Oh hello there.
My name is Lisa Wray, and I'm an Android developer, speaker, and advocate specializing in user interfaces.
I currently work at the New York Times on their flagship Android app. I have a B.S. from M.I.T. (21E) in music and computer science, and I'm an Android Google Developer Expert.
You can get in touch with me at first last [at] gmail [dot] com. I live to travel and would probably love to speak at your conference--let's talk! You can also find me online at Twitter.
Speaking
- Android Makers (Paris), 2017: Keynote: Android First [slides]
- DroidCon Italy (Turin), 2017: Keynote: Android First [slides]
Note: My recent keynote talks were a special pleasure because I worked with Virginia Poltrack on the illustrations. I'm including them separately here because I've had so many requests for them!
- DroidCon London, 2016: Radical RecyclerView
- DroidCon New York, 2016: Radical RecyclerView [slides]
- An evening at Square NYC: Data binding (lightning talk) [slides]
- NYC Android Meetup, Feb 2016: Data binding
- DroidCon London, 2015: Beautiful Typography on Android
- DroidCon New York, 2015: Beautiful Typography on Android
- Code Genius: Typography on Android
I also did a great deal of public speaking at Google, including conference speaking and appearances on the Google Developers channel on Youtube.
Current Projects
- Groupie Groupie is a simple, flexible library for complex RecyclerView layouts. [github]
- Fifty Shades of Gray text generator. [link] A natural language generator which uses a hand-built grammar to generate erotica in the style of Fifty Shades of Gray. It spent 24 hours on the front page of Reddit and got almost a million hits in the first day. It was my first foray into natural language generation and I'd love to do more! [github]
You can see more of my past projects on my GitHub page.
Where have I been?
The New York Times (again). I just couldn't stay away!
Genius. I was the lead (ok, sole member) of the Android team at Genius (formerly Rap Genius). I launched the Android app two months after I joined; it was immediately featured in "New and Updated" and had 1 million+ downloads in its first year. It got raves for its lyrics matching feature and sleek animations and design. It's still the #1 ranked app in Google Play for "Lyrics".
Google. I worked on the Developer Relations team, trying to make life better for developers - first on Android and then Ubiquitous Computing (Glass, Android Wear, Android TV, Android Auto, Cast, and IoT). I did 20% projects like I/O Schedule 2014 and the Santa Tracker app, and I built the first published watch face to use the public API on Android Wear (now open source).
The New York Times. I helped bring their app from Gingerbread to Holo and from a standalone phone app into a world-class, responsive app for all Android devices. I introduced improved typography and layout, using the New York Times' signature fonts, and originally authored features like night mode, saved articles, viewing and reading comments, and many design prototypes. I also built the New York Times for Glass app for Google Glass, which was the first published third-party app.