Mobius 2018 Moscow took place, long live Mobius 2019 Piter

Usually “how the conference went” and “conference announcement” are two completely different texts. But this time we simultaneously conducted the Moscow Mobius and opened the registration to Petersburg (to be held May 22-23). And we decided that the story “what was in Moscow” will help everyone at once: someone thanks him will relive the Moscow event, and someone will decide whether to buy tickets for St. Petersburg, while they are the cheapest.

Program

When there are dozens of reports at the conference, in Habrapost not to describe each, but you can describe some general trends. What were they like this time?

For example, “giantomania” was noticeable: at once in several reports they shared their experience in working on especially large applications, from Uber to Sberbank Online. Both Anton Schukin (Badoo), and Nikolai Lihogrud (Yandex), and Alexander Blinov (hh.ru) from different sides revealed the topic of modularization that is relevant for large scale. And Artyom Zinnatullin (Lyft), who appeared on the stage after Alexander, slightly trolled him by comparing the number of modules in hh.ru and Lyft:



But at the same time, the conference did not turn into an event where giants measure themselves with lines of code, and developers from smaller companies feel themselves superfluous. The same Artem immediately noticed that the main thing in his report “Android Builds at Lyft” is not a specific situation in one particular company, but general engineering principles, suitable for various cases. And he led the conversation from afar, starting with the assembly with the help of Bash, Make and Ant: it was possible to follow the development of the assembly tools, understanding what problem they were solving at each particular turn. By the way, after the report, he developed a topic with a blog post about what features of Gradle make it difficult to scale it into hundreds of modules.



Another trend is the transfer of the video about which both of the largest Russian social networks made a report at once. Alexey Savin(VKontakte) talked about video broadcasts, and Alexander Tobol and Ivan Grigoriev (Odnoklassniki) talked about live broadcasts and previously recorded video, going down from ready-made video players to the level of sockets and codecs. An impressive detail from the second report: “4K support appeared to us“ for growth ”, there was no need for it yet, we just decided that if 4K could be implemented normally, then everything in 1080p will definitely work well”. Here one would have thought that the speakers from these two social networks performed mostly for each other (who else does high-loaded mobile video broadcasts in Russia?) - but no, the other viewers on these reports were also, and many of them were impressed.



There were two more "symmetrical" reports: about Flutter (spokePaulina Szklarska ) and about using Kotlin for a common code for Android / iOS ( Svyatoslav Shcherbina directly from JetBrains). Both reports are about cross-platform development, and both technologies are not very mature, but promising. But at the same time their approaches are very different - and just by going to both reports, it was possible to feel the difference. A detail that impressed me personally: I already heard about the Hot Reload feature in Flutter development, but I perceived it simply as “the ability to restart the application immediately after changing the code”, and only then I saw that it was stateful (when restarted, the data entered in the interface is not lost ). Feelings such as if the plane can be replaced wing right during the flight.

Both technologies are now actively developing, and with Flutter it turned out most clearly. First, when we announced the report, the technology was still in beta - and just a few days before Mobius version 1.0 was released, making the topic more relevant. And secondly, Paulina began to prepare a speech in the status of an Android developer — but in the course of her career, she even went so far as to officially introduce herself as “Flutter developer” on Mobius.



Another parallel can be drawn between the reports of Jonathan Levin and Vitaly Friedman.: both of these speakers love not just to monotonously express something, but to arrange a show and engage the audience. This is well suited for the closing speeches of the conference, and visitors to previous Mobius will surely remember the keynotes of Jonathan, and this time Vitaly closed with the theme “Extreme testing: tricks from the dark corners of mobile interfaces.” Jonathan also made a "serious" report on the Android-insides (D8, R8, and so on) - but the fact that he climbed deep and focused on the cognitive component, still did not prevent him from reviving this topic.



Everything does not happen perfectly, at any major event, someone is inevitably disappointing someone - and judging by the reviews that have come to the moment, even here a couple came to light. Dag Sillars ' opening keynote on image optimization and the Paul Hudson talk“Squeeze Your Swift” was liked by some viewers, while others were challenged with “Although the speaker’s presentation is professional, the content is too superficial, which we don’t know here.”

Well, it remains to be glad that the participation of the speakers in the conference was not limited to the stage: they could be properly questioned by adding all that was missing in the report. And here we come to the second important part of the conference:

Communication

First, the report on Mobius is more than a report: it is always also a discussion zone after it, where the speaker has time to answer all the questions in detail. When someone famous arrives, viewers usually have a lot of questions about the report and other topics. And, for example, Artem Zinnatullin was surrounded so that he and his beard almost looked like a preacher:



Secondly, this time we also made the Ask Expert zone: some speakers specializing in a particular area in a certain time were ready to answer any questions about it. Artyom took part in this and again gathered a lot of people in the Ask Expert zone - it seems they can ask him endlessly.

Thirdly, in the evening of the first day the BOF-sessions were traditionally held: thematic discussions, where anyone could participate. This time in Russian, professional burnout was discussed, and in English (with the participation of foreign speakers) interviews.



How did these discussions go? Here opinions are divided. Someone thought that the topics were too banal, and there was a lot of captaincy in concrete remarks, but others participated so lively and for a long time, as if the second day of reports had not been waiting for them.

Fourthly, the communication takes place at the stands of companies - and at these stands was a lot of bright. Yandex in the case of Yandex.Avto presented a serious interactive (rack with a screen that allows you to personally poke into the Auto interface), and a frivolous (race track with toy cars), and the presence of Anton Dudakov(who spoke at the previous Mobius) made it possible to ask technical questions of any complexity about Auto. The loudest recent news, “Yandex.Telefon”, was also not left unattended: the company held a contest for mobile phones.



But it seems that Badoo won out by the audience of all, making the game “IT Alias” for its stand. Nastol lovers know that “Alias” is good with a low entry threshold: to understand the rules, just a minute is enough (“explain the words from the cards so that they are guessed as quickly as possible”), and then everyone has fun. And in this case, where Badoo used the words familiar to developers (“GPU”, “regression testing”, “patch”), it turned out even more fun - and as a result both days were briskly chopped up on the company's stand.

Finally, fifth, at conferences there is another form of communication: it is dictated not by some predetermined zones and schedules, but by the self-organization of the community. When people gather in one place, following with interest the posts and podcasts of each other, of course, they immediately begin to communicate with interest. And on this Mobius has traditionally been recorded a special edition of the “Android Dev Podcast”. Co-host of the podcast Denis Neklyudov , who had participated in Mobius many times before, could not get to the event this time - but eventually he bit his elbows while reading the conference chat.

In general, from our side the conference looked like this. But a great event is always seen in different ways - for example, Vladimir Ivanov, a member of the program committee, had the following opinion:

What's next?

About spring Mobius Petersburg, we can now say this:

• Date: May 22-23, 2019.
• Place: the same as before (Hotel Park Inn by Radisson Pulkovskaya)
• Format: the same as before. Specific reports will be different - but again you can wait and dive into the depths, and something fun; and architectural issues, and the analysis of specific technologies; and inquiries in the discussion areas, and discussions on a given topic.
• Tickets: already on sale , and will gradually go up, starting from January 1. So, if you are ready to be determined before the appearance of the full program, then it is most advantageous to do it right now.

In general, we are pleased with how many people were with us this weekend - and until the next meeting in St. Petersburg!