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! 👇 💬
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