by Phil Shadlyn

Are you tired of arguing with the Kotlin compiler when it insists on telling you a value could be null, even though you know it won’t be? Me too. Enter Kotlin Contracts, a new feature that allows us to better inform the compiler of our code’s behaviour, so it can make better decisions and allow us to write more concise, readable code. Join us and we’ll talk about: – Why we should be interested in Kotlin Contracts, and what problems they solve for us; – How to use contracts in your code; – Where are contracts are currently being used in the Kotlin standard library; – How far you can go with them, and what limitations they have.

Using a dagger is safer from the hilt

by Samuel Dionne

Using a dagger is safer from the hilt We know by now that we should be using dependency injection in our projects, but Dagger is still really hard to master and painful to setup. The Android team decided to give us a handle so we don’t cut ourselves too badly. We’ll cover the following: – 10 thousand feet overview of dependency injection – Why use Hilt over Dagger – New tools in Android Studio 4.1 – What happened when we migrated Transit App from Dagger to Hilt.

uilding the Modern Web with Web Components

by Simon Gauvin

The browser technology behind the web has come a long way since the days of hyperlinks and HTML. Referred today as the “web platform” developers now have a rich set of tools to build enterprise-grade applications for both desktop and mobile. The promise of “write once run anywhere” has moved closer to reality with the ability of developers to dynamically define their own HTML tags. Combined with CSS styling and JavaScript code Web Components completes the missing parts of the browser to allow for true component-based development of applications. In this talk we will explain what a Web Component is, how it is used to build everything from a button to an app, and review modern tooling and UX libraries allowing you to build your next multi-platform project.

Android 11 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.

May MeetUp – Online

Wednesday, May 27th, 2020

The meetup will be held online!

Join here : https://meet.google.com/xqv-dhwh-hyv

Schedule:

• 18:20 Welcome!
• 18:30 Don’t Forget to Test Your Flutter Code par Boris-Wilfried Nyasse 🇫🇷
• 19:15 Break (time to get another coffee / beer / etc.)
• 19:30 Design Thinking, how to make better apps quickly by François Légaré

Don’t Forget to Test Your Flutter Code

NB : 🇫🇷 this talk will be in French 🇫🇷

par Boris-Wilfried Nyasse

Testing is one of the most important phases of app development. You can’t build a high-quality app without testing it. The testing process requires precise planning and execution, but it’s also the most time-consuming part of development.

The Flutter framework provides comprehensive support for Flutter automated testing. Although Flutter is gaining traction, it can easily obscure the beauty of the Dart platform and the way developers can easily test their code.

In this session, we will look at how to build and automate your Flutter app testing.

Bio

Currently working as VP of Engineering for Stack Labs Canada (a consulting company
specialized in architecture and development of cloud solution),

I am a passionate Developer & Cloud/DevOps Architect, and above all passionate about tech, languages, infrastructure, and automation. I enjoy my journey to work with customer Technical leads, client executives and partners to manage and deliver successful migrations to Google Cloud solutions.

I enjoy my journey to ensure that the engineering trains run on time by creating an ideal environment for passionate people. My goal is just to inspire others to continuously improve and raise their standards at all levels of the team : follow best practices of software development. From the code analysis, testing and CI/CD knowledge.

Former founder and co-organizer of the Flutter Toulouse Meetup, it is fun to share my passion for Dart & Flutter. I’ve provided some talks to GDG and DevFest event ( Toulouse, Montpellier, London ).

Design Thinking, how to make better apps quickly in a post covid world

by François Légaré, Bell

We will review multiple tools used to create products that are aligned with customer needs. From ideation tools to root cause problem analysis, this talk will help you and your team build a backlog that is fully aligned and prioritized in a quick iterative format (+/- 5 days from problems analysis to conception).

Bio

Holder of an engineering degree in information technology and a DEC in computer science, and more recently a MBA François Légaré work in the IT field since 1998. He was a programmer analyst and system architect, team lead in J2EE, web/mobile developers and trainer and now act act as a senior solutions engineer combining AI, AR/VR and various cloud and IoT solutions to increase benefits for entreprise clients. He also teach and give conferences on various IT related topics. He is also involved in the IT community of Montreal participating and organizing various IT related events.

His main strengths are innovation, creativity, communication, excellent comprehension of strategic business issues, the ability to lead complex projects and delivery team.

February MeetUp #2

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020

The meetup will be held at Mirego!

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

Schedule:

• 18:00 Socializing!
• 18:30 Kotlin Multiplateforme par Nicolas Presseault et Martin Gagnon 🇫🇷
• 19:15 Break
• 19:30 Performance tweaks for Android Studio and Gradle by Samuel Dionne

Sponsors

Kotlin multiplateforme

NB : 🇫🇷 this talk will be in French 🇫🇷

par Nicolas Presseault et Martin Gagnon, Mirego

Introduction à Kotlin multiplateforme. Nous allons évoquer les principales raisons qui font en sorte que Kotlin multiplateforme a été le choix logique pour le développement de nos nouveaux projets multiplateformes.

Nous survolerons les principales différences du développement multiplateforme en kotlin (kotlin native et JS) versus le développement sur la JVM et les outils qui sont mis à notre disposition.

Bio

Martin Gagnon, Directeur, développement mobile

Avant de cofonder Mirego, Martin a travaillé comme développeur de logiciels et chef d’équipe chez Copernic. Chez Mirego, il met son expertise en R&D, en développement mobile, Web et Cloud au profit de nos clients afin de concevoir pour eux les meilleurs produits numériques. À titre de Directeur, développement mobile, il est responsable de l’amélioration continue de l’équipe mobile et de la mise en place de processus et d’outils pour livrer des produits remarquables. Il chapeaute aussi la formation de l’équipe mobile et son développement continu.

Nicolas Presseault, Développeur Android

Développeur chez Mirego depuis 7 ans, Nicolas a travaillé sur plusieurs projets mobile multiplateforme, se consacrant principalement au développement Android. Il a principalement travaillé sur des projets multiplateforme (Android / iOS) avec la technologie de J2Objc mais découvre tranquillement l’attrait pour Kotlin multiplateforme.”

Performance tweaks for Android Studio and Gradle

by Samuel Dionne, Transit

Android Studio is an awesome tool for Android development, but it may be sluggish at times. We’ll explore some of the way you can tweak it to make it faster. AS is not the only culprit when it comes to performance. Gradle builds are sometime, nay, always slow but there are some parameters we can use to improve its performance. When everything else fails, raw power does does it.