On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I attended droidcon, the Android developer's conference organised by the friendly folks at Skills Matter and Kevin and Carl from Novoda – the most enthusiastic mobile software development company on the planet.

Tuesday was a barcamp and a great opportunity to meet people and learn from others. I especially enjoyed Carl's talk on his work using RESTful APIs from Android (something I've been experiment with in conjunction with FluidDB). Other highlights of the day included learning about the Zii Egg and recently announced Trinity device, seeing the worlds longest nested if/else statement (don't ask – very diagonal) and some really great chats both technical and "blue sky" about the potential for mobile (and specifically Android) devices.

The second day was a more traditional presentation-based conference and we had some great talks. Highlights for me were a couple of presentations that delved into and demonstrated the NDK (native development kit), both of which were musical in nature (spot on for me) and had me dusting off my C/C++ books when I got home. I was also amazed by what Gabor Paller had managed to achieve with his Dedexer tool for Dalvic byte-code disassembly. The "park-bench" and Yan Minagawa's talk about the future of mobile were particularly entertaining for the group discussion that ensued, and I'd never heard of the c-base space station that had crashed into the heart of Berlin – it sounds an awesome place. Finally, Diego Torres Milano's talk on test driven development on Android was something I was especially pleased to see on the programme. I advocate and use TDD in my day job (and at the code dojo) – so it was great to learn how to do it on Android.

As always, some of the best stuff was in the chatting over pizza / drinks and in the intervals. Lots of cool pointers and advice as well as a sneak preview of Motorola's "Droid".

Great job guys and I'm looking forward to the next one…

(If you can't wait there is always the Londroid group whose next meeting is on 21st January – I'll be there).