Droidcon London 2023
Droidcon London 2023
I had the pleasure of speaking at Droidcon London this year so I wanted to write a blog post to reflect on the exprience.
A massive thank you to the organizers at Droidcon for hosting a fantastic conference!
The Talk
My talk was titled “Shipping Production Ready Rust in Android”. That talk went over why Mozilla invested in Rust in the Firefox Android app, and covered a bit of the “how” we made it work.
The talk is now available online on the Droidcon website.
The slides are also available online on my github: https://github.com/tarikeshaq/droidcon-2023
Reflecting on Speaking
This was my first real conference talk, I’ve given various talks internally at Mozilla on various topics but this was the first time with a totally unfamiliar audience. I was nervous at first but as the talk went by I felt relaxed and conversational.
I’m an advocate of a culture of sharing, and if you know me you know that I’m always aiming to improve my communication skills. I’m also a advocate of learning-by-doing, so what better way of becoming a better communcator, than communicating to foreign group of listeners and getting feedback from them.
I recieved a ton of feedback after the talk and I’m excited to incorporate that feedback into my next conference talk!
Having broken the ice by speaking at a conference I’m excited to do it more often!
(ps: I’m in the process of blogging the content of the talk in a blog post!)
On a Culture of Sharing
Working on engineering teams, it’s easy to forget the value of the non-coding parts of our job.
We all like writing code, building features, and the masochists of us like fixing bugs. However, as engineers tend to underestimate the value of communication and sharing. I’ve been lucky so far in my career to have mentors who value a culture of sharing. I define a culture of sharing as an environment where team members feel empowered and encouraged to share their successes and failures.
A culture of sharing is tremendously valuable to everybody involved:
- A culture of sharing can help us make sure we don’t repeat each others errors and learn as a collective what works and what doesn’t!
- A culture of sharing encourages even the most junior of us to provide valuable input (and don’t let anyone tell you any one person’s input isn’t valuabe)
- A culture of sharing helps us all become better communicators. Possibly the most undervalued skill for engineers, and the most critical skill as engineers become more senior is the ability to communicate clearly.