Interview: Mathias

This interview is done with Mathias Seguy. So Mathias:

1. Tell us a little bit about you & your average Android development day or your work day

I’am Mathias Seguy, a french android passionate. In 2011, I wrote 3 ebooks on Android development, that you can find on my web site. Then, I decided to create my own company dedicated to Android. As I was teaching Math in university, I chose to focus on Android Training and then dived in the Android programmation. My main concern is how to build great applications, in particular, what a good android architecture is or has to be. I also focus on UX, it’s the most important; what user plays with.

So I spend my day reading documentation, trying libraries, making tutorials, posting news on my blog, updating my training supports or giving training. Sometimes, depending on missions, I also help companies to build their application. And this year I will begin to be a mentor for start ups (I am pivoting a few).

2. What would you say are the ingredients for a successful app?

In those fields of concern, I think a good application has to realize some elements. The first main goal is to build a good architecture aiming:

1. to respect the resources of the device (battery, memory space)

2. to make evolution easiest (to be able to inject new api version simply, add feature, correct bugs,…)

3. to be context aware (battery status, network connection status, version number…)

The second goal to achieve when building an application is to make a great UX, and this is a hard thing for us (developers). So we need to be able to melt google guidelines and our own specific user cases, to make our application alive and adapted to our users. This is tricky and there is no receipt.

But at the end, only your success will tell if your application is good, great or ugly

3. What your talk at Droidcon Greece will be about? What is the audience level?

So at DroidCon Greece, I want to make your application evolves in an UX way. I will talk about animations, trying to convince you that animations are easy, that you can add animations everywhere for your user and that you can do that with single lines of code. Whatever is your level in android development, this talk is for you, we will have a complete vision of what animations can be done and how. There is a github project where all the code will be available for copy/paste.

4. What are you most looking forward to at Droidcon Greece?

As usual, what I like in all the DroidCons I go, is listening to people about their own Android experiences, learn new tricks, new good practices. I really like DroidCons, it’s like when you were child, at school, at recess, when you are in the course with all your friends playing to your favorite game. It’s for me a magic moment and I always love that.

Find out more about Mathias & his session here.