Droidcon Boston '19: Building at the Speed of Thought

What you'll learn

Breaking away from the traditional steps of a design sprint, we blur them together to further reduce the development cycle in what we call “Building at the speed of thought". Over the years my group has been perfecting how to build world-class Android Apps at the speed of thought first for hackathons, then products and now for design sprints. In this session, we will detail the “Speed of Thought” methodology, steps, tools and components involved. We start by utilizing a design sprint to explore the power of mobile and how it fits into the market/problem we are trying to solve. Then focusing on the crucial step in a design sprint, we build high fidelity prototypes in rapid succession utilizing the JetPack Android software components (UI, Behavior, Foundation, Architecture) to take full advantage of the Android platform. We do this by leveraging the design features of Android Studio (material components/theme editor, constraint library, motion editor) along with open source/industry resources to build an intuitive and beautiful UI. Once the UI framework is done, we write the Kotlin application logic utilizing the Android Architecture Components with data binding connected to Firebase for the synchronized backend. With our application finished we execute our strategy for marketing, distribution, and monetization guided by Data-Driven Ethnography (DDE). At the end of the session, the audience will have a good idea of how in rapid succession all these tools and components come together to produce magic.

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