My 2020 Year Self-Review
By: Raul Hernandez Lopez
Tags: Self Care, Healthy Lifestyle, Self Review, Self Improvement, Kotlin

On the other hand, about not related (directly) tasks in my daily work, I started to do something I had pending for a long time: MORE public contributions to the Dev community.

In fact, I can probably tell you more this year about that than ever before. This year was especially full of (remote) opportunities for either talking at conferences or writing articles, of course, coding first in Github or Gists to try proofs of concept.

From September 2019 I started to increase my collaborations, but I became more engaged from April 2020 when participated at Android Makers (AM) in Paris, wait, in Paris? Due to the start of the pandemic, this was a remote conference instead.

Despite the conference was in April, I came up with the idea in December 2019 and the work started in February: investigating, designing, coding, experimenting, etc.

Previous to this event, I got an invitation from my friend Antonio Leiva (DevExperto) for a personal interview about career development. I really enjoyed talking about my experience in Spanish. Thanks Antonio!

Going back to the AM talk, in the end, I consider the conference and talk went pretty nicely, I liked this conference’s format from a speaker's perspective: I was able to make it from my flat in London 🇬🇧 ! To be honest, I wasn’t so sure of making that big effort for an online event. Not only for the energy you need to spend on it but also because it was the first time in a remote conference, where you lose human contact and networking. But in the end, I was encouraged and created the content, practiced a lot, and was pleased with the experience.

This was a nice picture taken from my flat in London 🇬🇧

But that wasn’t all. I contributed for the first time in a technical podcast (for the Spanish 🇪🇸 language community) thanks to David Hackro, host of the AndroidDevPodcast. I can tell, being at different timezones was challenging, while he was in Mexico 🇲🇽, I was in London 🇬🇧.

Tweet of the AndroidDevPodcast with its link to all Audio formats.

I believe the invitation to this great podcast was thanks to the big impact that the public articles had. I can tell that I wrote a bunch of Android/Kotlin articles (6 articles from the “Fueled Reactive apps with Asynchronous Flow” series and a new independent one later on), whose first 6 articles were written in 6 consecutive weeks, which received quite a bit of attention from the Android/Kotlin community (were featured on Android / Kotlin weekly, thanks a lot to both newsletters!):

Great, but was that all?

Later, I decided to give it a go and submit proposals to more conferences, like Droidcon EMEA (#dcEMEA). I even extended the talk to “Fueled Reactive apps with Asynchronous Flow and StateFlow to sync with the UI”. While those in-person conferences became online events, I began to take this a little bit more seriously. What do I mean by that? I upgraded my speaker setup, both with a new microphone 🎤 and a quality stream-cam 📹.

Microphone with a condenser was part of the new speaker setup

#dcEMEA went really well (this is the offline demo)!

Short VOD with the #dcEMEA demo.

I gave this same talk during our internal/private event called #OneDroid at Twitter, where all Android engineers meet once a year (this is part of my actual job, but I’m telling you public speaking contributions in chronological order).

Having a beer after the #OneDroid event

Furthermore, I was invited by my good friend Nicolás Patarino to give that same talk in Spanish 🇪🇸. So I did it at the Madrid Android Developer Group (MADG) meetup. I was thrilled to be part of this meetup, thanks Nico! Besides, I was especially excited to see people who attended Droidcon EMEA who were also present at this Spanish talk edition:

Victor attended both EMEA (English) and MADG (Spanish) talks.

After that, really surprisingly, I got invited by my friend Enrique López-Mañas to the Kotlin Munich meetup 🇩🇪, the same day it was going to happen. Thus, I participated with no time to prepare really. I hoped it went well! Thanks Enrique!

This wasn’t the last of the talks, I was lucky enough to get a space on a meetup I followed from its beginning called Kotlin London 🇬🇧. Big thanks to Pablisco, Amar, Guillermo and Enzo!

Myself trying the speaker setup the same morning of the Kotlin London event.

To close this wonderful year, I received the greatest news of getting my talk accepted for Droidcon APAC #dcAPAC, I had a terrific experience there. The first time I traveled to Asia 🌏 whilst sitting in London 🇬🇧, can you imagine? It got featured at Kotlin weekly.

The capture of the presentation at dcAPAC with Raul wearing a Black Sabbath t-shirt.

And that’s a wrap for 2020! I can consider this year as probably the most successful one for speaking and writing technical articles.