Been skimming ADS videos… Let's ban "What's New"-prefixed talks from future Android Dev Summits. In general, half of the talks feel like they're just enumerating features of library X or product Y like I/O has become. The other half seem good, but they're always the short ones.

i like what's new talks when they are clearly noted as such

For I/O, sure. ADS is small and a bunch of full sessions are wasted on them instead of actual deep technical content that you can't get elsewhere. Skip the masturbatory keynote and put all your what's new content in there.

There's some value in repetition for critical stuff, though. Perhaps ADS could have a single "Stuff You Better Start Dealing With" session, for things that will break apps with the next year's targetSdkVersion requirement.

Yeah I'd take a what's new in framework, jetpack, and tools all right at the beginning, and then pare the keynote down to 15m. I agree it's important, I just don't want as much at the conference that was supposed to correct how little technical content is at I\O anymore.

(No comment)

Was hoping you'd speak at the summit

Same here 🤞🏾

Same here 😭

Paternity leave

As a person who participated in "what's new" talk last io, it is similarly not fun to prepare it

I'll take a what's new in tools, jetpack, and framework. Get it all out of the way in 3 sessions in a row (and make the keynote 15m). It's important content, but I felt like it dominated what could have otherwise been more focused and deep investigations and explanations.

There were 5 "what's new" videos and you are _allowing_ 3? Sure other talks have a "what's new" format but you're not mentioning those. (300 people blindly liked this tweet. :shrug: )

Except meeting people dev summit was not worth for people who expects advance stuff. Also should ban "Beyond the basics". It's hard to go beyond the basics in 20 minutes talk. Dev summit talk titles 🤦‍♂️.

As someone who gave a talk with "Beyond the basics" in the title (and probably the only such talk), I respectfully disagree. Our talk built on concepts already introduced in other talks/docs.

Probably then I am the person who watch so many talks 🤔. Irrespectively all talks in dev summit was super amazing just the titles were sometimes misleading for me. Whatever it's always fun to be in Android dev summit and definitely good learnings I will keep coming 👍.

Agreed, mostly. I think What’s New in Compose was a good one although I can’t remember if I watched their talk from I/O. This year was still fun but it did feel like some sessions were just repeats of I/O.

Absolutely. Compose content is much needed and probably one of the few exceptions to the naming generalization. It's not so much the name that's the problem, it's the content format that it encourages.

Yeah for sure. I’m pumped for Compose, I think it will simplify a lot of things if implemented right. I think more advanced topics next year would be nice. I don’t think there were any on UI testing, were there?

No, testing is still being figured out. uiautomator should work since it uses accessibility APIs, but Espresso is entirely useless since there's no (traditional) view hierarchy.

No no not for Compose with testing just UI testing in general.

Lol, first thing they mention is that it's weirdly named.

Best talk, in your opinion?

So far I've skipped the ones I think will be good and have only been scrubbing through the others at 2x. So ask me again after the weekend. The graphics one was the most interesting so far even though I won't need to use 99% of it!

Cc @GDGAhmedabad @WTMAhmedabad Good insight here!

Where's the dislike button for tweets?

...because you're ashamed of the truth or general reasons? 😛

Ashamed of the truth? Nope. Just don't like grandstanding negativity. If you don't like the free, high quality talks and content we provide, that's fine. Don't watch them and move on.

The original point of the event was because I/O talks devolved into this non-technical stuff. Now it's just become the thing it was meant to solve. Guess I'll just hold out for the third conference that inevitably fixes ADS.

These talks helps to create awareness about platform feature. Many people don't have time, or chance, to go through all the release notes. Those talks are valid, and we have several other more technical and deeper talks.

If only there was some yearly conference where they could give these talks...

Come on, you know they have different audience, price, etc. The talks are not the same, and you know that.

Price is irrelevant. I'm watching both online for free. When a bunch of the talks are teams building product X or library Y submitting just to provide overview of what they've done it's such a waste. The committee shoves the unique and technical to 20m or embarrassing 5m slots.

Price is irrelevant when you're watching online, but you must have in mind that when creating the talks, we must think about the audience that is attending the event. If we were talking about bunch of similar videos produced on studio, I would agree with you. Not for live events.

I don't know how much you're involved into committees, but they are always looking into ways to offer a better variety of topics, asking to merge talks, or to change the topic. I agree we could have more short talks, to cover more overview presentations, but they are important.

That doesn't explain the difference between 2016 and 2019. There was a committee in 2016, surely, although I suspect it had far less product and marketing involvement.

The frequency at which we see new Jetpack libraries or new major versions makes a yearly update not enough. Maybe those talks should be recorded out of ADS/IO and be hosted on YouTube as regular updates?

I was obviously not criticizing, didn't want to offend you and was not negative in any way😶 If there's something to say about ADS, that's that it's still a high quality conference. Just pointing out that there might be a little truth in what Jake's tweeted 😇

Sorry, this wasn't directed at your tweet 🙌

Maybe the Twitter devs couldn't figure out how to implement it because there's no technical talks on how to accomplish it!

Burn

Joke

Still funny

They just can't find the opposite of the heart sign 😂😂😂

Hey!😂😂😂

It is difficult man 🤣

As a Twitter dev, I know the proper channel is to file a github issue in one of your repos asking how to implement a dislike button

I'll be sure to comment "+1"

It will be an experiment for 6 months and then discarded 6 months later when the new thing happens 😂

burnnnnnnnn

Please join us in : 1. What's new on Twitter feed 2. What's new on Twitter UI patterns 3. Coding in style : static live buttons 4. High performance Twitter

Question, why you didn't talk in the ADS conference? That way we could have had an additional technical talk. Just curious.

You literally have a "What's new" talk coming up on Dec 4th. A little hypocritcal don't you think?

No. The title is a joke which should be obvious from the fact that Java 19 is 3 years away and the second half of the talk is about the death of the language whose conference is hosting the talk.

I should make the description of the talks visible! Then it really would have been more obvious.

Oh my bad. I should have know that....duh

It's like "getting started with" at droidcon :( basically talks showing the hello world of a tool/lang/stuff... I mean, it's ok if the conf is free, but I won't pay tickets for having someone reading the introduction which I can read on my own :(

I mean, not every "getting started" is bad, but a lot are focused for people which are just landed in the Android world. The bigger the conf, the "easier" the talks, since they need to please even beginner :/

Yep. And I'm not against it in general. More that I/O pushed out nearly all unique or deep technical content and ADS was designed to be a place for it. Now every year there's less and less and people submitting 40m technical abstracts are given embarrassing 5m slots.

What are your favorite ones?

As someone who isn't working full time on an Android app anymore (I know that I'm probably not the target audience of the ADS in the first place, but still) I really enjoy them. The explosion of Jetpack libraries is great, but it comes with needs like those talks.

"Deep Dive into What's Happening 9 Months From Now in __________"

Where is your talk? Was looking forward to it

You're not the target of such videos. We get it.

Whether I'm the target or not is irrelevant. ADS was created to not be the target of those videos because I/O became so watered down. Now we marginalize the content that ADS was created for to pathetic 5m slots. It's embarrassing.

Well, I think view count might be somehow misleading, since a lot of people will watch more than 30 seconds to count as a view, but they won't learn anything new. You could have added a survey at the start/end of the video to collect user feedback. I would have loved more depth.

Bold statement "people won't learn anything new"

I mean, not learn anything that is not already covered from documentation or release notes. As Jake mentioned, they are a great (maybe the best?) opportunity to teach new things, but instead what I see is really basic content.

Do you have data to back that? I get thousands of views on Medium articles per day, read rate ~35%. They're indexable and searchable. With videos I get a huge spike first and a total of 10-20k views and I guess the vast majority didn't watch more than a minute (cont)

I do get new followers when I'm in a video or conference, which gives me a bigger audience to promote articles and samples. Also, arch and arch-components samples get 5k unique visits/day. Most of our devs don't understand spoken English.

I agree! Those 5 mins videos are totally ridiculous!

There are millions of android developers and you want to set the level of all talks for the 0.1%.

0.1% of millions is approximately the number of views in your spreadsheet which includes the compose talk whose name was changed by the committee and doesn't belong in the list. Sounds like we're not reaching the 99.9% with videos from a single conference.

Whether or not you or anyone thinks this, there are other opinions, and for sure better ways to give feedback. There is a lot of work behind those talks.

AndroidReleaseNotesConf 2020 is gonna be great tho

We need a ADS just on Android themes & styling. For me it's the hardest thing to do in android.

Maybe consider giving this feedback directly to the organising team. Speaking as someone involved in ADS I know that many, many people found the talks extremely useful, and many of our colleagues put their heart and soul into making it a success.

I will try. But to be clear, I'm not claiming the content as not useful or the event as not a success. Merely that the point of ADS was an outlet for technical content that no longer fits at I/O. Now those submissions to ADS are few and far between and pared down to 20/5m slots.

I wonder if HR would like to have a chat with you again 🤣

(I never actually saw them the first time)

lucky you. I did meet them lol