MCE Retrospection from EL Passion’s Mobile Developers

MCE is a type of conference that always evokes great emotions. It's always difficult to decide which presentations to attend. The conference takes two days. From over 45 presentations you’re able to select up to 11 & several flash talks, which took place during the lunch break.

John Reid’s talk “Software Paradigms & Patterns” made the biggest impression on me. He talked about things that are not closely related to a specific technology, so everyone could learn something. He mentioned the most important principles of object-oriented programming such as "SOLID", "Tell, Do not Ask", "Inheritance vs Composition", "Program to interfaces, not implementations," "Clean Architecture", "Law of Demeter" and many others. For most programmers this is nothing new. But knowledge of the rules is not enough. You should also use them in the daily work. John showed the most important thing - using them in practice.

Presentations of this type give a lot of thought and are a motivator to write better and more readable code. At the end he asked the question “Is Object Oriented Programming dead?”. The answer is no, if we still use good programming practice. Summarizing whole event - great talks, great people and fantastic atmosphere before, during and after conference. This is my second time on MCE and I'm sure that not last. See you next year.

Mateusz SzklarekiOS Developer

At MCE we were able to select tags, about which we want to talk with other developers. Surprisingly I and Kasper, without any consultations or suggestions picked the same tags. One of them was #Architecture. It became clear that this is very important topic for us at EL Passion.

We were experimenting with our architecture for a long time. Recently we started a new project from scratch and we were able to use TDD to create our architecture.We attended to all talks connected with architecture and it was amazing to see that presented architectures were almost the same as ours.

From all those presentations, the last one, given by Richa Khandelwal was most inspiring. She explained why we, mobile developers, have problems with applying MVC to our code. In other words why Model-View-Controller usually end asMassive-View-Controller. It was talk about Single Responsibility Principle in practice. Our application simply have more than three responsibilities.

Besides architecture there were many really good talks and it makes MCE a conference I can strongly recommend. See you next year!

Karol KowalskiAndroid Developer

This years I have participated in MCE for the first time. The two full days of listening to great speakers brought lots of new insights and surely will influence my daily work.

There were four main tracks and everybody was free to make their own choice. I decided to take advantage over it and besides technical presentations, I focused on business aspects as well to understand project goals and decisions better. I was happy to join Florian Braunschweig's talk about keeping the startup spirit alive when it's fast growing and how to drive continuous innovation within the product even while maintaining a lot of necessary management structures and processes.

Another non-technical presentation worth mentioning was a powerful and motivating talk by Steli Efti on how important it is to listen your customers or even fight for negative feedback that will bring values beating your competitors.

There also was the third day dedicated for workshops where we could play around with technology. I had a chance to build simple but creative electronic circuit based on Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards and get to know it's possibilities and limitations.

Summarizing the three days, it was really great pleasure to take part in the event and I look forward to the next one in a year. See you there!

Bartek GuminiakiOS Developer

Unlike previous editions, this year’s MCE took place in April. It was definitely worth waiting couple more months to take part in this great event. As usual, there was numerous great talks and organizers haven’t disappointed us with social entertainments.

My favorite talk was given by Natasha Murashev, aka Natasha The Robot. The way she presented practical cases of using protocols in Swift was inspiring. This language is still new, but the community grows fast and new interesting design patterns appear one after another. Protocol oriented programming becomes important subject for all iOS developers. I really enjoyed presentation about Fastlane by Felix Krause. The utility became part of our toolset some time ago at EL Passion and I was happy to learn more about time saving features.

A lot of good talks were about clean architecture. It makes me happy to hear how popularity of this topic grows. Jon Reid’s talk was worth seeing, as always. He showed how to address common issues that developers have with MVC. Another presentation that I think was interesting was given by Jorge Ortiz.

In addition to the conference, Jitter workshops provided great opportunity to learn about DIY hardware based on Arduino and Raspberry Pi. I was happy to do some practical experiments connecting both hardware and software. It was also nice to play with 3D printers and home automation devices. Apart of the content provided by organizers,I really appreciated a chance to meet new people that work in mobile software development and enjoy it. I hope next edition of MCE will be as good as this one.

Dariusz RybickiiOS Developer

This was my first time at MCE. I had a couple of such events behind me and I already knew that some are good, some worse and just a few will be great. I also heard that MCE belongs to these better ones, so my expectations were even higher. And do you know what? It met my expectations fully and even beyond.

Starting from a great presentation from Michał Bendowski about Android Studio Internals which was ‘must have’ for me, through further maneuvering between different interesting talks, to finally reach the greatest one which was ‘Clean Android Architecture’ by Richa Khandelwal from Coursera which was the most beneficial for me. Richa not only described the theory of adapting clean architecture to android platform well but also (to my surprise, because I thought she won’t make it in time) she showed practical examples of how she implemented it in her code. If you are interested in making your architecture cleaner I recommend to at least take a look at her github project: https://github.com/richk/CourseraDemoApp.

I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t mention another amazing talk by Van Anh Dam together with Karolina Cikowska which covered a totally different topic - ‘Why Your Kid Won’t Be a Programmer?’. If you are trying to teach your kid how to write code you should definitely take a look at it because there is a high chance that you are doing it wrong.

To sum I will place this conference at first place together with Droidcon Italy.

Kasper KondzielskiAndroid Developer

I attended previous editions of MCE and both of them convinced me that I should take part in the next one. The quality of talks and meeting new people are the most important things i focus on when summarizing conferences in general.

The first one are the talks. My favourite in category of “show me the code” :) would be Konstantin Raev’s talk on React Native. I really like how we can build UI’s with constant feedback without recompiling/rebuilding the app. I’m big fan of doing UI from code rather than Interface Builder so I think it might solve a lot of issues I have at them moment and hope to try it out sometime soon.

Talks from Jorge D. Ortiz-Fuentes and Jon Reid about architecture in general were the greatest talks during the whole conference. Showing us the benefits of using clean architecture, introducing boundaries and proper usage of OOP. I dislike the fact that often developers think in a framework related way and this introduces a ton of new problems including Massive View Controller and Shared Instance antipatterns. I hope that the more talks we will hear about clean architecture the more it will be used in production code by more and more developers :)

Practically after every day (and before whole conference) we had an opportunity to talk to many speakers and attendees on after parties. It was great pleasure to meet some of personal heroes like Jon Reid and hang out with newly met friends.

Konrad SzczęśniakiOS Developer

I find myself attending conferences for a different reason than most. Joining over a dozen of them a year and working with Android for over 5 years, I expect to learn only little bits from technical presentations.

The most enjoyable part is networking, learning from people, who are very smart, but would never think of giving a talk during such a big event like MCE. And when 3 days conference means 4 days of before, in-the-middle and after parties, that’s what makes it even better.

Yet again this conference surpassed my expectations. There were many interesting talks, including those directly from engineers working hard to make our lives easier: Michał Bendowski working on Android Studio, or Gregory Kick on Dagger 2.

My personal favourite was “Let the Symbols Do the Work” by Hannes Verlinde. First of all, he was well prepared. You could feel that he spent a lot of time on adjusting little details in slides and monologue. The simplicity of the idea behind his talk was what struck me so deeply.

Maciej GórskiAndroid Developer

Although this was my very first mobile conference and I have almost no experience in this kind of events I must admit it was a great pleasure to take part in it.

The biggest surprise were games which turned out to be a great opportunity to meet many new interesting people from the mobile world. I’ve never seen this kind of approach to organizing an event. Well done organizers! The conference was full of interesting and inspiring talks, some better than others. My personal highlight was Richa Khandelwal who, step by step, explained how to write applications with great architecture. Time-consuming to implement them, but surely worth it in the long run.

Great talks, great people, great atmosphere, I’m sure i’ll be back next year. Cheers!

Dominik MalantowiczAndroid Developer