Annyce Davis

Davis Technology Consulting

Talk: Say It With Video!

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Every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours of video on YouTube and that number is steadily increasing. So how can you take advantage of video to help promote your personal brand and/or share your expertise? In this talk, I’ll walk you through the steps I took to develop my first video course, from outlining the initial structure down to actual video creation. Walk away with the tools you need in order to create short, informative online video content!

It covers: Preparation, Execution and Marketing Steps

Materials

 
If you would like to view some of my video content, I encourage you to check out my video course and bite-sized tutorials available on Caster.io.

Review: Talk Like TED

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If I was offered the opportunity to give a TED talk, let’s just say I wouldn’t turn up my nose at it. So I was really excited to find this book, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds.  In it the author analyzes hundreds of the most popular TED talks and provides insights into what made them so successful. Then he goes on to share actionable advice for how anyone can give a talk that’s memorable and engaging. Some of my favorite tips were the following:

Tell a Story

Over and over again the book highlights the importance of telling a story during your talk. Now not a, “Once upon a time…” type story, but rather something short and meaningful that relates to your topic at hand. I don’t typically think of telling a story during a tech talk but I wanted to see if I could somehow use a short story in my upcoming talk at Write/Speak/Code. So here’s a slide from my talk:
 
Here’s what I was going to originally say:

“I created an online video course for O’Reilly Media with no prior experience.” 

Now that’s definitely a true statement, but it would be much more engaging if I made a short story out of it. So I added a bit more detail and now I will say something like this:

“Last August I was contacted by Meghan, an editor at O’Reilly Media and offered the opportunity to create an online video course for them. I was very hesitant about doing it since I had no prior experience.” 

Notice how both statements convey the same thought, but the second is obviously more interesting and will get the audience more involved with the talk. At least I hope 😉

The Rule of Three

“The rule of three…is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things.” (Wikipedia) The author shows several examples of how pervasive the Rule of Three is in our lives and culture. So it makes sense that we would want to apply this technique in our conference talks/presentations. Apparently it’s easier for our audience to remember things that are presented in groups of three. Here’s a slide from my talk on Screen Robots. Notice how in the agenda I only have three items. This is a technique that I plan to continue using as much as makes sense.


I’ve only touched briefly on two of the nine techniques in this post; but hopefully you found this review useful. I highly recommend this book for those interested in giving talks, in case you haven’t noticed!  Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter for future book recommendations.

Google I/O 2016 Recap

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This was my second time attending Google I/O and it was once again a great experience. I put together a few highlights of the event below:

Venue

So the event took place at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. It was my first time in Mountain View and it’s such a beautiful city. On Day 1 of the conference it was a bit “toasty” outside so that proved to be challenging, but eventually the remaining days were pleasant and breezy. The majority of the talks took place inside tents and there tended to be a lot of interest on the part of attendees.

Attendees

For me one of the best parts of attending I/O this year was getting to meet so many of the people that I have interacted with online. Most of them were really cool people and managed to keep their spirits up despite putting up with the heat and long lines.

Takeaways

I was completely impressed with the updates to Android Studio. Some of the things that I felt would be nice to haves, like showing Gradle dependencies clearly or having the Espresso Test Recorder were released. Definitely one of the major highlights for me.
 

 

Something that surprised me though was how Firebase has become the de facto standard of all things mobile for Google. In fact, several products were renamed “Firebase X, Y, Z”. The following tweet summarizes it best:


 

Also there were several talks on developing applications for emerging markets. I especially enjoyed the one titled, “Building for Billions”. The speakers talked about the best strategies for making sure your application is always interactive and responsive for users regardless of network and memory conditions.

All in all, I am very thankful I was able to attend; I know that everyone doesn’t get this opportunity. I learned a lot, I drank a lot of coffee, and I met some awesome folks.



Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with my Android Adventures. Until next year…

Talk: Screen Robots UI Testing with Espresso

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Often when writing tests with Espresso you find a lot of onView, withId, perform calls scattered throughout your test methods. This takes away from the simplicity of the test, tends to be verbose and also litters resource ids everywhere. There’s got to be a better way, right? Yes, there is…Screen Robots. In this presentation you will learn how to take advantage of the Screen Robot abstraction technique.

It covers: UI Testing, Basic Espresso, and Screen Robots

Materials

 
If you would like to learn more about creating high quality Android applications, I encourage you to check out my video course and bite-sized video content on Caster.io.

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