Droidcon NYC 2024

We had a blast attending and presenting at Droidcon in New York this past September. It was great chatting with everyone about mobile observability and all the unique challenges that come with it. Here are some of the highlights!

"How to log everything in production"

First things first; here’s the video of our talk. Originally titled "How to Log Everything in Production" (or my personal favorite, "How to Get Away with Murder"), we ended up going with "Building a Performant and Privacy-Conscious Screen Capture Library for Compose." The talk dives deep into the current challenges in mobile observability, with a special focus on capturing screen representations in Jetpack Compose apps. If you’re hungry for more details after watching, you can find the full story in our companion blog post: Our Journey Implementing Session Replay in Android for Jetpack Compose

At first, we only submitted the talk based on the aforementioned blog post. We didn’t even know if it would be accepted! But once it was, we decided to go all-in, getting ourselves a booth and becoming a “speaker sponsor.” Half the team came along to help set up and talk to folks, including our CEO, Pete. We seriously underestimated how much work goes into preparing for a conference! From finalizing the talk to setting up the decorations (special shoutout to our life-sized mascot “Chippy”) and making some cool swag like a 3D-printed bitdrift chainsaw, we had our hands full. But the best part was creating a fun demo app! For our demo we built a version of Flappy Bird (renamed Flappy Chippy) built entirely in Jetpack Compose. The game let attendees play while we live-streamed screen captures and telemetry to our backend. At the same time, we displayed the data in different forms—stat charts, user funnels, live logs, and 3d-screens. We had a blast building the demo and chatting with lots of people about how to improve mobile observability for engineers and decision-makers. The best part? We learned a ton from real users and developers, and many of those conversations are now part of our roadmap. Are you as excited about tackling challenging and innovative problems like these? You can join the bitdrift team —we're hiring an Android Software Engineer! Want to learn more about Bitdrift Capture? Explore our sandbox and experience Capture firsthand, or get in touch with us for getting access to the real thing. Also don't forget to join us in Slack to ask questions or give feedback!

Author

Miguel Juárez López

October 22, 2024

"How to log everything in production"

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