Despite all, mDev camp starts with a strong community spirit by facing the subject of COVID from the mobile developer's perspective.
We heard about how the project eRouška, that helped to track and notify users of a possible infection near them, quickly gained in popularity and protected public health in a significant way, and about the challenges this project faced from Jakub Nešetřil from Česko.Digital.
Followed by a talk from Marc Pous from Balena, a company that is considered an expert in IoT Fleet Management. He talks about using IoT devices to crunch data in simulations for protein folding using a distributed computing network.
Many devices are not being used to their full potential, be it an old mobile phone or a tablet just laying somewhere catching dust. These could be used in a distributed network to analyze the COVID protein, allowing scientists and doctors to make faster progress in finding potential treatments for COVID-19. One device might not do much but putting a lot of them together in a joint effort can create a powerful network capable of rivaling even a supercomputer. From an ecological standpoint, it gives reusability to the unused device a gives you a good feeling about contributing to something bigger that could save millions of lives.
Next up was Aleksandra Komagorkina, who is a chemist technologist, who switched to UI/UX design a few years ago, talking about the ultimate guide to battery optimization. She explains that very common operations on the iOS platform like location retrieving, playing multimedia, and more can deplete the battery rather quickly. This can be debugged by using tools like MetricKit, that are embedded in XCode, to help us analyze the flow of the application to avoid these mistakes.
Optimizing battery usage translates directly into energy efficiency and App performance and responsiveness, and that is also a great reason to convince your project manager to care about battery optimization since it means happier customers, and therefore heartwarming reviews for your app.
These were just a few of the talks, that you could see during the mDevCamp virtual conference, which was a great opportunity to gather ideas and insights, with the power to have a real, significant impact.
You can read more about the project eRouška here.
To join the fight against COVID from any device of your choice go here.
