Android programmers' group blends socializing with app development

Jeremy C. Fox / Boston.com

Matt Horan, left, and Mike Burns lead bi-weekly meetings of the Boston Android Developers Group at thoughtbot’s Winter Street offices.

By Jeremy C. Fox, Town Correspondent

When Mike Burns and Matt Horan aren’t writing complex computer code for work, they spend their free time writing complex computer code for fun.

The programmers, friends since their college days as computer science majors at Northeastern University, are the founders of the Boston Android Developers Group, which meets downtown every other Monday night to eat, socialize, and develop applications for the Android smartphone operating system.

The meetings — or "hackfests" as the developers call them — start at 7 p.m. and run until around 11 p.m., when Burns and Horan have to gently point out the late hour to a few stragglers who have gotten into their work and lost track of time.

The friends say they saw a gap in the local programmers’ community and sought to fill it.

Horan, 25, is a web programmer and systems infrastructure manager for Berklee College of Music’s extension school. He got his first Android phone shortly after it was released in the fall of 2008, but he didn’t start programming for the devices until around a year ago.

Burns, 27, is a web developer at thoughtbot, a Winter Street-based firm that designs web applications for start-up companies. He and Horan were developing Android applications in their free time and said to themselves, “There have got to be other people in Boston who are doing this.”

There were groups for programmers interested in the Blackberry and the iPhone, but they perceived a need for one focused on the Android system. So they created it. From the start, they wanted their group to be different from others they’d seen.

“There were other mobile groups out there, but they weren’t focused on programming as much as just like making a company out of the apps and the devices themselves and lots of non-programming-related things,” Burns said. “We were interested in actually building apps and talking with other developers who were interested in building apps.”

At first they met at Burns’ downtown apartment. When the group outgrew that space, they turned to thoughtbot, which was already co-hosting hackfests for programmers using the Ruby programming language to design web applications. They say the meetings are great for networking and socializing as well as hacking.

“A lot of time is spent programming, but a lot of time is spent just talking about Android, what we’re doing, what’s going on in the community,” Horan said.

Hackfest attendees range from serious professionals working on apps for clients or projects they hope to sell to first-timers who want to learn the basics of programming.

“They may have an idea what they want, but they’re not even close to able to do that, so they’re just getting set up making simple apps that, like, display words on the screen,” Burns said.

Burns, Horan and other experienced programmers will help those beginners with their first steps, and they encourage them to share their knowledge and experience with others. The friends believe strongly in using open source code and sharing discoveries.

“We care a lot about the community, and not just the Boston community, but the worldwide Android developer community,” Burns said. “To this end, everything I do and most of us do at the hackfest is open to the public.”

That openness includes brief presentations at each hackfest where programmers tell the rest of the group about something they’ve been working on or a new trick they’ve learned that may help others out. The founders want to use the group to continue building a supportive community that will support fellow programmers. Toward that end, the group has applied to the state for nonprofit status.

“The point of this is basically so that we can become an organization that, first of all, people want to give things to,” Horan said. “So we can get devices for our efforts, and if you want to come and hack on a device that’s new and you don’t have it, well you can come and use a device that we have and experience it.”

For more information on the Boston Android Developers Group, visit http://bostonandroid.org/.

Email Jeremy C. Fox at jeremycfox@gmail.com.