Google Developer Days India

Google Developer Days was held for the first time in India. It was also my first ever event/conference.

Event Management

Kudos to a very well managed event. Shuttles for pickups and drops, huge rooms for talks, ample comfortable seating areas with beanbags, wonderful catering.. it was extremely well thought-out. The Google staff was courteous and extremely helpful throughout the 2 days. Entire event was very smooth and yet highly energetic, despite being attended by probably a 1000 developers.

Talks

There were 3 tracks for talks and trainings over 2 days

Here are the ones I attended

• Mobile in Context: Design Principle of Flow and Navigation by Jenny Gove. First of the 2 best talks for me. It had no fluff; only great examples, screenshots, stats and guidelines.
• Lighthouse, Headless Chrome, and Puppeteer by Eric Bidelman and Vinamrata Singal. Second of the 2 best talks for me. Amazing amount of detail; code-snippets, screenshots, tips and much-more compressed in a 30 minute session.
• Running in the Background by Nasir Khan. This talk was about running Android tasks in the background.
• Actionable Insights by Amrit Sanjeev. This talk was about Firebase Prediction tools announced earlier this year.
• Testing out Kotlin by Sean McQuillan. Unfortunately, this required advanced Kotlin knowledge which I don’t have.
• Building Production IoT Devices with Android Things by Wayne Piekarski.

Many of the talks were live streamed and are available to watch on Google Developers India Youtube channel

I missed a few which I was looking forward to:

• Cloud Functions
• Design thinking workshop by Stanford
• Hands-on with the Google Cloud Vision and Natural Language APIs

Training

I could only attend one training - ‘Build a Web App with Firebase and Cloud Firestore’ led by Arthur Thompson. We live-coded a Restaurant listing web-app.

Sandboxes

This was one of the more popular areas of the conference. Lot of small booths showcasing Google’s products.

• Here I got to know about Lighthouse an Google Chrome extension which provides feedback on the websites.
• Saw couple of cool demos made with Android things
• Gave feedback to Firebase team about incremental commit-sync for static hosting
• Saw GCP’s Video Intelligence API demos. Was awesome.
• Pluralsight promotion (offered 2 months free subscription for those who complete a small Android IQ test)

Codelabs

There was a dedicated section with workstations to try out all the code-labs available for Google platforms. Googlers were available to help resolve any issues. I wish I had done couple of them at the event. Well, maybe next time.

Community Lounge

Lot of lightning-talks were held at the community lounge randing from ‘Solve for India’ to ‘Networking Skills’. There was also a dedicated track for ‘Mobile and Web Design’.

Swag

Every developer at the event got an Android Things Pico pro maker kit. Can’t wait to get hacking away at this.

Feedback

• Great Google/event staff. Everyone was courteous and extremely helpful. Zero hiccups. keep going!
• Talks by Jenny Gove and Eric Bildeman were perfect templates. Lot of in-depth technical details, examples and stats. I wish more talks were like these.
• Some talks should have been split between beginners and advanced. For example: talk about Kubernetes was neither a good introduction nor in-depth architecture overview. No qualms against the host though, as 30 minutes is too short for a Kubernetes scale subject.
• Get view of attendance’s interest beforehand with a online poll and assign rooms accordingly.

Conclusion

Overall it was a wonderful event! Well managed, lot of talks, insightful discussions, meeting fellow developers and lot more.

Thank you all at Google for inviting me and hosting a wonderful conference!

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