Android Developers Backstage

Chet, Glen, Rod, and Tor. Il n'y a pas de Romain.

In this episode, Chet and Tor talk with Rod Graves and Glen Murphy from the Android UX team.

We talked about various UX changes in Android over the years, as well as UI design in general. For example, Glen compared UX design to API design; trying to provide an interface for the users of your product that helps them build a mental model to better understand how everything fits and works together.

Favorite acronym: "WTFY"


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Links:

Rod: @rgraves
Glen: @gmurphy
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

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Links:
Best Practices for Unique Identifers

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Chet and Romain, featuring a complete lack of Tor.

In this episode, Chet and Romain talk about talking, speak about speaking, monologue monologuing. We have a conversation about various aspects of giving presentations.

Everyone has their own style and techniques, and there are no right answers for giving talks that audiences enjoy. But we all have opinions and techniques that work for us; here are some of ours.

We talk about making presentations more engaging, having co-speakers, picking topics, getting practice and experience, choosing events, and all kinds of other random stuff that came up in the conversation.

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Links:

• Presenting Presenting (article)
• Top Tips for Terrible Tech Talks (video/presentation)

Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Chet, Dustin and Chris

In this episode, we chat with Chris Craik and Dustin Lam from the AndroidX team about benchmarking.

We cover the new AndroidX benchmarking library, how to use it, and what problems it solves.

If you're wondering why Chet totally took over the interview towards the end, it's not that he wouldn't share the stage; Romain and Tor had to leave early and snuck out quietly.

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Links:

• Benchmarking library documentation
• Google I/O 2019 Benchmarking talk

Blurry action shot from the recording session

Chris: @chris_craik
Dustin: @itsdustinlam
Chet: @chethaase
Tor: @tornorbye
Romain: @romainguy
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Romain, Anna, and (unfortunately) Chet

Chet and Romain spoke with Anna Goldie from the Google Brain team about machine learning. If you ever wondered what the difference is between AI and machine learning or what deep neural networks are, then this episode is for you. To be clear, this show has nothing to do with Android, we just thought it would be an interesting topic.

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Links:

• Google Brain
• Tensor Flow
• TensorFlow tutorials
• Machine Learning on Android
• ML Kit
• Chris Olah's blog on ML models

Anna: @annadgoldie
Chet: @chethaase
Romain: @romainguy
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Tor, Andrey, Romain, and Chet (not pictured)

Tor and Romain spoke with Andrey Breslav, the lead language designer at Jetbrains for Kotlin. They talked about coroutines, flow, performance, islands near St. Petersburg, evolution of the language, and many other Kotlin-y things.

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Links:

Sandra, Carlos, Chet and Romain [authenticated]

In this episode, Chet and Romain chat with Carlos Valdivia and Sandra Kwan from the Android Identity and Authentication team, covering related topics like authentication, ID, autofill, backup and restore, and more.

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Chet: @chethaase

Tor, Yigit, Sean, Romain and Chet doing their (co)routine.

Coroutines are Kotlin's approach to asynchronous programming and they are making their way into various Jetpack libraries. In this episode Tor, Chet and Romain have a chat with Sean McQuillan from DevRel and Yigit Boyar from the Jetpack team to discuss what coroutines are, what problems do they solve and how to use them.

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Chet, James, Vinit, and Tor, in reverse-polish notation.

Tor and Chet talked with Vinit Modi and James Fung from the CameraX team. CameraX is a Jetpack support library that released in alpha form at Google I/O 2019. It offers developers an easier way to embed camera functionality while performing more consistently across Android versions (back to Lollipop) and across various devices.

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Tor, Chuck, Leland and Romain

Jetpack Compose is an unbundled UI toolkit written in Kotlin and based on the reactive programming model that was recently introduced at Google I/O. Compose is not ready for production yet but is now being developed in the open on AOSP. In this episode Tor and Romain have a chat with Chuck and Leland to discuss how Jetpack Compose works and some of the goals and ideas behind its design.

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Romain, Philip, Ben, Tor, and Chet (listed in alphabetical order)

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor talk to Philip Simpson and Ben Trengrove from the cast of Pocket Casts. We talk about their app, coincidentally called "Pocket Casts," and how they implemented various features like Material, audio, and even how the company made a complicated weather app for a country where it's always sunny.
Oh, and we talked about some of the stuff happening at Google I/O 2019, because that's when we recorded this conversation.

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Links:

Tor, Romain and Chet

In this episode, Chet, Romain and Tor discuss the Android-related announcements at Google I/O this year -- Android Q, Jetpack Compose, Project Marble, etc.

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Tor, Mel, Chet, and Romain (shown in alphabetical order)

In this episode, Chet, Tor, and Romain chat with Mel Goetz, an engineer on the Material team, about Material Design Components, the set of components for Android that implement Material Design.

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Romain, Frank and Tor in the Studio

In this episode, Romain and Tor chat with Frank from the Android Studio team. Frank works on the Android emulator and in this episode he explains the differences between a simulator and an emulator, how snapshots work, how does GPU support is implemented and much more.

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Chet, Iliyan and Tor in the Studio

In this episode, Chet and Tor chat with Iliyan Malchev from Project Treble. We already covered this a year and a half ago back in episode 75, but this time we dig deeper and also cover the progress made since then. Tune in to learn about acronyms like HAL, HIDL, GSI, VTS, and more!

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Michael, Tor (not pictured), Romain (not pictured), and Chet (not even present). Some podcasts are conversations. Some are more like interrogations in a café.

In this episode, Tor and Chet Romain talked with Michael Wright from the Android Framework team. Michael works on input, display, power manager, and haptics, which are, by amazing coincidence, exactly what they talked about.

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Esteban, Romain, Chet, and Tor in the Android Studio.

Our guest-scheduling failed once again but we managed to find a guest at the very last minute!

In this episode Esteban de la Canal tells us everything about Apply Changes, a new feature in Android Studio 3.5 Canary destined to replace Instant Run. Why are we doing this and why is it better than Instant Run? Listen to this episode and come find out with us.

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Links:
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Romain, Chet, Dave and Tor in the Android Studio.

In this episode, we talk to Dave Burke, VP of Engineering for Android. How are features chosen for the next version of the operating system? And what is Dave's favorite feature in Android P? Tune in to find out.

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Links:
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Tor, Romain, Sumir, Ian, and Chet pose for a candid picture far from the recording studio, when they finally realized  they'd forgotten to take a picture in the studio earlier. You'd think they'd have this process nailed by now,  wouldn't you? I mean, 106 episodes; it's not like it's new and all. Honestly, what level of professionalism are we paying for here with this free service?

Romain and Chet talk with Sumir Kataria and Ian Lake about the latest developments in the new WorkManager and Navigation architecture components. WorkManager is now in beta and Navigation should be in beta Real Soon Now.

Alpha? Beta? Are these all Greek to you? We try to de-mystify this naming convention and talk about how we see development and release of architecture components in general.

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Links:
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.

Tor, Romain, Robert, and Chet. Note the winter coat; the temperatures in California had plummeted that week all the way down into the lower 60s (F). Brrrr!

Tor, Romain, and Chet talk with Robert Greenwalt from the Android Telephony team about how the phone actually works. And text. And data. And SIM cards. And carrier networks.

It turns out that communication is kind of a important feature for phones

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Links:
Thanks to continued tolerance and support by our audio engineer, Bryan Gordon.