DEV Community: Chris Trag

First look at Gemini CLI

Chris Trag — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 23:17:52 +0000

I noticed several friends talking about Google's new open source Gemini CLI on my social feeds, so I figured I'd take it for a spin and document the experience. No script, no preparation - just installing it and seeing what happens when I ask it to build some web apps.

First I built a Sudoku game, then attempted to build Tetris (with some interesting rotation behavior), and threw together a simple todo app. The interface output was clean, the interaction mode is an evolution from the AI coding assistants I've used previously, and the minor rough edges you'd expect from a launch-day product.

Note: this was recorded during what seemed like heavy server load, so performance / wait times were inconsistent. The self-correction behavior when things break is actually pretty interesting from a UX standpoint -- I have to give credit for how transparent it's approach is: you always know what it's doing and/or thinking in the moment.

If you're evaluating AI coding tools or just curious about Google's approach, this might be useful. I'm planning to test it with more complex scenarios and actual project files next.

What I tested:

Installation via npm
Single-file web app generation
Error handling and self-correction
Web search integration
General usability

📰 February 2025 @AmazonAppDev Newsletter

Chris Trag — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 06:00:00 +0000

From app submission to certification

Ensure your app is in top shape for a smooth submission process.

Streamline app management with App Submission API
Use the RESTful App Submission API to manage updates to your app with programmatic calls and automation.

Your personal app submission checklist
Check to see if your app meets all of the requirements before submitting. Read more ›

Avoid common pitfalls for app rejections
Meet Amazon's test criteria and quality standards before submission. Navigate policies around appropriate content, user privacy, and in-app purchases. Read more ›

Stay ahead of the trend

📊 New App Statistics Reports
Performant apps lead to better stats. Check how your app is doing with the new Acquisition and Engagement dashboards.
Read more ›

📺 Hello World for Fire TV with Jetpack Compose
Compose for TV introduces new components with clear focus indicators and remote-friendly input behavior.
Read more ›

Recent updates

⚠️ [Discontinuation Notice] Amazon Appstore for Android devices
As of August 20, 2025 Amazon Appstore for Android mobile devices will be discontinued. Starting on February 20, 2025, the option to submit new apps targeting Android devices will not be available. Updates to existing live apps on Amazon Appstore for Android mobile devices can be submitted until August 20, 2025.

⚠️ [Discontinuation Notice] Amazon Coins program
As of August 20, 2025 Amazon Coins Program will be discontinued in all marketplaces. Note that as of February 2025, customers will no longer be able to buy Amazon Coins. However, customers will be able to use their previously purchased Amazon Coins until August 20, 2025.

Appstore Billing Compatibility SDK is now on Maven Central
Easily port your Android app with Google Play Billing to the Amazon Appstore, with minimal changes.

Developer highlights

Revamping your tech stack for the new year?
Solution Architect Matthijs Langendijk explores framework options for OTT apps, including React Native development for Fire TV, to help you choose the right tech stack for your streaming app.
Read more ›

Amazon GameLift scales to 100 million concurrent users (CCU) for a single game
Amazon GameLift provides scalability for game developers, supporting up to 100 million CCU while maintaining fast session allocation and seamless player experiences.
Read more ›

Related resources

💡 Visit the Amazon Developer Portal for all the updates, documentation, and resources.

📰 January 2025 @AmazonAppDev Newsletter

Chris Trag — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 06:00:00 +0000

App performance

New guides and tools for upleveling your app, testing across devices, and monitoring performance

⏱️ Optimize your Fire TV app performance
Get answers to common issues to ensure your app provides a smooth, responsive streaming experience. Read more ›

✅ Testing made easier with Appstore Quality Central
Explore the new suite of tools for testing your app across virtual devices. Test results can help you improve quality, increase stability, and optimize user experience for a streamlined certification process. Read more ›

Inspect performance with the App Health Insights dashboard

Monitor key performance metrics for your Fire TV, Fire tablet, and Android apps with the App Health Insights dashboard.

Beyond "Hello World!"

eBook 📖 Mastering the Big Screen

We partnered with Callstack to address the unique challenges and solutions for creating high-quality streaming apps using React Native.
Download your copy ›

Bare React Native projects for TV

Bare React Native can be ideal for projects that require specific build processes or have unique performance requirements.
Read more ›

Developer highlights

🗓️ 2025 look ahead
@chris_trag shares upcoming events and developer courses he’s excited about for the new year.
Read more ›

📈 2024 Year in Review
ICYMI - We round up some of our favorite highlights from last year, including event tech talks, product and feature releases, and popular best practice guides.
Read more or watch the video ›

Related resources

💡 Visit the Amazon Developer Portal for all the updates, documentation, and resources.

2025 look ahead: Top dev events & courses for Android, React Native, and GenAI

Chris Trag — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 05:45:21 +0000

To prepare for an action-packed 2025, here are several upcoming events and developer courses I’m excited about. For the New Year, I’m focusing on 3 areas to dedicate my time and energy:

Android: Up-level Android & Unity development skills to build faster apps and games
React Native: Sharpen the toolkit to launch new tablet & Smart TV apps
GenAI: Attend workshops and meetups to learn what’s next with building LLM-powered products

This guide is by no means definitive; If you have any events, courses, or meetups you want to share, let me know in the comments below 👇 💬

Android & Gaming

CES 2025 - Las Vegas (Jan 7th - 10th)

The Consumer Electronics Show is the world’s largest technology event and where we discover the first major announcements of the year from over 4,000 tech brands exhibiting their products and services. The Keynote lineup offers up mix of industry leaders from across the Automotive, Travel, AI, and Tech, and Entertainment. Personally, I am excited to walk through the CES 2025 Innovation Awards® showcase in the Venetian Expo, Hall A, especially the Best of Innovation category winners to see these up close.

If you’re attending CES for the first time, I suggest some comfortable walking shows since there’s over 2.5 million square feet for the showroom exhibits. If you’re interested in the suite of Amazon devices and products, my colleagues and I will be over in the Amazon at CES 2025 experience (Venetian Ballroom G-H) — Feel free to send me a note on Bluesky or LinkedIn if you plan to stop by!

2025 Droidcon events (multiple dates)

The Android community does a great job with talks and sessions at all the local Droidcons. Each city has a unique take that I find refreshing compared to many conferences I spend time at. This year I want to dive deep into Kotlin Multiplatform, better understand the latest features in Jetpack, and find out about the recent updates for Android worth incorporating.

The organizers also launched Droidcon Academy for mastering in-depth topics through codelabs, new learning paths, and talk recordings.

As I shared in last year’s post, I am partial to the London Droidcon since it’s been great for several years in a row. If you have a favorite of the Droidcon locations, I would love to know in the comments below!

Android Training Courses & Certificates

The Android team has a mix of beginning and advanced Android, Kotlin, and Compose online course on their developer site.

Here are my favorite courses and codelabs offered:

Android Basics with Compose to get moving quickly
Jetpack Compose for Android developers walks through the toolkit for building better Android UIs
Android app architecturefor improving the quality and structure of your apps

Tokyo Game Show 2025 - Tokyo, Japan (September 27th - 29th)

東京ゲームショウ (TGS) is a blast to attend and is a great way to know what’s launching for upcoming video games and new hardware, especially from Japan based publishers. The general exhibition area is for digital gaming demos from the top titles along with upstart game studios.

Watch the sessions from this year’s show here: expo.nikkeibp.co.jp/tgs/2024/en/program/official

React Native

The React Summit(s) - Amsterdam & NYC

The GitNation team puts on two major events each year:

React Summit in Amsterdam from June 13th to 17th, 2025
React Summit NYC in November 2025 (Exact dates TBD)

These two are a hybrid of workshops, sessions, and on-demand content to follow-up on afterwards. Attend the events if you want to connect with both React and React Native app builders working on similar challenges using these frameworks. I’ve really enjoyed the networking and mix of attendees, especially the React open source awards portion of the days. Keep in mind the virtual ticket provides all the sessions for on-demand access via the GitNation site — however you choose to attend it’s worth checking out.

New Course: React Native Mastery

React Native Mastery is the latest course from Vadim & the notJust.dev team and is the top referred course these past few weeks. They aim to provide “the only course you need to Master mobile development with React Native & Expo.” What’s different than most online courses is how it focuses on learning through full-featured sample apps. To start, the course offers up Quiz, Camera, Forms, and Business card samples as the first four modules.

React Conf 2025 (Date TBD)

Attending React Conf 2024 was a highlight for my year — the networking, the sessions, and the announcements in particular were stellar. Co-hosted by Meta and Callstack, these teams did a great job partnering up to bring the event to life. Over the two days of sessions, there were 600+ in-person attendees and over 250k+ online viewers — check out the 2024 talk recordings at conf.react.dev/talks.

The date for 2025 is still to be determined so I’d suggest keeping an eye on conf.react.dev

Anisha Malde and I presenting at React Conf 2024. You can watch our session on YouTube.

AppJS 2025 - Kraków, Poland (May 28th-30th)

AppJS is one of my favorite annual developer conferences for how in-depth and thorough the talks and workshops are. The Software Mansion team leans heavily into the specifics of React Native for Mobile, Brownfield apps, and optimization tooling. If you’re building with Expo and React Native, this is the conference you cannot miss in 2025.

My colleagues Gio and Eric at AppJS teaching how to extend React Native apps for the Big Screen.

Chain React Conf - Portland, Oregon (Date TBD)

Infinite Red puts on a highly technical set of developer talks dedicated to React Native. Attendees get to connect with many of the core contributors and lead maintainers across the React Ecosystem. Personally, I would recommend arriving a day earlier to attend the workshops.

Watch the 2024 sessions at chainreactconf.com/events/2024

React Universe 2025 - Wroclaw, Poland (September 2nd - 4th)

React Universe (formerly React Native EU) is great for teams building with React and React Native across devices and app stores. The team at Callstack pulls together quality sessions that span everything from VR development to core maintainer announcements. While the conference is in latter part 2025, I’d recommend checking out their engineering podcast callstack.com/podcast.

Here is our panel discussion on building apps for Mobile, Web, and Smart TVs

Gen AI & LLMs

AWS Advanced AI and Tool Use Meetup - San Francisco (January 16th, 2025)

The AWS GenAI Loft in San Francisco is hosting several developer meetups and workshops including the Advanced AI and Tool Use Meetup with Toolhouse.ai in January. This free hands-on session will help you learn how to build efficient AI assistants and network with fellow developers and AI experts.

Event details: aws.amazon.com/startups/events/advanced-ai-and-tool-use-meetup
RSVP link: lu.ma/0r7kp1lm

DeepLearning.AI - Generative AI for Everyone

This free set of courses is designed to help you master the fundamentals of Generative AI, learn real-world examples of tools in use, and better understand the impact on society and business. I really enjoy this curriculum because it starts at the very beginning in order to build a foundation to learn practical ways to incorporate this tech into your products and apps.

In addition to these 101 lessons, the AWS team contributed two courses on Agentic Workflows and deploying Serverless LLM Apps with Amazon Bedrock.

More information at deeplearning.ai/courses/generative-ai-for-everyone

Where to find more developer events and courses?

There’s a lot happening across these developer communities so I’d suggest subscribing to these channels:

Google’s Android Developer Updates are sent directly from the Android team with a mix of video, articles, and upcoming events. For something a bit more community-led, I’d recommend subscribing to Android Weekly. For product updates related to Fire OS, make sure to subscribe to our monthly newsletter.
This Week In React is currently the top newsletter on what's happening across React & React Native so definitely subscribe if you're interested.
Unity has their own newsletter for product announcements and tips. In addition, the Unity dev community shares the latest on Game Dev Digest, X, and Discord.
There’s more than 100 AWS trainings on AI and Machine learning available to everyone. In addition, try out partyrock.aws and go through the getting started guide — let me know what you think!

Summary

I hope these developer events and course recommendations help spark some inspiration for you and your team throughout 2025. Let me know in the comments below what are your favorites worth checking out! 👇 💬

Stay connected
Stay up to date with Amazon Appstore developer updates on the following platforms:

📣 Follow @AmazonAppDev on Twitter
📺 Subscribe to our Youtube channel
📧 Sign up for the Developer Newsletter

Top Android & React Native events to attend in 2024

Chris Trag — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 01:13:03 +0000

As we gear up for another year of building apps & games, I can't help but get excited about the upcoming events in the Android and React Native developer communities. These conferences are more than just network gatherings; they are opportunities to dive deep into the latest frameworks, share new projects, and connect with the folks that are shaping the future of how we build apps.

Here’s my round up of the top events I’m excited to attend either in-person or virtually:

All the local droidcons in 2024! (multiple dates)

Droidcon remains a cornerstone in the Android development space and one that I love attending. Each city has a slightly different spin on where they focus and it’s worth attending to learn about the evolution of Kotlin, what’s new with Flutter, and how to keep your Android apps working across devices and form factors.

Personally, I’ll admit I’m a bit partial to the London droidcon since I end up learning so much each time I attend. Definitely consider attending Droidcon for keeping up to date in the Android space.

A look inside last year’s DroidCon London main hall

Mobile World Congress - Barcelona, Spain (Feb 26-29th)

MWC continues to be the place where Android and streaming announcements are made — and one that is useful for app decision makers to attend. It’s primarily focused on mobile and phone tech and has expanded into fintech, sports, and related spaces.

I’d recommend first looking up the sessions and sponsored pavilions to decide if it’s worth making the trip — MWC is one of those events that you will get the most out of if you plan ahead of time. Here’s a write up from the 2023 event to give you a sense of the size, scale, and focus of MWC.

JSWorld Conference - Amsterdam, Netherlands (Feb 28th - Mar 1st)

JSWorld is a community favorite and offers a WIDE array of topics for attendees to learn from and discuss with peers. Expect over 2500 attendees for the 3-day in-person event. Last year there were over 75 talks with topics including React, React Native, VueJS, Vercel, and gRPC.

You can listen to many of their previous tech talks on the JSWorld podcast site: https://jsworldconference.com/jsworld-podcast

React Native Connection - Paris, France (April 23)

RN connection is a popular single-day event focused on building React Native apps for mobile, desktop, and the web. For local developers, Le Tech Connection is running a networking event the day before dedicated to the React framework here. I’m excited for how they mix up the conference format to offer a mix of small group and 1:1 opportunities through the event.

App.JS Conf - Krakow, Poland (May 22-24th)

The team at Software Mansion runs this stellar conference for React Native & Expo app development. Poland continues to be the central hub of RN developer events and App.js Conf is one of the keystone moments each year in the industry. Make sure to check out some of the past talk recordings on their YouTube channel.

Chain React - Portland, Oregon (July 17–19th)

Chain React is hosted by the team at Infinite Red. This is a great conference for North American developers to connect in person on common topics. Infinite Red also hosts the React Native Radio podcast, maintains Ignite (the most popular boilerplate for Expo and React Native), and writes the React Native Newsletter.

React Native EU Conference - Wroclaw, Poland (Sept 5 - 6th)

My friends are regularly telling me to make it out to the React Native EU conference. “RNEU” for short is known for consistently delivering on the promise of deep technical insights. Run by the team over at Callstack for multiple years in a row, RNEU is now Europe’s biggest community-driven event.

The talks and panels are organized by a global team of world-class React and React Native experts who care about giving back to the community. It’s worth attending (live or virtually) if you’re looking for major announcements from RN leaders and new tools for improving your development process with RN across devices and app stores.

My teammate Anisha delivering a talk on StoryBookJS at 2023 RNEU

Android Enterprise Global Partner Summit (Virtual)

Each year Google puts on a enterprise focused event for Android app builders. Enterprise-level Android app development introduces unique challenges, and the event is focused on the tools and strategies for building secure, scalable applications for enterprise customers. While the in-person attendance is limited, the team posts the sessions online for anyone to watch after the event. Check out the 2023 sessions here.

Where to find more events and meetups?

There’s a lot more happening in the space and I’d recommend reading through Diego from Thoughbot’s detailed post on 2024 events since it includes ticket prices, locations, and which tech stacks are covered.

Make sure to check out the React team’s page on RN communities along with their comprehensive list of upcoming events for React. In addition, turn on notifications for React Native events happening on Meetup and Eventbrite.

Whether you’re attending conferences in-person or virtually, I hope you set aside time to learn new ways of building and meeting fellow devs solving similar challenges. My team and I will be at many of these events, so I hope to see you in 2024!

Stay connected

Stay up to date with Amazon Appstore developer updates on the following platforms:

📣 Follow @AmazonAppDev on Twitter
📺 Subscribe to our Youtube channel
📧 Sign up for the Developer Newsletter

What's new with Amazon Appstore for Developers in 2022 [Slides]

Chris Trag — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 22:59:29 +0000

I had the opportunity to present a lightning talk at Droidcon London 2022 on what's new with Amazon Appstore for Developers. I'm sharing the deck slides here for the dev.to community - please let me know if you have additional questions in the comments below.

Talk overview

Amazon Appstore reaches millions of customers worldwide on Fire TV, Fire tablets, mobile platforms, and Windows 11 devices. Join us to discover the latest developer tools for growing your user base, increasing ROI, and building immersive customer experiences.

Stay updated

Get the most up to date Amazon Appstore developer news, product releases, tutorials, and more:

📣 Follow @AmazonAppDev and our team on Twitter
📺 Subscribe to our Youtube channel
📧 Sign up for the Developer Newsletter

ABCD Testing

Chris Trag — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 18:02:43 +0000

testing the Forem API 1, 2, 3

Test

Chris Trag — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 18:02:27 +0000

testing the Forem API 1, 2, 3

DEV Community: Chris Trag

First look at Gemini CLI

What I tested:

Links

📰 February 2025 @AmazonAppDev Newsletter

From app submission to certification

Stay ahead of the trend

Recent updates

Developer highlights

Related resources

📰 January 2025 @AmazonAppDev Newsletter

App performance

Inspect performance with the App Health Insights dashboard

Beyond "Hello World!"

Developer highlights

Related resources

2025 look ahead: Top dev events & courses for Android, React Native, and GenAI

Android & Gaming

CES 2025 - Las Vegas (Jan 7th - 10th)

2025 Droidcon events (multiple dates)

Android Training Courses & Certificates

Tokyo Game Show 2025 - Tokyo, Japan (September 27th - 29th)

React Native

The React Summit(s) - Amsterdam & NYC

New Course: React Native Mastery

React Conf 2025 (Date TBD)

AppJS 2025 - Kraków, Poland (May 28th-30th)

Chain React Conf - Portland, Oregon (Date TBD)

React Universe 2025 - Wroclaw, Poland (September 2nd - 4th)

Gen AI & LLMs

AWS Advanced AI and Tool Use Meetup - San Francisco (January 16th, 2025)

DeepLearning.AI - Generative AI for Everyone

Where to find more developer events and courses?

Summary

Top Android & React Native events to attend in 2024

All the local droidcons in 2024! (multiple dates)

Mobile World Congress - Barcelona, Spain (Feb 26-29th)

JSWorld Conference - Amsterdam, Netherlands (Feb 28th - Mar 1st)

React Native Connection - Paris, France (April 23)

App.JS Conf - Krakow, Poland (May 22-24th)

Chain React - Portland, Oregon (July 17–19th)

React Native EU Conference - Wroclaw, Poland (Sept 5 - 6th)

Android Enterprise Global Partner Summit (Virtual)

Where to find more events and meetups?

Stay connected

What's new with Amazon Appstore for Developers in 2022 [Slides]

Talk overview

Stay updated

ABCD Testing

Test