On September 20th, 2016, I gave a Lunch and Learn about Xamarin at the Logical Advantage office in Charlotte. Ahead of the event, I contributed to everything you need to know about Xamarin, a Q&A article posted to the Logical Advantage blog to introduce the topic and share what people could expect from the talk.
The presentation was a chance for me to learn a new technology in a more deliberate way. Xamarin made it possible to build native mobile applications for Android, iOS, and Windows with C#, and that was especially appealing to me as a .NET developer. Instead of learning Swift, Objective-C, Java, and C# all at once, I could use a familiar language and share code across platforms while still getting closer to native mobile performance than browser-based approaches like Cordova.
Just as importantly, the talk gave me practice explaining technical ideas in public. Preparing the material forced me to separate what was exciting about Xamarin from what was merely new, and to think through the practical tradeoffs a developer would run into when trying to build something real. I wanted people to leave with a useful sense of where Xamarin fit, when it made sense, and how it could help teams already invested in .NET experiment with cross-platform mobile development.
Logical Advantage's Lunch and Learns were great for that kind of exchange. They brought people together around practical technology topics, gave developers a reason to share what they were learning, and helped the business build relationships with people who cared about software in the Charlotte community. Events like this created visibility for Logical Advantage as a company that was engaged with current technology and willing to help lead local technical conversations.
Here is the slide deck from my presentation for anyone who missed it. This presentation was largely borrowed from the Introduction to Xamarin slide deck, thanks to James Montemagno.