There is a long time since I haven´t written anything at this blog and yes, I feel a bit guilty for caring that less.

So probably today is a good day to make a postmortem or something similar. Let´s say “Post mortem” when we want to think in learnt lessons from the past and how it was useful to us.

Overview

As a software engineer, focused on quality software is important to recycle my knowledge as soon as something new comes around. Android launches a new OS every year with new and very exciting features per se. This means to me, as a software engineer specialised on this platform, I should learn as fast as I can, to reflect as good as I can the better features of a platform which is constantly evolving and recycling itself.

What has been useful to me for this?

I am glad, certainly the are a big amount of conferences and meetups everyone can join nowadays, and the big and amazing community of Android we have. For instance this year I went for the first time to Google IO 2017, an awesome event carefully crafted by Google. There I met with friends and new interesting people. It has been an amazing opportunity to learn new things and look up how Google creates a proper scenario for us to feel comfortable with all news. Also this year, I had the opportunity to enjoy and participate for a first time as speaker, concretely at Freakend Mobile 2017, an amazing conference which mixed best of both iOS and Android worlds, carefully crafted by Jorge Barroso (no presentation needed). I did a short speech about 12’ long, based on this topic: From Junior to Experienced in few years, as can be noticed, based on my own experience, being opinionated, and talking about past experiences, what I learnt, what I liked, what in my humble opinion could help to progress successfully in a mobile career when you start from scratch.

Being my first talk, I can say I honestly could make it much better, but well, always there is time for beginners, don´t you think? After Freakend, I really felt I could do my presentations better and I had time to improve it a lot. Therefore I decided to try at the most popular meetup of Android development in London, this is called “Londroid”, better said, at Londroid April. I took advantage of my first talk at Freakend Mobile to try to advance to a new more technical topic, blending both. Probably big different topics, as career advance is against image recognition with Augmented reality in Android. But I really enjoyed the second part and a friend of mine gave me a cool idea after leaving for beers when Londroid was finished, to purpose a tech talk based on the second half, thanks David González (no presentation needed either) I really appreciate it!

More challenges

I mentioned before, I went this year to Google IO, and there I took another risky decision… to apply for a new conference. Honestly, this is going to be very challenging I told to myself. I tried in Codemotion Spain and Droidcon London. A very similar topic than Londroid, but hopefully more interesting for everyone.

What happened?

I have failed and I have got a really big surprise, I was not expecting at all to be chosen at any of those conferences. And I partially failed also at that assumption. I have got my idea chosen for Droidcon UK.

Conclusions

I can feel something can be very difficult, but better to don´t create our own barrier. Now I have almost two months to prepare an interesting talk. Crossed fingers, hard work and make myself ready for people from all around Europe. Actually reading a very interesting book a friend of mine, and awesome engineer and speaker (no presentation needed really), recommended me called “Confessions of a Public Speaker” by Scott Berkun, thanks Luis G. Valle. I am extremely thrilled about this amazing opportunity. The learning curve never stops in one way or one another, this is what I love about my profession.