piątek, 16 grudnia 2011

Cracow.mobi review

Last week, I visited Cracow and its first edition of conference on mobile application developement.
I was delivering a presentation about Testing in Android (in Polish). It was my second try with this presentation.
The first time was during mobilization.pl conference in Łódź, which I also coorganized last October.

The event was held in conference centre of Technical University of Kraków: Kotłownia (boiling room) and GIL .
Registration was a bit crowdy but in a minute I got nice set of Android stickers and id. Some students came to me and said they liked the presentation in mobilization.pl despite the fact that examples (maven!) did not work.

Coffee was served downstairs but the place was not labelled properly I think so not many people knew it.
There was no food provided for atendees but I was stressed with my presentation so I did not care so much.

First day of the conference had two tracks (Android and iOS) held concurrently. I stayed in Android because my presentation was the 3rd.
The Kotłownia site was really great. The screen was big, there was also LCD screen for the presenter so speaker could see his slides without turning back on the attendees.
What is more the room had 2nd level being also equiped with a small screen and few rows of chairs for attendees.

The organizers already announced some changes in the agenda due to abscence of speaker (in iOS track) and then conference started.
The conference started strong. First Android speaker was Pawel Zieba and talked about sqlite. I liked the technical content he delivered with some minor exceptions to some presentation skills (sometimes too quiet). Pawel got lot of question from the public so it means it was interesting for many.
Next presentation was eagerly awaited by me. Konrad Malawski was talking about roboguice. I know what roboguice is, I even once aimed at presenting about it but never actually got into. Konrad made really good impression on me with his presentation. Roboguice seem to make code look better. The presenter answered smoothly real-life questions so I really believe he is using not only gives presentations about it.

I will not judge my own presentation. I am still not very happy about it, maybe next conference it will go smoothly. Again I had some problems with examples and multiscreens.
I need consider showing videos instead and not switching to eclipse.

After lunch there was a presentation from Jacek Laskowski who just started learning Android, half a year ago. Jacek is a person who inspires me and many people from JUGs in Poland. It was a pleasure to see Jacek presentation skills (great voice, good interaction with audience) and I think he made the most of few lines of code he presented.

Next presentation by applicake guy was about content synchronization. Unfortunately I haven't seen that fully so I am not able to judge it.

Next day seemed to be less rich in presentations for me but started strong with very inspiring speech by Łukasz Mikulski and games in our life.
Cool transitions (I guess thanks to Mac's keynote), embedded videos and real life examples made it good start of the day.
This speaker was late so before he started there was a really cool round of "introduce yourself" with everybody having a microphone to say few sentences about themselves. There was a bunch of interesting people representing startups or portals.
The agenda was already a mess so noone know at what time next presentation starts.

I moved to GIL to see the presentation I missed during mobilization.pl from Bartłomiej Zass from Microsoft. He is proffessional speaker and he confirmed that: technical problems were solved with grace, good interaction with attendees, no difficult questions. After lunch I come back to GIL to see presentations about phonegap. Krzysztof "Procek" Ścira was natural born speaker. It was smooth and he talked about practise giving many useful tips for people who like to start the adventure with phonegap. His presentation attracted only handful of people (due to problems with agenda I guess) and he treated this group with great respect and did very good presentation with focus on practical things (project setup etc.).

To sum up, I think that event was good but there is lot of to improve for the next edition.
I liked:
+ general idea :)
+ android stickers and t-shirt (I got 3 :) - as a speaker, for answering questions and for being mobiledeveloper.pl fan :))
+ meeting few people I knew before only from twitter
+ having a chance to see Jacek Laskowski in action and spare few words with him

I did not liked:
- agenda changes, moreover poorly advertised
- speakers that did not arrive (yes I know is not the fault of organizers, we faced the same during mobilization.pl)
- afterparty on the last day, should be on Friday