You may have noticed that the more I go to conferences, the less I write about them. I could claim lack of time, but the fact is that all my write-ups will be something along the lines of “Loved <city>, went to talks that made me think, met interesting people, gave a talk or two that seemed to go well”. Not sure if people get bored of reading that, but I get bored of writing it.

That’s not to say I’m bored of conferences. On the contrary - since I work from home, travelling to new places and meeting Real Human Beings keeps me sane. Plus conferences are fun.

But I went to a conference on Saturday that makes me feel compelled to write something, and not just because it was organised by my two fellow Sevilla JUG organisers. @IsraKaos and @RGDav are both doing more Android day-to-day than server-side Java, so this is an area they’re interested in learning more about. Not content with organising Android events every other month, they decided they had so many interesting speakers they wanted to have speaking here in Sevilla that they wanted to run a whole day, single track conference, on behalf of GDG Sevilla. Android Xtended was born.

Because I was missing coding, and because my friend and I had an awesome phone app idea at the weekend, I thought I’d try my hand at developing an Android application this week.

I want to give a quick overview of my preliminary thoughts on getting started on this endeavour.

Background: I’ve got more than 10 years Java experience, but any UI for the applications I’ve worked on was always a web UI. I am completely new to mobile app development.