How time flies! I am so busy working on my clients Android application and the book about the Hudson continuous integration server that my blogging got a bit neglected. In the frenzy I did manage to work on a whole bunch of pull requests for the Maven Android Plugins upcoming releases and get involved again in AnDevCon. Yeah.. AnDevCon was a great conference earlier this year and my feedback is on the site for the upcoming AnDevCon 2 in November. And I will be there again. But let’s start with more from AnDevCon 1.
As you might know I did two presentations at AnDevCon. The first one was an introduction and a bunch of tricks for using Apache Maven and the Maven Android Plugin for building Android applications. The other one an introduction to testing Android applications in development starting with simple unit tests all the way to running the whole build with tests on a continuous integration server like Hudson. And now I got some feedback as collected by the conference organizers and I am pretty happy with it. But see for yourself. The numbers in brackets are the value from 1 to 10 (Poor to Excellent) answered to the questions:
- Rate this class overall
- Did the technical content meet your expectations?
- Rate the instructors presentation skills.
and finally the question if they would recommend me for future events.
First about the Maven presentation.
- Very good at answering questions (9, 10, 7, Yes)
- (10, 10, 9, Yes)
- (10, 10, 9, Yes)
- (10, 10, 10, Yes)
- (9, 9, 8, Yes)
- Short of cloning Mark Murphy, Manfred was outstanding! He provided real world explanations. Great examples! (10, 10, 10, Yes)
- Covered all the topics I wanted to hear! Thanks! (10, 10, 10, Yes)
- Great intro, fast-paced, lots of info in a short time (that’s a good thing) (8, 8, 8, Yes)
- A bit hard to follow for non-Maven users, but good starting point to create interest in Maven (6, 7, 7, Yes)
Considering the class was actually not that big it was great to get that much feedback as well as such good ratings. Keeping in mind as well that I explained the core concepts of Maven as well as some pretty advanced use cases of the Maven Android Plugin.
And now even better about the testing presentation:
- Great job! (9, 9, 9, Yes)
- Many valuable pointers (8, 9, 10, Yes)
- (9. 9. 7, Yes)
- Best presenter so far (10, 10, 10, Yes)
- Good speaking skills. Good humour. (10, 9. 9. Yes)
- A little bit too Maven focused. I am new to Android development and I was hoping for a “Here is how to test your apps” presentation. This was way over my head. Not actionable since I really didn’t understand the material (my gap, not his) but could REALLY use an Eclipse/ADT intro/medium class on testing best practices. (7, 6, 8, Yes)
- (8, 8, 10, Yes)
- I really enjoyed this presentation. The speaker was very knowledgeable. He provided a lot of great useful tips. (10, 10 , 10, Yes)
- Bring him back! (10, 10 , 10, Yes)
- Best speaker thus far. (10, 10, 10, Yes)
- (9, 8, 9, Yes)
- (9, 9, 9, Yes)
- (9, 9, 8, Yes)
- Well organized and interesting. (9, 8, 9, Yes)
- Entertaining and informative. Great job! (10, 10 , 10, Yes)
- (8, 9, 7, Yes)
- Very interesting content. Presenter was very amusing. Learned several nice unit/integration test tools and build environment. (9, 8, 9, Yes)
- This is another class that had a prereq on another class. I wanted to learn how to effectively learn junit and all I got was junit is easy to use with Maven, see? I did learn about some interesting automated testing tools so thats a plus. (7, 6, 9, Yes)
- Great overview of many tools. Might be nice to have deep-dive classes on specific test tools. (7, 7, 8, Yes)
- Excellent talk but was very dense. Seemed like a lot of material for the time alotted. (8, 8, 10, Yes)
- The talk was a bit over my head. It felt like he was giving great info, but I lacked some assumed common knowledge. (7, 5, 6, Yes)
Now reading that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, mostly anyway 😉 I thoroughly enjoyed giving this presentation in front of a fairly large audience. The restriction on length for the presentation meant that I had to move it fast in order to cover the ground I wanted to cover. I think I succeeded in showing everyone something to look into and get motivated to learn more.
And you might just be able to do so…
Now with all this valuable feedback you will be happy to hear that I am going to do it again. Just even better. Things are moving fast in the Android space and I plan to show you some amazing new features of the Android Maven Plugin at AnDevCon and thanks to getting a 3 hour slot for my workshop called “Testing Android Apps – Going from Zero to Hero” there will be more time to talk about testing and dive into it some more. But don’t worry. I won’t be going slow.. so fasten your seat belts.
And of course don’t forget to get your tickets for AnDevCon 2 soon to take advantage of the available discounts.
It would be great to meet you and talk about Android, Maven, Hudson, Testing, Robotium, Robolectric or KSoap2-Android..
See you there
manfred
PS: yes.. I will be organizing fire side chats again as well. Got any suggested topics?
,