During the week of April 6^th to 9^th, I had the good pleasure to attend AnDevCon or the Android Developer Conference. I will be sharing my experiences at this event in my next few postings.

This was the first ever AnDevCon so if you missed it, don’t worry; there will be one coming in November. The event was held at the San Mateo Marriott very close to San Francisco airport. The actual event started on the 7th as a whole day workshop where the attendees could choose a subject that was of particular interest to them and intently focus on it. The one I attended was, “Android for Java Developers” and the speaker was Marko Gargenta from Marakana. The workshop covered some of the challenges that Java developers have to overcome to program successfully on the Android platform. In addition, Marko briefly covered the Android stack (kernel, davik, Android System Server, etc.).

The workshop was very informative though much of what was covered was available for folks by coding the tutorials that are in the SDK. Since the discussion was so broad, the scope sometimes went into the weeds but by and large stayed on topic. The attendee’s skill level varied greatly from raw beginners to folks who had published apps. Most of the discussion in the workshop followed Marko’s new book, “Learning Android”; so if you downloaded the book from O’Reily (I did), you could review the topics.

I’ll cover the first full day of classes in my next post.